I saw this today at Forbes.com:
“ They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations. ”
— Francis Bacon
I think the above is a particularly good way of explaining why I feel very happy to be a software developer. I love what I do, and so, I find, it is a lot easier to get me to do that work, than it would be to get me to do something I did not like doing. And in the end, not only am I happy, hopefully everyone, including the business owner that I work for, and the customers of that business, can be happy to, because they each have to get what they need too. I think there really is a temperament that is suited to software development, and that its pretty safe to say that I have it.
Another quote that I think is apropos for the professional software developer, which I keep quoting, without knowing where it came from, and which is similar to, or dovetails with the Francis Bacon quote is:
"Hard work becomes easy when the mind is at play"
Unfortunately I do not know the origin of the quote. I could be quoting myself, or Benjamin Franklin, or Abraham Lincoln, or Mark Twain. Who knows. The meaning of the quote, to me, is that if a person is unable to enter into, and enjoy the technical challenge or mastery of a skill that is required to do a job well, then not only will they hate doing the work, they'll do it badly. This is another way of saying that temperament affects outcomes, at least in our line of work. Incidentally google and all the quote databases come up empty when looking for quotes about a mind at play.
Please share your favorite quotes about work, being a software developer, and anything related to the temperament or working lives of developers.
Update: Apologies for the formatting mistakes on this post, and any eyestrain caused by them!
Update: Apologies for the formatting mistakes on this post, and any eyestrain caused by them!
Nice post. :-) I like "Never send a human to do a machine's job." - by one of the agents in the first Matrix movie. I find myself saying that sometimes when I find a mistake I've made. :-)
ReplyDeleteHere's another, more related to your post:
"With Delphi, if you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong." - by somebody on the internets (could have been Nick Hodges but I'm not sure).
Now I have a headache... white letters on black backgrounds should be forbidden...
ReplyDeleteI can't find the exact quote or remember who said it but it was from one of the early pioneers of computer hardware/software about the one of the first programs ever written. It went something like this...
ReplyDelete"We punched the instructions into the computer and ran it expecting to receive the correct answer. The program ran but gave us an incorrect answer. We investigated further and found a logic error in our code. It was at that moment I realised programming wasn't the simple mechanical process we had thought it to be and that I would be spending much of my time getting my programs to run correctly."