"Mythical Man-Month" Supposedly Busted By MIT Startup

An anonymous reader writes "We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done and quadrupling its productivity."

Comments

Nope

[igny]

A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth,

No they didn't. The communication cost remained O(n^2), they just improved the constant multiplier, not the order. To actually bust the MM theory, they should have quadrupled a couple times more, and see whether the productivity going down the drain or is as scalable as they claim.

This is MIT, remember

[AdmiralXyz]

One thing I hear a lot from programmers, particularly programmers unhappy with their Pointy Haired-Bosses, is, "I don't need to be managed as much as my bosses think I do!", and then pointing to a place like Google- which has one of the lowest managers-per-programmer ratios in the industry yet still produces amazing products- as an example.

The thing is, though, Google gets away with this because they hire the best of the best, and the best of the best can manage themselves pretty well. Most programmers are nowhere near as talented as the ones working at Google, they're the ones who need to be supervised. Managers are for programmers who write code that ends up on The Daily WTF, which is many of them.

I suspect that's what's going on here. Of course a bunch of MIT students can just hop on a project and be productive, that's why they're going to MIT. This result does not apply to the world at large.

Having said that though, I bet some of the techniques they used would apply to the world at large. I for one am going to see what I can learn from this with regards to getting people up-to-speed on new projects.

Disappointing

[Tracy Reed]

I have been a slashdot reader since darn near the beginning (see uid). And I finally have to admit that the quality of information here has seriously gone downhill. As everyone else has rightly pointed out, the article is bogus. They didn't break Brooke's law.

Just yesterday a server I administer which runs a very non-optimized PHP and graphics and database heavy site was linked in a story on the front page. The server barely noticed the load. A hit every other second or so. And it was a direct link, no coral caching or whatever. I remember a day when slashdot had enough readers to utterly destroy a single server. It looks like a lot of people have taken off. If this continues I may have to take off too. As it is reddit, hackernews, and many other tech news sites with superior content in my rss feed are competing with slashdot for my eyeballs. I may finally have to trim slashdot from the list if this keeps up.

Re:!MMM

[Mr. Droopy Drawers]

I wish I had mod points. This needs to be modded up.

I work for a large FW company and we host interns regularly. I am always surprised (shouldn't be) at what passes for projects assigned to them. I participated in a code review for one of these. Nothing prepared me for the abomination of code I encountered.

Now, 6 months past, I noticed another team deployed that code in their group and is coming back to our team to fix it since it originated from our group.

Smart ne Experience. This article was short on detail but long on dumping on Mr. Brooks. I think they need to (re)read his book.