Table of Contents
- The list
- Betteridge’s Law
- Brandolini’s Law
- Carlson’s Law
- Chesterton’s Fence
- Conway’s Law
- Dunning-Kruger Effect
- Gall’s Law
- Goodhart’s Law
- EROOM-Nitot’s Law
- Hanlon’s Razor
- Hawthorne Effect
- Hofstadter’s Law
- Hyrum’s Law
- Lindy Effect
- Maslow’s Hammer
- Murphy’s Law
- Parkinson’s Law
- Peter Principle
- Pournelle’s Law
- Shirky Principle
- Tesler’s Law
- Wirth’s Law
A collection of meta-laws you’ll need to stay sane.
This is a curated list of the Wikipedia one. Many thanks to them !
If you want a more extensive list, there is also Hacker-Laws, although it tends to go way beyond the scope I’m trying to focus on. Many thanks to them, also !
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Interrupted work will be less effective and will take more time than if it would completed in a continuous manner.
Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
People with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Corrolary: High performers have a tendency to underestimate their skills in their domain of expertise.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
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Note
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«EROOM» is a wordplay on reversing Moore’s Law and backronyming it to the french «Effort Radicalement Organisé d’Optimisation en Masse» (which can be loosely translated to «Massive and radically organized optimization effort»). |
We need to commit to optimize existing software with a factor of two every two years.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Individuals can modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
The longer a period something non-perishable has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail..
The duration of work expands to fill its allotted time span, regardless of the amount of work to be done.
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
See also Shirky Principle
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
See also Pournelle’s Law
An application inherent complexity can never be removed, nor hidden, only dealt with trade-offs.