Brooks’ Law: Why Hiring More Developers Will Kill Your Deadline
The Panic Hire It is the most natural instinct in business. If you need to dig a ditch and you are behind schedule, you hire more diggers. Two people can dig a ditch twice as fast as one. Labor is interchangeable. Managers assume coding is like digging ditches. It is not. Coding is like performing surgery. In his 1975 classic The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks observed a phenomenon that plagues the tech industry to this day: The “Rescue” Paradox. When a project is late, adding fresh bodies to the team actually pushes the delivery date further out. ...