Episode 5: The Mythical Man-Month, Part I
By Ariel Caplan on September 28, 2017
This episode, we opened up an old classic, Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month.
After some initial impressions, including our collective astonishment at the degree of gendered language in the book (and thoughts about what impact it might have had in its time), we moved on to discuss some concepts emerging from the reading:
- 8:39 How have ideas in this book survived and evolved over time?
- 14:43 Brooks’ Law: “Adding human resources to a late software project makes it later.”
- 16:56 Changes in modern communication styles in tools
- 21:42 Have we gotten any better at onboarding?
- 23:56 Have we lost the value of documentation?
- 26:46 The Surgical Team paradigm, reexamined
- 31:41 Consistency and top-down design versus bottom-up design by consensus
- 42:19 Small teams
- 46:06 Choice of programming language
- 52:48 Closing comments
We’d love to hear your thoughts about the book as well. Join us on Slack and share with other Dev Empaths!