Quotes About Efficiency

Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.

Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

North Korea's alleged penchant for irrational and erratic behavior is illusionary: the North Korean leaders actually know perfectly well what they are doing. They are neither madmen nor ideological zealots, but rather remarkably efficient and cold-minded calculators, perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world.

Just be aware that you reach a point of diminishing, or even negative, returns as the specifications get more and more detailed.

Have you noticed how some project teams are efficient, with everyone knowing what to do and contributing fully, while the members of other teams are constantly bickering and don't seem able to get out of each other's way? Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.

More testing should be done automatically. It's important to note that by automatically we meant that the test /results/ are interpreted automatically as well.

Before you start to look at the bug, make sure that you are working on code that built cleanly—without warnings. We routinely set compiler warning levels as high as possible. It doesn't make sense to waste time trying to find a problem that the computer could find for you! We need to concentrate on the harder problems at hand.

Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.

Let the computer do the repetitious, the mundane—it will do a better job of it than we would. We've got more important and more difficult things to do.

we just don't have the time to go chasing after bugs that the automated tests could have found for us. We have to spend our time writing new code—and new bugs.

Just as woodworkers sometimes build jigs to guide the construction of complex pieces, programmers can write code that itself writes code.

Gain familiarity with the shell, and you'll find your productivity soaring.

Don't let entropy win.

The O() notation puts an upper bound on the value of the thing we're measuring (time, memory, and so on).

order for all your work, my friend: First

People who can manage their time can also manage their money. After all, managing minutes and managing money is the same exact principle.

Become a minimalist. Eliminate clutter from your life by living with the 100 things that you wear and use the most.

For example, we've got this one rule I hope we never give up enforcing: our buyers here in Bentonville are required to return calls from the stores first, before they return the calls of vendors or anybody else, and they are required to get back to the stores by sundown of the day they get the call.

In those days, I tried to operate on a 2 percent general office expense structure. In other words, 2 percent of sales should have been enough to carry our buying office, our general office expense, my salary, Bud's salary—and after we started adding district managers or any other officers—their salaries too. Believe it or not, we haven't changed that basic formula from five stores to two thousand stores.

He became, really, the best utilizer of information to control absentee ownerships that there's ever been. Which gave him the ability to open as many stores as he opens, and run them as well as he runs them, and to be as profitable as he makes them.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sire, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn't 'em both.