David Stevenson

“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”
― Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

“Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy—one scar—at a time. So don’t scar on the first cut. Don’t create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again.”
― Jason Fried, ReWork

“Almost everything we know about good software architecture has to do with making software easy to change”
― Mary Poppendieck, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash

“The biggest cause of failure in software-intensive systems is not technical failure; it’s building the wrong thing.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point