Quotes from Gene Kim

technical debt is what you feel the next time you want to make a change.

Mike Rother says that it almost doesn't matter what you improve, as long as you're improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.

habits are what enable mastery.

She wonders what is happening: Too many promises to the market? Bad engineering leadership? Bad product leadership? Too much technical debt? Not enough focus on architectures and platforms that enable developers to be productive?

Life in IT is pretty shitty when it's so misunderstood and mismanaged. It becomes thankless and frustrating as people realize that they are powerless to change the outcome, like an endlessly repeating horror movie. If that's not damaging to our self-worth as human beings, I don't know what is. That's got to change,

In addition to the human suffering that comes with the current way of working, the opportunity cost of the value that we could be creating is staggering—the authors believe that we are missing out on approximately $2.6 trillion of value creation per year,

What I want is for it to keep the lights on. It should be like using the toilet. I use the toilet and, hell, I don't ever worry about it not working. What I don't want is to have the toilets back up and flood the entire building.

practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours. And if you want to create a genuine culture of improvement, you must create those habits.

Maxine appreciates these reminders about their customers—when engineers think of "the customer" in the abstract instead of as a real person, you rarely get the right outcomes.

makes me angry when we need to make some heroic, diving catch because of someone else's lack of planning.

you pay down technical debt as a part of daily work. It's a magnificent example of the First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity in our code and organizations.

However, interrupting technology workers is easy, because the consequences are invisible to almost everyone, even though the negative impact to productivity may be far greater than in manufacturing.

But, even after two years, all we have is a great process on paper that no one follows and a tool that no one uses. When I pester people to use them, all I get are complaints and excuses.

IT is not just a department. IT is a competency that we need to gain as an entire company.

In high-performing organizations, everyone within the team shares a common goal—quality, availability, and security aren't the responsibility of individual departments but are a part of everyone's job, every day.

Many psychologists assert that creating systems that cause feelings of powerlessness is one of the most damaging things we can do to fellow human beings—we deprive other people of their ability to control their own outcomes and even create a culture where people are afraid to do the right thing because of fear of punishment, failure, or jeopardizing their livelihood.

Gatekeeper, the Facebook feature toggling service.

practicing five minutes daily is better than practicing once a week for three hours.

Great QA requires a perverse and sometimes sadistic intuition for what will cause software to blow up, crash, or endlessly hang. Maxine once heard a joke: "A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a 'sfdeljknesv.

The Second Ideal is Focus, Flow, and Joy.

Our goal with a product-based funding model is to value the achievement of organizational and customer outcomes, such as revenue, customer lifetime value, or customer adoption rate, ideally with the minimum of output (e.g., amount of effort or time, lines of code). Contrast this to how projects are typically measured, such as whether it was completed within the promised budget, time, and scope.

every Facebook user was part of a massive load testing program, which

A critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone's queue—or worse, when work has to go backward, because it doesn't have all the parts or requires rework.

I listen to Wes and Patty brainstorm ideas to reduce yet another dependency on Brent when something starts to bother me. Erik called WIP, or work in process, the "silent killer," and that inability to control WIP on the plant floor was one of the root causes for chronic due-date problems and quality issues.