Bill Gates Quotes

The bigger the budget, the more people that you have to coordinate and it's not easy to do that always because, not only do people have trouble communicating in that way, but often there are internal disagreements and everybody is not necessarily on the same page. Even in a big-budget movie with famous actors and directors, everybody could be on a completely different page. The director has to figure out a way of getting everybody on the same page, more or less, and keeping them there.

If we're trying to build a world-class News Feed and a world-class messaging product and a world-class search product and a world-class ad system, and invent virtual reality and build drones, I can't write every line of code. I can't write any lines of code.

Extreme programming is an emotional experience.

I work on OpenBSD fulltime, as the project leader. I set some directions, increase communication between the developers, and try to be involved in nearly every aspect of the base system.

Horizontal meetings are team or project meetings, set up to coordinate individual activities. When I worked in a large tech company, those meetings just popped up in my calendar by the dozen.

I always feel like if you have a smaller crew, you can not only get to know the individual strengths of people more specifically, but then, you also give them a longer runway to be able to apply the knowledge that they have learned to subsequent work.

I don't think I've ever worked on anything that wasn't way bigger than we expected. That's all the way back to working on fighting games at Paradox. Everything seems to balloon when more and more people get involved.

Basically, I had a hard time getting anyone to want to make any of the features that I had written.

If you don't share information among your startup's team, then it'll be just about a coincidence if product, marketing, and engineering are ever aligned. Those odds are too low to succeed.

A director's job is to make something happen and it doesn't happen by itself. So you wheedle, you cajole, you flatter people, you tell them what needs to be done. And if you don't bring a passion and an intensity to it, you shouldn't be doing it.

A typical software project can present more opportunities to learn from mistakes than some people get in a lifetime.

You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code.

As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

You're working with other people and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you want, and sometimes you didn't realise what a mistake you've made until you see it projected.

You can do a lot of things with git, and many of the rules of what you *should* do are not so much technical limitations but are about what works well when working together with other people. So git is a very powerful set of tools.

People are building the software and so having the pieces be such that a single person understands all the tradeoffs and everything that's going on in a piece is extremely valuable. It avoids getting into an experimental mode where you're just trying things out. That never works.

I think I'm a great organizer. Not that I'm organized, but I'm a great organizer of other people.

Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation.

The biggest mistake I made was not having a full-time producer. I was securing locations and wardrobe and making sure people get called to show up on time and getting the film to the lab and getting the camera, and all this stuff that I'm happy to do, but if I'm doing every little thing, I'm not concentrating on my story. So it never gets any better than the script.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

Producing is very much like running a business, where you find the project, you find the different people involved, you put the elements together, and you make sure they all work together well.

The fact of the matter is: when you're doing a project, you try to make it better every moment. And a lot of people get frustrated. But I surrounded myself with a good team of people and I'm really proud of the work we've all done. All I can say is - I've learned this in my business - don't let the process frustrate you; focus on the end. Because the end is pretty wonderful. Just fight it out.

Morale in an organization does not mean that "people get along together"; the test is performance not conformance.