Kirby's Third Law of Software Engineering

Always be ready to answer the question, "What have you done for me lately?"

Managers don't care if you were a super star two quarters ago. They only care what have you produced last week. And when they want to know, they want to know now. I always maintain some means to answer this question quickly: a Word document, a Jira query, a spreadsheet, a notebook. I even created an Access database for two different jobs where I had to track who I was billing to.

Kirby's Second Law of Software Engineering

Kirby's Second Law of Software
The more I get paid the smaller my desk


Also see Kirby's First Law of Software

Kirby's Law of Software Schedule Estimation

Kirby's Law

Software schedule estimation is impossible.

Proof

To know how long writing software will take you have to have written it before. If you have written it before, then there is no need to be writing it now. Therefore any software that you are writing now hasn't been written before. Therefore it is impossible to estimate how long it will take.