I'm so sorry but I read it as "the Mythical Moth Man" for a second
very Kafka. If only the industry had adopted your 'vision'...
Also, very Norm MacDonald (RIP).
The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
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Re: The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intrigued to hear what else is on your list?
My go-tos are the mythical man month and Peopleware:productive projects and teams. There’s the Peter principle too. On more technical (slightly) topics, I like the Pragmatic Programmer. I also like people to be aware of re-engineering concepts, so Hammer and Champy’s Re-engineering the Corporation is also good.
A good set.
Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things go ƃuoɹʍ is a compendium of engineering and organisational dictums. Of itself it provides relatively little insight, but many of the principles themselves trace to more substantive works, including Parkinson's Laws, the Peter Principle, and many, many others:
https://archive.org/details/murphyslawotherr0000bloc>
Bloch himself was working off a number of earlier compilations, several already popular in the high-tech industry (programming, weapons design, biotech, etc.), as well as other fields. I'd tracked those down at one point but seem to have lost those references. Bloch cites some, though not all, his sources in this and subsequent "Murphy's Law" books.
"Gamesmanship" and "Systemantics" cover similar ground:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics>
See also Richard I. Cook's "How Complex Systems Fail": http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...>
Charles Perrow explores organisational foundations of failure in Normal Accidents and The Next Catastrophe. To an extent Joseph Tainter and Jerard Diamond's books (particular each author's independent Collapse titles) look into the dynamic at much greater depth.
For programming, MMM (Brooks), PeopleWare (Demarco & Lister), The Psychology of Computer Programming (Weinberg), Code Complete (McConnell), and a substantial literature on quality assessment and practices emerged in the 1970s -- 1990s. The bibliographies of the above books, as well as citations of them, should provide an ample set of references for further reading.
Re: The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
#93While Brooks' book is nominally about software processes, in my career of over 40 years, I found it to be applicable to just about every engineering discipline to which I played a part. I read this book back in the 70's and then every 10 years or so and I never failed to learn something new from it. I just wish the managers and companies I worked for would have applied these lessons.
I'm a bit of a broken record on the idea, but I'm fairly convinced that much of what we think is unique to software is not that unique. Coordinating work with people is hard, pretty much period.
Systems in general have similarities.
Human organisations, whether governmental, commercial, educational, religious, military, charitable, social, or any other principle focus, tend to have and exhibit strongly similar patterns.
There is of course also domain-specific knowledge, but even much of that almost always proves more general on closer examination, with much of the distinction being of labeling and language rather than behaviour and phenomena.
Re: The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
#94It's always a surprise to know how far back good ideas actually go. Brooks figured out all this stuff in the 70s, pretty much as soon as it was possible for someone to have done this type of work and written a book about it. Reminds me of Adam Smith's writings about the nascent factory economy, and perhaps ancient philosophers as well.
Since you bring up Smith, one of the absolutely glaring oversights of Wealth of Nations is that it utterly fails to grasp or note the role steam power would play in the next century of increasing automation, factory-system development, and transportation within England and the economies of Europe and North America especially.
This is all the more gobstopping an oversight when you realise that Smith not only know of James Watt and his steam engine, but was personally acquainted with Watt, personally arranged for him to have a position at the University of Glasgow, and that that was specifically to work and improve the University's own steam engine. Watt remained at that post for a decade or more if memory serves, much of that prior to the publication of Wealth in 1776.
Re: The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
#95This is a very shallow summary of the Mythical Man Month, and it leaves out at least one concept that the book is most (in)famous for: the '10 times programmer'. An excerpt: > In one of their studies, Sackman, Erikson, and Grant were measuring performances of a group of experienced programmers. Within just this group the ratios between best and worst performances averaged about 10:1 on productivity measurements and a…
I agree. Mythical Man Month is a book to read. It's clear, interesting, and has better writing than summaries. Many classics like this are so good because the author is among the first to observe new phenomena. They can write down what they have learned without cultural narratives that distort reality. The hardest lesson in the book is the chapter 11 "Plan to Throw One Away". I have never seen this not to be the case…
I understand the drive to consume book summaries instead of books themselves. There are way too many books, life moves fast, we need results yesterday.
I also think that if we summarized all the great books ever written and boiled them down to one phrase, it would be "read more books".