Those who think software construction should be just like building construction are clearly unskilled at both. 

~ Andy Hunt

If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better here".

~ Peopleware

Fear leads to risk, risk leads to process, process leads to hate… and suffering and Gantt charts.

~ Dan North

Millions of human tapeworms

Since the modern, scientifically conceived corporation was invented in the early half of the twentieth century, creativity has been sacrificed in favor of forwarding the interests of the “team player.”

Fair enough. There was more money in doing it that way; that’s why they did it.
There’s only one problem. Team players are not very good at creating value on their own. They are not autonomous; they need a team in order to exist.
So now corporations are awash with nonautonomous thinkers.
Creating an economically viable entity where lack of original thought is handsomely rewarded creates a rich, fertile environment for parasites to breed.

And that’s exactly what’s been happening. So now we have millions upon millions of human tapeworms thriving in the Western world, making love to their PowerPoint presentations, feasting on the creativity of others.

-- Hugh MacLeod @ Ignore Everybody

Teaching people

Better to teach people and risk they leave, than not and risk they stay.

-- anonymous

Embrace the constraints

Every project worth doing comes with constraints. Our natural inclination is to fight them.

...

There's a useful alternative: embrace the constraints you've been given. Use them as assets, as an opportunity to be the one who solved the problem. Once you can thrive in a world filled with constraints, it's ever easier to do well when those constraints are loosened.

-- Seth Godin

Bored People Quit

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they’ve either never done the work or have forgotten how it’s done.

-- rands

The Curse of the Silicon Valley

[...] the Curse of the Silicon Valley is that great engineers are often promoted to leadership for their hard work. While many succeed in this role, an equal part fails because the skills required to lead are vastly different than the ones required to be an engineer. The Curse is that we’re often placing our most valuable engineers in a role where they’re predisposed to fail.

[...] there’s a large population of immensely talented engineers that should not be leaders. There is no amount of training that would make up for the talent we’d extinguish by teaching them how to write annual reviews.

-- rands @ goo.gl/YYFCs