Hasso Plattner Quotes

We can't simply blame the engineers when things go wrong because, no matter how well they plan, things don't always go according to plan.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

It is strange how little harm bad codes do.

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

It turns out that we can build perfectly secure software, and yet people can still get hurt.

Serious accidents are frequently blamed on "human error." Yet careful analysis of such situations shows that the design or installation of the equipment has contributed significantly to the problems. The design team or installers did not pay sufficient attention to the needs of those who would be using the equipment, so confusion or error was almost unavoidable.

I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

My first book, 'To Engineer Is Human,' was prompted by nonengineer friends asking me why so many technological accidents and failures were occurring. If engineers knew what they were doing, why did bridges and buildings fall down? It was a question that I had often asked myself, and I had no easy answer.

When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

How could this Y2K be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?

I wonder sometimes if manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

W2K will be a bigger disaster than Y2K.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it's supposed to. Even awesome Apple, mighty Microsoft, and gargantuan Google miss deadlines.

All software sucks.

In the astronaut business - the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, 'There is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse.'

I've seen plenty of films where the projector broke. The problems that we have in the digital age are exactly the same as we had. Instead of, 'There's a hair in the gate,' it's, 'The computer ate the footage.' There will always be things like that going on. Nothing is perfect.

any system, in which the final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are human, is doomed to failure because it deifies human beings by designating others than God as lords over men.

There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.

There's no such thing as a foolproof system. That idea fails to take into account the creativity of fools.

I say this as an engineer: We are profoundly bad at asking ourselves how the things we build could be misused.

A computer, by definition, cannot be held accountable for anything because there is no mechanism to hold it to account, short of turning off the electricity supply or destroying the hardware. Only humans can be accountable.