Science Quote by Ken Thompson

A bureaucratic grenade disguised as a bland status update, Ken Thompson's line lands because it refuses the premise that good computing work can be pre-packaged into "projects". In a research center, the word project is usually a funding-friendly container: scope, milestones, Gantt charts, deliverables. Thompson punctures that whole apparatus with three surgical words: "per se". Not "no work", not "no goals" - just no work that naturally fits the managerial category everyone pretends is neutral.

The intent reads as both warning and flex. Warning, because computing breakthroughs often emerge from tinkering, dead ends, and accidental discoveries that look, from the outside, like "unplanned" time. Flex, because only a lab confident in its talent and mission can afford to say the quiet part out loud: the output isn't a checklist; it's a culture. Thompson came up in an era (Bell Labs, Unix) where the most consequential software was born from small teams, loose mandates, and a deep trust in curiosity. That history is the context humming behind the sentence.

The subtext is institutional critique: when you force research into project-shaped boxes, you incentivize safe, legible work - and punish the weird, promising detours. Thompson isn't romanticizing chaos; he's defending an ecology where real engineering insight is allowed to gestate before it can be justified. It's a line that still stings because it exposes how often "project management" becomes a substitute for understanding the work itself.