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Brooks' Law
- nonrandomstring 3y agoCan never resist re-reading Brooks, it always sparks some thoughts. """ The added burden of communication is made up of two parts, training and intercommunication. Each worker must be trained in the technology, the goals of the effort, the overall strategy, and the plan of work. - Brooks """ A modern overlay is that we've two more factors; the means of communication and the number of channels keep moving/growing. How often did the project move from IRC to Slack to Teams to a fancy new internal project management system and eventually to hell in a hand-basket? How often does a project uncontrollably partition into the team that hang out in the forum, the Whatsapp division, and the IRL group who meet at the pub? Coms coherency as big a problem as ever. It makes me remember what Meadows thought, that "communications paths" aren't a strong leverage pint because they're generally fixed. That's not true any more - most real people do a lot of band hopping. Meadows also skips lightly over the /effectiveness/ of coms, and things like S/N ratio, while Brooks notes it in several ways. I also had a weird insight. Productive ventures see communication as a cost (beyond an optimal point), but social media systems mark communication as value to be encouraged for it's own sake (afvertising). So they make awful bedfellows because even if you don't obviously use an ad-supported platform the design of the latter is a celebration of inefficiency. Yet so much "business" is conducted through these channels.