Gerald M. Weinberg Quotes

Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion.

The Hawthorne Effect (“the process of being observed often motivates people to better performance”) can be the bane of scientific observation.

why is it so hard for developers to submit their work for review by others or to try to improve their own skills by reviewing the work of others? Curiously, superior developers tend to find value with walkthrough and inspection processes while the merely clever do not. So, as always, the good get better and the bad get worse.

each program has an appropriate level of care and sophistication dependent on the uses to which it will be put. Working above that level is, in a way, even less professional than working below it. If we are to know whether an individual programmer is doing a good job, we shall have to know whether or not he is working on the proper level for his problem.

People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond to failure.

Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.

In studying the factors which go into the satisfaction of working groups, social scientists have isolated four major areas: The material rewards and opportunities. The challenge and the interest of the work itself. The general conditions in the larger organization, such as employee benefits, working conditions, and organization status among similar organizations. The competence of supervisors and leaders.

Fisher's Fundamental Theorem states — in terms appropriate to the present context — that the better adapted a system is to a particular environment, the less adaptable it is to new environments.

problem-solving leaders have one thing in common: a faith that there's always a better way.

I’m reminded of the story of the village idiot whose antique watch stopped running. He pried it open and found a dead cockroach inside. “No wonder it doesn’t work,” he said, “the manager is dead.

Specifications evolve together with programs and programmers. Writing a program is a process of learning — both for the programmer and the person who commissions the program.

Programmers do not ordinarily work in isolation. Although an individual programmer may find herself assigned the task of writing a program, even then she has other programmers to whom she may turn for help — and who, at the same time, may be turning to her.

When people who are driven by a vision see something wrong, they might say to their teammates, “I feel bad because we’re not building the kind of system we can be proud of. What shall we do so we don’t feel this way?” On

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius.

The shortsighted or insecure team leader may feel that the best way to please management is to promise them whatever they ask. But, ultimately, what the management wants is kept promises, and these can only be obtained if the team leader can win team acceptance of the promises as their goals. What the team leader must learn is that Managers — no matter how hard they press for promises — really want results. Results will be far more easily obtained if they are obtained in the pursuit of goals set with full team participation.