Developing web applications today is at least a twofold gain over what it was 10 (edit: oh, more like 15 I guess) years ago, and that mostly has to do with avai

Developing web applications today is at least a twofold gain over what it was 10 (edit: oh, more like 15 I guess) years ago, and that mostly has to do with available tooling (browsers, frameworks, etc.) The same is true for many other areas of software. We do still spend the same amount of time building things, but the things we build are far larger than what we would've built 10 years ago. That, however, is a different phenomenon, and it's not the one that Brooks lays out in NSB. Also, it's worth noting that the Brooks thesis is also somewhat vaguely defined because it's never clear what is meant by "productivity". For example, if we increase the quality of software by an order of magnitude (e.g., by completely eliminating huge classes of once-common vulnerabilities), is that an improvement in productivity?