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The Bearing of a Child Takes 9 Months No Matter How Many Women Are Assigned

I quote the title from the book Mythical Man-Month written by Fred Brooks and originated from Theodore von Kármán in the unique form “Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month.” Fred Brooks made this a very popular statement in the software industry, with good reasons. The idea behind it is that adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, also called Brooks’ Law.

This is a story about where I have seen this happen and what the result became to be.

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3 Research-Backed Principles That Help You Scale Your Engineering Org

As engineering teams grow, obvious difficulties arise. It’s simple math. You can’t keep up with everyone and everything in the same way as you did when the team was small. To maintain the high level of impact you’ve always had, your ways of working need to change.

The good news is, there are a few principles and laws that have emerged from social science and project management — like Conway’s Law, Dunbar’s Number, and Brooks’ Law — that can help inform your growth. The truths revealed by these principles about team dynamics and system design point the way to better outcomes and more team satisfaction.