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Comment by e1ven | Hacker News Reader

They can't just throw more random people at the problem - Adding too many developers can slow projects down and make them less likely to work. (9 women can't make a baby in a month, and all that..)

The guy this post is about just came from Google, where he lead on the stuff you're praising. He can push these efforts in the right direction, and help make other strategic hires..

Isn't this exactly what you want?

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9 women can't make a baby in a month but 9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months instead of 1 woman making 1 in 9 months.

More people can work on more/different things in the same period of time, thereby increasing total work done. (Parallel vs sequential and all that..)

9 women cannot make 9 babies in 1 month nor 1 women can make 1 baby in 1 month. no concurrency in baby making for sure.

There is some potential concurrency: a woman can produce two or more babies in 9 months, although it is uncommon.

the process is not concurrent. it is still parallel.

Unless the child processes have different fathers, which can and does occasionally happen.

Let's say you have a project with 9 parts. Each part will take ~9 months to complete.

If you take 9 people and give them each one part it will take ~9 months to complete.

If you take one person it will take ~81 months as they need to finish each part before they can go onto the next one.

Sorry, but is there some kind evidence that Giannandeea is incabale of the strategy and logistics needed to manage multiple projects in parallel?

Sure, but then you try to make the children be playmates, and only 3 might work for a while, 1 might be a jerk that hurts the others; and 5 years down the road, you move anyway, so you only have 1 baby.

^ Sticking to the analogy when it comes to integrating into business; competing products, and which one actually maintains adoption.

9 babies in 9 months is basically what Google has done with its messaging apps.

Off topic question: is there a word or phrase for this conversation?

Something to describe arguing about the issue at hand completely through the metaphor and not directly referring to the issue at hand.

The word is pretty much analogy and counter analogy.

See this wikipedia article that discusses it in the context of logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_analogy

"Hackernewsing"

Darmoking?

This example took a life of its own.

Just wanted to clarify an irrelevant point to this discussion - Length of the pregnancy isn't 9 months.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777570/

But those 9 women don’t need to coordinate, each one will merrily go along with her task alone. So let’s keep the metaphor as used originally, it doesn’t extend further

Someone read The Mythical Man Month. :)

Lol beat me to it. Number of ppl in our industry who don’t seem to be aware of the Brooks’ Law never siezes to amaze me.

I've always found the mythical-man-month thing to be completely at odds with reality. Cities and ant colonies work because they use sophisticated collaboration technologies instead of top down rigid hierarchies. But maybe I'm wrong and there is a better explanation for NYC.

The "Mythical Man Month" was specifically about challenges in software development with humans, so comparisons to cities and ant colonies aren't all that helpful. It is not a general purpose rule to be applied to any task that can be performed by n+1 people or ants, purely an observation on the nature of software development. I think many of us can likely attest to its frequent validity in that domain, even if it doesn't ring true in others.

> sophisticated collaboration technologies instead of top down rigid hierarchies

Let me know when you find sophisticated collaboration technologies working beyond a team of say, 5-10.

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