3 ms·
The usual joke: Respond by giving your mangler (and maybe his mangler) two copies of The Mythical Man-Month.
by kabdib 6y ago
The usual joke: Respond by giving your mangler (and maybe his mangler) two copies of The Mythical Man-Month.
- ofrzeta 6y agoI haven't read it but from what is commonly quoted it is about "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." So the assumption of bringing n people to work on a projects increasing the productivity n-fold doesn't seem totally absurd when they are working on the project from the beginning. It might not be exactly n but (n-m) due to increased management, communication etc. So we might discuss how big is m? Still there should be some increase in productivity because that's essentially how huge projects work.
- rzzzt 6y agoThe other often repeated quote is about pregnancy.
- ofrzeta 6y agoYeah but software is not a baby and software can very well have modules and APIs.
- rzzzt 6y agoIt also does not like to be split cleanly into as many parts as there are people working on it; development work is not an embarrassingly parallel problem.
- hinkley 6y agoThe longer people work between coordinating with others the more code has to be rewritten. People do not like rewriting code, so add time for all the bickering.
- alex_anglin 6y agoIt's worth a read, if just to consider that many of the observations made in the industry during the 70's hold true today. Wikipedia has a summary of the book[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
- astrobe_ 6y agoYou can push it to the extreme and have two persons on each and every coding task. That's pair programming [1], which is said to be less productive, although it is argued you trade productivity for quality and other benefits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming