On Man-Months & Silver Bullets
Published
I finally got around to reading Mythical Man-Month (MMM) as part of a casual, technical bookclub with a few friends.
My main interests and motivation behind reading it were I’d always heard it quoted, mostly in the context of “if a pregnancy is 9 months for 1 woman, you can’t make it 1 month with 9 women” paraphrasing of course. Additionally, in the past couple years, there was a note-taking app called SilverBullet which I thought was a reference to the essay “No Silver Bullet” in MMM. I did ask Zef and he said that wasn’t the case. Oh well.
Here’s the primary, single takeaway from MMM that still holds true today:
Brooks’ Law: adding people to a software project will delay it further.
If you haven’t read it, it’s worth picking up. To be honest, I’d recommend a physical copy of the latest (1995) edition. Archive.org has a digital scan of what appears to be the 1995 edition, but it’s actually an earlier release. Would not recommend—you want the full experience.
If you aren’t interested in reading all 300+ pages cover to cover, here’s my recommendation:
- The first (5) chapters and last (4) chapters.
- If you want even less, then do the first (2) and the last (4).
I recommend this because you get to read “The Mythical Man-Month” and “No Silver Bullet” in full while also getting the recap at the end of the to fill in what you didn’t actively read.
A few other random thoughts:
- Two book recommendations from the reading:
- Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (I actually picked this up when I bought my physical copy of MMM)
- Software Engineer Economics
- The original “waterfall” 1970 Royce paper even came up (I’ve been toying with a small blog post re: that paper for a couple years)
- I’d love a revision where they made it much more gender neutral
It was sort of surreal reading it since the original book will be 50 next year and honestly while there’s some specific examples and nuances that aren’t the same today (mostly around collaboration and how much faster and cheaper hardware has gotten) the overarching themes still 100% ring true. I get that computing is a relatively young field, but at what point is it simply immature?
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