When talking about work, I often find myself referencing various laws, adages and principles. I find them to be great shortcuts by leveraging a common understanding of the topic and domain. Of course they are not perfectly true in 100% of cases, but there is a reason that they turned into common sayings.
Since I have trouble remembering names, this article is both my way to share the sayings I mention the most and to build myself a cheat sheet! My goal is not to list all the common ones, but instead focus on the few that I really mention frequently when building software or leading teams.
Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.”
Brook’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
Conway’s Law: “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.”
Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Law of Demeter: “Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units: only units ‘closely’ related to the current unit.”
Ninety-Ninety Rule: “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time”
Pareto Principle: “Roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.”
Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.”
Since you scrolled this far, you might be interested in some other things I wrote: