While attaching the word “hacker” to everything even remotely technical is getting a bit tired, there’s plenty of gems in this guide from Dave Kerr. I haven’t seen Brook’s Law since I was at university:
Adding human resources to a late software development project makes it later.
…but experience has shown me that it’s true in practice.
While we’re at it, every new developer needs to know Kernighan’s Law:
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
With each passing year, I get a little bit less impressed with clever code. Your first priority in writing code that will outlast you isn’t making it performant, “elegant” (whatever that means), or necessarially even correct. Your first priority has to be maintainability, because if it’s not, your code will be replaced or abandoned before those other things start to matter.