Fred Brooks Quotes

After two minutes after this time, and I am already there.

There is something wrong when you wait in line thirty minutes to get a hamburger that was cooked for ninety seconds an hour ago.

I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.

More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined.

If you don't put out a shirt for eight months, that doesn't mean it took you eight months to make the shirt.

Quality is not an absolute measure. It doesn't mean 'deluxeness' or 'perfection'. It means keeping the promise the customer wants you to make.

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

If you wait until you feel like doing something, you will likely never accomplish it.

When you sell a product or service, you're making a promise to your audience. If you don't understand your audience, you'll never be able to keep that promise and you'll ultimately let them down.

I don't wait for moods - you'd never get anything done if you did.

I don't need time, I need a deadline.

The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce - a clean room, a hot cup of coffee, a nonporous casing, a trip to the moon on goassamer wings.

Law Number XXIV: The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man.

Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done.

I'd like to shower and change clothes," she said. "Would you mind waiting for me a half hour?" The question seemed to amuse him. "Not at all," he said with exaggerated formality. "Please take all the time you need." Michael watched her walk away. Did he mind waiting a half hour for her? Not at all. He'd been waiting years for her.

If you take the time away, you take the character away.

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait. There is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.

Oh yeah, waiting sucks.

Hahnji, mister, you must be patient. Before you can name that corner, our future must become past.

We need to push ourselves to make as many reductions as possible in our own energy use first - and that takes time. But we must do this quickly - the climate will not wait for us.

It is not enough to want to make the effort and to say we'll make the effort. We must actually make the effort. It's in the doing, not just the thinking, that we accomplish our goals. If we constantly put our goals off, we will never see them fulfilled. Someone put it this way: Live only for tomorrow, and you will have a lot of empty yesterdays today.

Listen to your customers but don't (always) believe what they say-they know even less about the future than you.

Each second is a second you can make a new choice, a better choice, a healthy choice, a present choice.

Customers can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.