Gene Kim Quotes & Sayings

It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end. — Gene Kim

A great team doesn't mean that they had the smartest people. What made those teams great is that everyone trusted one another. It can be a powerful thing when that magic dynamic exists. — Gene Kim

Remember, it goes beyond reducing WIP. Being able to take needless work out of the system is more important than being able to put more work into the system. — Gene Kim

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods. — Gene Kim

The status quo (of development) pre-ordains failure from the very beginning. — Gene Kim

we are not talking to one another about what changes we're planning or implementing. This is not acceptable. — Gene Kim

DevOps shows how we optimize the IT value stream, converting business needs into capabilities and services that provide value for our customers. — Gene Kim

One of the inherent challenges with initiatives such as DevOps transformations is that they are inevitably in conflict with ongoing business operations. Part — Gene Kim

My guys wanted to call it "Cujo" or "Stiletto." But the developers wanted to call it "Unicorn." Unicorn? Like rainbows and Care Bears? And against all my expectations, "Unicorn" wins the vote. Developers. I'll never understand them. — Gene Kim

To tell the truth is an act of love. To withhold the truth is an act of hate. Or worse, apathy. — Gene Kim

we need to design our systems so that they are continually creating telemetry, widely — Gene Kim

My heart lurches as all the implications sink in. I've seen this movie before. The plot is simple: First, you take an urgent date-driven project, where the shipment date cannot be delayed because of external commitments made to Wall Street or customers. Then you add a bunch of developers who use up all the time in the schedule, leaving no time for testing or operations deployment. And because no one is willing to slip the deployment date, everyone after Development has to take outrageous and unacceptable shortcuts to hit the date. — Gene Kim

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work. — Gene Kim

makes me angry when we need to make some heroic, diving catch because of someone else's lack of planning. — Gene Kim

Done poorly, Conway's Law will prevent teams from working safely and independently; instead, they will be tightly-coupled together, all waiting on each other for work to be done, with even small changes creating potentially global, catastrophic consequences. — Gene Kim