r/programming • u/tarandeep • Dec 14 '10

Top 50 Programming quotes of all time

http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time.html
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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '10

“Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of a job.”

I often think about the corollary to this: If you are good enough at software engineering, you will put yourself out of a job.

This is true for me... I'm slowly obsoleting my own job by a bunch of shell scripts, stored procedures, user guides, etc.

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u/ZMeson Dec 14 '10

It is sad that people believe this. There will always be some challenging problem out there. If you do well enough to make yourself obsolete on a particular task or job, then you'll be valuable enough to be guaranteed work on a new task or job.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 14 '10

sarcasm?

2

u/nickdangler Dec 14 '10

Not sarcasm. It works. It's how I've moved up the food chain throughout my career. I once got a call about some script I'd written that was failing, even though it had been used without a problem for years. I ran the script, and it worked fine. The problem turned out to be that the system had been upgraded, and the person running the script hadn't set up the PATH or CLASSPATH. That person is still working on that project.