The Mythical Man Month [0] hit me at a perfect time - I was working at a company that was obsessed with tracking everything in man-months without considering wh

The Mythical Man Month [0] hit me at a perfect time - I was working at a company that was obsessed with tracking everything in man-months without considering who was doing the work, or when they were added. The book gave me the academic support to back my intuition when I would push back on management. Now on the other side, I take his advice in There is No Silver Bullet [1] very seriously. Improving software engineering is a slog, not a shiny buzzword. My favorite quote [2] of his "The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere." I guess the one surprising thing for me was that he was still actively working. Even 15 years ago I thought of him as a grand dean from a past generation. Great to see him stay so vibrant for so long. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks