Quotes About Engineering

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship… One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today's civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.

in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

When a bridge fails, the engineer who designed it is as good as dead.

I think the title doesn't define who we are: it's what we do that defines who we are. Engineers can be great advocates for what they do and for the things that they've learned. Whether some people like to do that or not is a separate discussion. - Ray Tsang

Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

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. For instance, an engineer assigned to multiple projects must switch between tasks, incurring all the costs of having to re-establish context, as well as cognitive rules and goals.

technical debt' is what creates hardship, toil, and reduces the agility of our software engineers,

Traditional managers will often object to hiring engineers with generalist skill sets, arguing that they are more expensive and that 'I can hire two server administrators for every multi-skilled operations engineer.'" However, the business benefits of enabling faster flow are overwhelming. Furthermore, as Prugh notes, "[ I] nvesting in cross training is the right thing for [employees'] career growth, and makes everyone's work more fun.

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.' The Third Way is all about ensuring that we're continually putting tension into the system, so that we're continually reinforcing habits and improving something. Resilience engineering tells us that we should routinely inject faults into the system, doing them frequently, to make them less painful.

a system where small teams of engineers are able to work productively and independently of each other, with components painstakingly and splendidly isolated from each other, instead of being complected into a giant, ugly, knotty mess.

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?

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.

It's not a good sign when they're still attaching parts to the space shuttle at liftoff time.

We cannot achieve deployments on demand if each of our production code deployments take weeks or months to perform (i.e., each deployment requires 1,300 manual, error-prone steps involving up to three hundred engineers). The countermeasure is to automate our deployments as much as possible, with the goal of being completely automated so they can be done self-service by any developer.

now some of the best engineers in the company are working on making everyone else more productive. That's the way it should be, she thinks.

Another way we can enable more market-oriented outcomes is by enabling product teams to become more self-sufficient by embedding Operations engineers within them, thus reducing their reliance on centralized Operations.

If black boxes survive air crashes, why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.

I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing - I went into politics. It's practically the same thing.

A wall is happy when it is well designed, when it rests firmly on its foundation, when its symmetry balances its part and produces no unpleasant stresses. Good design can be worked out on the mathematical principles of mechanics.

Genetic engineering is not really something new. Human beings have been fiddling with genes for as long as ten thousand years. That's how long they have been growing plants and herding animals.

Fara turned to Hardin. "Didn't you study psychology under Alurin?" Hardin answered, half in reverie: "Yes, I never completed my studies, though. I got tired of theory. I wanted to be a psychological engineer, but we lacked the facilities, so I did the next best thing— I went into politics. It's practically the same thing.

Gaia is just an extension of the desire for comfort and security extended to an entire planet. What's wrong with that?" "What's wrong with that," said Trevize, "is that my house or my ship is engineered to suit me. I am not engineered to suit it. If I were part of Gaia, then no matter how ideally the planet was devised to suit me, I would be greatly disturbed over the fact that I was also being devised to suit it.