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This is not an unorthodox or unreasonable position. The Mythical Man-Month is a classic text in software engineering and project management and essentially argu
by sushibowl 9y ago
This is not an unorthodox or unreasonable position. The Mythical Man-Month is a classic text in software engineering and project management and essentially argues this very point. The analogy to child birth is actually also a classic one made originally by the author.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
- varjag 9y agoOf course just like everyone on HN am aware of the book and heard this quote a billion+ times. And of course I know it's badly misused in this particular case (as it often is).
- mrguyorama 9y agosoftware development parallelization works about as well as it does for actual software, ie non-linearly at best. Add to that overhead/mistakes/difficulties caused by "synchronization" and you come to the conclusion that a significant amount of that "30 man years" of software had to be just discarded when rebuilt
- varjag 9y agoBut consider that the existing "30 man years" design had couple year calendar time for it at most. Doesn't that say something about the task at hand? EDIT guess this is just rephrasing of your point, in a way.