Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS/360. He’s probably best known for his influential book The Mythical Man-Month, which has itself obtained a mythical status within our industry. The TL;DR of the book is that adding more engineers to a late project makes it later. Brooks speculated that the reasons for this are that adding engineers quadratically increases the amount of required communication and bringing the new engineers up to speed actually slows things down.
Sadly, Brooks died on Thursday at the age of 91. Steve Bellovin tweeted the news:
Sad news from @unccs — Fred P. Brooks, the founder and long-time chair of the department (and a major influence on my professional outlook) passed away a few hours ago.
— Steven M. Bellovin (@SteveBellovin) November 18, 2022
Even people who haven’t heard of The Mythical Man-Month are familiar Brooks’ Law, which distills the central lesson of the book. Of course, Brooks’ Law is honored more in its breach than in its observance, especially by managers who “just know” that a few more staff will solve all a project’s problems. Still, it’s worth reminding those who are inclined to add more manpower to a project that 9 women can’t make a baby in a month.