{"id":10961,"date":"2022-11-19T13:07:29","date_gmt":"2022-11-19T18:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10961"},"modified":"2022-11-19T13:07:29","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T18:07:29","slug":"fred-brooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10961","title":{"rendered":"Fred Brooks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS\/360. He\u2019s probably best known for his influential book <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Mythical_Man-Month\">The Mythical Man-Month<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, Brooks died on Thursday at the age of 91. Steve Bellovin tweeted the news:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Sad news from <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/unccs?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@unccs<\/a> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Steven M. Bellovin (@SteveBellovin) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/SteveBellovin\/status\/1593414068634734592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 18, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Even people who haven\u2019t heard of <i>The Mythical Man-Month<\/i> are familiar <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brooks%27s_law\">Brooks\u2019 Law<\/a>, which distills the central lesson of the book. Of course, Brooks\u2019 Law is honored more in its breach than in its observance, especially by managers who \u201cjust know\u201d that a few more staff will solve all a project\u2019s problems. Still, it\u2019s worth reminding those who are inclined to add more manpower to a project that 9 women can\u2019t make a baby in a month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS\/360. He\u2019s 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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10961\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-10961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10962,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10961\/revisions\/10962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}