The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick Brooks Jr.
137 people recommended it in 42 threads, 2007–2025.
6 commenters pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.
What people on Hacker News said
That put into words so many things that I felt about computer programming, if nothing else the humanness of programming as a pursuit.
My personal thoughts were that it would be hard to see success with the model unless you made sure all the roles were recognized as being equally important towards the success of the team.
The reality, of course, is that the book was so spot-on and insightful that many of its ideas have simply been absorbed into the way we approach software development.
So, good book that we probably all should actually read instead of just spouting about nine pregnant women, but not all of it will be relevant today.
I see the Mythical Man Month tossed around as an excuse for not trying sometimes - by people who haven't even tried to split up and spread out chunks of work in parallel - but onboarding cost is definitely real.
The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks really helped me learn to think about large projects from a personnel and planning perspective.
For software engineering, all the essays in Fred Brooks' 'Mythical Man Month' were formative.
The reason it is continually mentioned is companies make this mistake over and over and over again.
So yeah, some of it has dated, and some of it I disagree with, but it kills me that a lot of the lessons are still not learnt 45 years later.
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