Quotes from Tracy Kidder

I want a UI that is so simple that drunks can use it and ADDs won't be distracted away.

When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.

He opened all the drawers in his desk. All were empty, except that a box of staples lay in one. He pocketed the staples. "I already took the polygraph.

If you've got a Mexican last name, you've got a strike against you.

If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility.

How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer's case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything he does, including the hike to Casse.

At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The

As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.

Too much protocol.

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the I that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

No one keeps track of the hours we work," said Ken Holberger. He grinned. "That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do." Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.

The mind that relies on cliché does not really know what it is saying.

Si los oías sólo dos veces, los recuerdos de Lou podían parecer monótonos. Si los oías muchas, se convertían en viejos amigos. Eran reconfortantes.

megalomaniacal.

Dokte Paul works with both hands" — that is, both with science and with the magic necessary to remove ensorcellments.

On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.

Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.

Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.

Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition—the one made most socially acceptable—has been the desire to become a manager. If you don't become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of many of your peers you become a failure. Among computer engineers, I think, the wish to manage must be a virtual instinct.

beating people up didn't seem to get results anymore.

When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good.

The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers.

I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen," West said years later. "There's some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understand how things get put together. Even if you can't under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together.

Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV.