Scientists build to learn; Engineers learn to build.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.

Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.

To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.