Mantras for developers

Don Y · 2026-08-16T18:41:17+00:00

My colleagues have been bandying about various "quips" thatencase "good engineering wisdom" in playful quotes.My favorites, to date:"If you can't describe (in prose) what you're doing, then you'redoomed to wasting time trying to sort out what you REALLY want toachieve -- and mistakenly claiming that all to be 'Engineering'""The sooner you start, the longer it will take"Both leverage the notion of having some sort of specificationthat defines your goal -- so you know where you are headedand when you've attained it.There are others, of course, but many are old saws ("if itdoesn't fit in one brain, it's too complex"; "it should fiton one *page*"; etc.)Beyond that, there are far too many that address "specifics"instead of The Big Picture.

Aug 16, 2026 Last reply: 1 month ago 44 Replies

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Bill Sloman 1 month ago

Freshman washout courses are designed to shed the stupid and the people who can't be bothered to do the work required.

If you can do the work they are designed to get you a level where can cope the more advanced stuff you'd have to master if you did enroll in the next course in the series.

You found the experience awful and gave up chemistry, so the course did exactly what it was intended to do. The original sense of "awful" was "awe-inspiring" but everybody knows how to run freshman washout course, even Tulane, so there's no awe involved.

Yuck, but unsurprising.

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john larkin 1 month ago

I got an A in freshmen chemistry. It was boring, not even as interesting as high school chemistry.

Got A's there too. Our fake experimantal data was better looking than anybody else's real data.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

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Bill Sloman 1 month ago

It's not designed to be interesting, but informative. You don't enjoyed getting better-informed - it draws your attentio to the fact that you were previously ill-informed, which is something you'd prefer not to know.

Put enough random nose in the right places and you can look convincing while still getting the right answer.

The real world is less cooperative.

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Cóilín Nioclásín Glostéir 1 month ago

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"On 23/08/2026 12:51 am, john larkin wrote: | |[. . .] | |>>> And I faked the EE lab reports, not chemistry. | |>> | |>> Yuck, but unsurprising. | |> | |> Got A's there too. Our fake experimental data was better looking than| |> anybody else's real data. | | | |Put enough random nose in the right places and you can look convincing | |while still getting the right answer. | | | |The real world is less cooperative." | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Jan Hendrik Schoen did not bother with random noise. (He put exactly the samely shaped purportedly random noise into graphs in different papers about unrelated topics.) (S.

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