Time & Perspective Quote by Dennis Ritchie

"Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role" lands with the dry understatement you’d expect from Dennis Ritchie: a man whose work is so foundational that even his retreat from it has to be phrased like a minor scheduling update. The line is modest to the point of misdirection. It’s not confession or complaint; it’s a soft way of marking distance from the hands-on creation that made him famous, while refusing the myth of the lone genius endlessly hacking in a lab.

The intent is practical, almost bureaucratic: explaining a shift in duties. The subtext is sharper. In computing, “managerial” can mean everything from supervising people to shepherding standards, defending budgets, or translating technical truth into institutional language. It’s a role that often signals success inside an organization and a kind of loss inside a craft: less time for the satisfying, solitary rigor of building things that compile. Coming from Ritchie, it also reads as a quiet commentary on how innovation gets absorbed. Once your work becomes infrastructure - C and Unix as the plumbing of modern life - the world stops asking you to invent and starts asking you to administer the consequences.

Context matters: Bell Labs was famous for letting scientists roam, but even there, prestige eventually comes with committees. Ritchie’s phrasing sidesteps ego, yet it exposes a cultural reality in tech and science: institutions promote their most effective builders into roles where building is hardest to do. The sentence is plain, but it carries a whole lifecycle of invention: creation, adoption, then governance.