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I think it's a bit more nuanced than this. It's like the example given in the Mythical Man Month. If you want to grow corn, you can pretty much be assured tha
by j_baker 16y ago
I think it's a bit more nuanced than this. It's like the example given in the Mythical Man Month. If you want to grow corn, you can pretty much be assured that no matter what you do, you can harvest the corn more quickly if you put more people towards harvesting it. This is because harvesting corn is a partitionable task (in other words, you can easily divide the work up amongst an arbitrary number of workers). Of course, productivity per person will go down, but the overall rate at which you're harvesting corn will still grow.
Programming isn't easily partitionable. Programmers need to communicate with each other to do their task. Thus, adding more people makes you progress faster up to a point. At a certain point, adding more people starts to slow you down. Therefore, individual worker productivity will go down more quickly faster than it would for the corn harvesters.
Lumping all the different positions from all these different kinds of companies ignores these differences and really makes it difficult to apply the idea in general. For technology companies in particular, I'd say that the productivity loss can be even higher than 3/2.
- stoney 16y agoBut that's assuming that you're hiring more programmers to do the same task. Programming is partitionable at a larger scale - if I hire more programmers I can start more projects/create more products. So I guess what I'm saying is that for a one product company, yes, there is a point where the productivity loss from adding another employee gets very big. But for multi-product companies (think Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple), more employees just means more parallel projects.
- larrik 16y agoIt would seem that way, but I seriously doubt all of those parallel projects exist in vacuum. They likely will share frameworks, they should certainly share UI elements and designs. I mean, Apple can't have the iPad, iPod, and iPhone teams not talk to each other, their clearly linked on numerous levels. Likewise, Microsoft's apparent reliance on "parallel projects" is why we geeks poke fun at them so much. Anyone remember the screen shot of the 20+ styles of Window decorations just in Microsoft products on XP? Or howabout the fact that the Windows team has to basically reverse engineer (or at least re-develop from scratch) all of the UI features of the Office team.