Does anyone else question the mythical man month? If I accept the basic assumption of the mythical man month then I also have to accept that NYC is a myth - there is no way that a city that size can possibly function. Lets start out with ten people in NYC and they add ten more people .... My own belief is the MMM is an apologists view of how we currently collaborate to develop software and products.
Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
91–100 of 212 posts
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#92Web devs: don't think this applies to you.
If you're pushing up 0 lines of code on a day where you had no meetings or interruptions, and you aren't working on something truly novel and near-impossible, you took the day off on the company dime. And everybody you worked with noticed, and if you do it regularly - they are just waiting for everybody to reach their breaking point with you so they can push to get rid of you. Sure, you'll find a new job and do it again, but you'll still not have anybody's respect.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#93sounds like I am at least a 10x programmer
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#94A good measure is how many lines removed per day.
That’s a terrible metric in my opinion. Yes, removing redundant code or optimising code is important, but I wouldn’t want to be judged on it.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#95Personally I take more pride in removing code these days.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
People misunderstand it. It means writing code, documentation, testing, bug fixing etc. I'm not sure it is that far off over several years. If you look at Google, and say there are 52 * 5 days * 10 lines of code, 2600 lines of code per developer. Extrapolate that to 20 years times how many developers and list on code that is currently used, would it be that far out? People over-estimate the sustainability of short te…
No, we don't misunderstand it. 10 lines per day is just rubbish. Here's an example: https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf is code written by 2 people (me and another guy). It's written, documented, tested and bug fixed. It's 110k lines of code. And it's tight. Good luck removing 10k lines of code and not loosing any functionality. Assuming 10 lines per day and round-the-clock 365 days of working, that's 30 m…
> I didn't spend 15 years writing it. It's a part-time effort over 10 years.
It's not that far off. I'm taking your example as rather confirming the point rather than refuting it.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#97I did some trivial math. Redis is composed of 100k lines of code, I wrote at least 70k of that in 10 years. I never work more than 5 days per week and I take 1 month of vacations every year, so assuming I work 22 days every month for 11 months:
70000/(22*11*10) = ~29 LOC / day
However this math is a bit off because in the course of such 10 years I wrote quite a number of side projects, but still, max ~50 LOC / day.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once had to work with some outsourced developers who would do "something(); something(); something();..." rather than "for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++) something();" when instructed to repeat something X times.
It's called loop unrolling and improves performance by eliminating loop control overhead and reducing branch mispredictions. Maybe they had a compiler background :)? /s
If they had, they would know that virtually any compiler can do this on his own.
I also know these examples and I know the people who are writing them. "Copy & Paste" coding is just more convenient for them instead of writing a loop, fizzling with brackets, indation or whatever. They don't produce high entropy code.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once opened up a government code base (in C) that lead with this: "void * * * * x;". It took a while to learn that code. Taking time is fine and good managers will support you, so long as you have something to explain what your time is spent on.
I'm consulting a client right now and their C++ codebase is full of gems of this caliber. I eviscerate every single PR, and tell them what's wrong and why, and then their CTO just merges them into master without changing anything. All the while they pay me for it. Why? Fuck me if I know. They hired me to provide advice. I provide advice, and it's pretty expensive. I _know for a fact_ they will regret merging this shi…
You might be going into conflict/criticism mode, which would make them unresponsive. Being right isn't enough to get people to change. I don't know at all if this is the case, just mentioning it, because you seem to be frustrated by the situation.
Re: Mythical man month: 10 lines per developer day
#100Web devs: don't think this applies to you. If you're pushing up 0 lines of code on a day where you had no meetings or interruptions, and you aren't working on something truly novel and near-impossible, you took the day off on the company dime. And everybody you worked with noticed, and if you do it regularly - they are just waiting for everybody to reach their breaking point with you so they can push to get rid of yo…
This is why people push the most difficult tasks to the most junior developers. Because a dev stuggling to do the 'impossible' looks the exact same way. That way others get to protect themselves from blame.