4 ms·

People seem to have forgotten the lessons of The Mythical Man-Month: it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software dev

People seem to have forgotten the lessons of The Mythical Man-Month: it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort.

nix23 4y ago
Cant remember that sentence. But if your project is late and you put more people onto it (more people more work done..in theory), it gets even worse.
- mjevans 4y ago
  Context from the book: bringing on new workers has a one time cost of bringing them up to speed and an ongoing cost in synchronization / communications complexity. General consensus, try to assign the optimal number of humans to as specific a task as possible and shard / divide and conqueror the tasks to minimize the headcount per task.
- fatfox 4y ago
  More about Brooks’ Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? The GP to me seemed to imply that.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? No you are totally right, it was just about that you then waste even more time to introduce those people to the project then it will save you time.
    - jrochkind1 4y ago
      Yep, and in general more time on communication and coordination overhead -- ongoing, not just for the period of introduction -- the more people you have involved. While I find this a very insightful and important observation -- I'm not sure I see much relevance to current tech layoffs.
cratermoon 4y ago
> it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort. Yes, but Brooks was speaking about the effect of bringing new people on to a project. His words, "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". However, had those same people been brought on board at the start of the project, they would not have had the same negative affect on the timeline. Certainly some people turn out to be what G. Gordon Schulmeyer called "net negative producing programmers" (NNPPs)[1], but presumably they could have been let go before their impact was a problem. Could companies be just now laying off the NNPPs they should have let go long ago? Of course, but the track records of these companies hiring the top talent would suggest that NNPPs don't stick around long. 1 http://web.archive.org/web/20011023084845/http://pyxisinc.com/pyxis_artmain.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011023084845/http://pyxisinc.co...

People seem to have forgotten the lessons of The Mythical Man-Month: it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort.

nix23 4y ago

Cant remember that sentence. But if your project is late and you put more people onto it (more people more work done..in theory), it gets even worse.

mjevans 4y ago
Context from the book: bringing on new workers has a one time cost of bringing them up to speed and an ongoing cost in synchronization / communications complexity. General consensus, try to assign the optimal number of humans to as specific a task as possible and shard / divide and conqueror the tasks to minimize the headcount per task.
fatfox 4y ago
More about Brooks’ Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
jrochkind1 4y ago
He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? The GP to me seemed to imply that.
- nix23 4y ago
  >He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? No you are totally right, it was just about that you then waste even more time to introduce those people to the project then it will save you time.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Yep, and in general more time on communication and coordination overhead -- ongoing, not just for the period of introduction -- the more people you have involved. While I find this a very insightful and important observation -- I'm not sure I see much relevance to current tech layoffs.

cratermoon 4y ago

> it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort. Yes, but Brooks was speaking about the effect of bringing new people on to a project. His words, "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". However, had those same people been brought on board at the start of the project, they would not have had the same negative affect on the timeline. Certainly some people turn out to be what G. Gordon Schulmeyer called "net negative producing programmers" (NNPPs)[1], but presumably they could have been let go before their impact was a problem. Could companies be just now laying off the NNPPs they should have let go long ago? Of course, but the track records of these companies hiring the top talent would suggest that NNPPs don't stick around long. 1 http://web.archive.org/web/20011023084845/http://pyxisinc.com/pyxis_artmain.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011023084845/http://pyxisinc.co...