Top 50 Fred Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.”

— Fred Brooks

2. “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”

— Fred Brooks

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3. “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

— Fred Brooks

4. “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”

— Fred Brooks

5. “Present to inform, not to impress. If you inform, you will impress.”

— Fred Brooks

6. “You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.”

— Fred Brooks

7. “Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.”

— Fred Brooks

8. “How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.”

— Fred Brooks

9. “The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.”

— Fred Brooks

10. “A scientist builds in order to learn; an engineer learns in order to build.”

— Fred Brooks

11. “The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.”

— Fred Brooks

12. “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

— Fred Brooks

13. “Dissertations are not finished; they are abandoned.”

— Fred Brooks

14. “Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose.”

— Fred Brooks

15. “Successful software always gets changed.”

— Fred Brooks

16. “Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”

— Fred Brooks

17. “I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.”

— Fred Brooks

18. “What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.”

— Fred Brooks

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19. “Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.”

— Fred Brooks

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

— Fred Brooks

21. “Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.”

— Fred Brooks

22. “System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.”

— Fred Brooks

23. “Software and hardware design is less different than software designers think, but more different than hardware designers think.”

— Fred Brooks

24. “Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.”

— Fred Brooks

25. “It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers.”

— Fred Brooks

26. “Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.”

— Fred Brooks

27. “Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community’s practice.”

— Fred Brooks

28. “Predictability and great design are not friends.”

— Fred Brooks

29. “Originality is no excuse for ignorance.”

— Fred Brooks

30. “A design style is defined by a set of microdecisions. A clear style reflects a consistent set. A clear style may not be a good style; a muddled one never is.”

— Fred Brooks

31. “Design work doesn’t just satisfy requirements, it elicits them.”

— Fred Brooks

32. “Improving your process won’t move you from good to great design. It’ll move you from bad to average.”

— Fred Brooks

33. “Software work is the most complex that humanity has ever undertaken.”

— Fred Brooks

34. “But I will argue that knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm.”

— Fred Brooks

35. “To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one’s bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion.”

— Fred Brooks

36. “A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.”

— Fred Brooks

37. “The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.”

— Fred Brooks

38. “Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.”

— Fred Brooks

39. “I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.”

— Fred Brooks

40. “We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties; for the media are not “ours” in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.”

— Fred Brooks

41. “Mediocre design provably wastes the world’s resources, corrupts the environment, affects international competitiveness. Design is important.”

— Fred Brooks

42. “A computer program is a message from a man to a machine. The rigidly marshaled syntax and the scrupulous definitions all exist to make intention clear to the dumb engine.”

— Fred Brooks

43. “A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers.”

— Fred Brooks

44. “The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.”

— Fred Brooks

45. “System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.”

— Fred Brooks

46. “There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.”

— Fred Brooks

47. “Consensus processes starve innovative design by eating the resource.”

— Fred Brooks

48. “Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.”

— Fred Brooks

49. “Systematically identity top designers as early as possible. The best are often not the most experienced.”

— Fred Brooks

50. “When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

— Fred Brooks