The costs of bad software engineering decisions are an externality that almost never falls back on the engineers who made them.

Added to korrents 25 Oct 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

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• High consequences cannot be what makes work engineering, because most traditional engineering is low-stakes too. HWHillel Wayne18 Jan 2021
• A decision cannot be judged by its outcome, because good decisions fail through no fault of the decider and bad ones succeed by luck. GKGary Klein9 Aug 2022
• Software quality has historically been maintained by engineers' own will combined with their strong negotiating position in the job market, rather than by other forces. AKAndrew Kelley31 Jul 2026
• The difficulty of software engineering is probably essentially constant across abstraction levels, because human cognition adapts to new tools. FCFrançois Chollet25 Sept 2026
• The engineering intuition that matters cannot be taught from a textbook — you know bad patterns in software because you have debugged them at three in the morning. DHDex Horthy15 Jul 2026

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