Gerald M. Weinberg Quotes

In this business, it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.

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

… intelligence has less to do with the matter than personality, work habits, and training. These things, unlike intelligence, can be changed by experience later in life, which turns the problem from one of selecting programmers to creating them.

By making the time tradeoff explicit and by indicating a willingness to contribute time now, I make it clear that it is a problem of limited time, not a problem of limited respect for the other person.

Jane easily shifts among activities — testing for discovery, pinpointing, locating, determining significance, repairing, troubleshooting, and testing to learn. As long as she continues to serve her customers, it doesn't really matter which task she performs at any given time.

Leadership is familiar, but not well understood.

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

Victor Hugo once said that nothing in this world was so powerful as an idea whose time has come. In our time, the idea is technology, especially information processing technology. The programmer partakes of this technology power

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.

If a program doesn’t work, measures of efficiency, of adaptability, or of cost of production have no meaning.

Your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.

If you are a leader, the people are your work.

A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he is going to be trying to prove that the program is correct — even if this means the oversight of errors which are monstrous to another eye. All programmers are familiar with the symptoms of this dissonance resolution — -in others, of course.

In the popular image, a problem-solving leader is a solitary genius, but the true leader prefers to produce a success.

"Testing gathers information about a product; it does not fix things it finds that are wrong. Testing does not improve a product; the improving is done by people fixing the bugs that testing has uncovered. Often when managers say, "Testing takes too long," what they should be saying is, "Fixing the bugs in the product takes too long" — a different cost category."