Maintaining focus is actually labor.
Adding more devs might not help with a late project, but it does help with building bigger systems. So, I disagree, software is extremely labor intensive work.
> Software is not labor-intensive. Not many people are necessary in order to produce good software.
Not many people are needed to produce 500gr of good rice. And lots of people are needed to produce something like all the software Google or MS maintains.
The specialty of software is the low cost of marginal products. This is the new thing here, not labour intensiveness.
> On the contrary, Brooks’s law on software project management states that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.
This has more to do with communication, collaboration and slowness of getting up to speed when joining a software project.
This is clearly visible in the HR requirements practices. Companies which have a confidence in their ability to manage the on-boarders' attention, tend to interview for communication rather than experience - those who haven't made the investment in attention-management techniques, such as great training, technical on-boarding routine, etc., tend to focus on experience over sociability.
>Brookes' law
I've found, with 30 years of experience in software development from both the trenches to management and back, that there is an aspect of this law which goes ignored - "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later, but adding documentation to a late software project makes it easier to add manpower.."
The better you document things so that strangers can understand them, the easier time you have on boarding strangers and getting them up to speed. This is a cultural mechanic, and alas is usually in the wrong persons' hands - i.e. HR, upper managements, etc. Technical people need to get this right for the true fire to burn ..
I think this is shared by all big engineering works.
> This is a cultural mechanic
I'd call this "structural" instead of "cultural", where I am of the opinion that culture is implicit and structure is explicit in nature.
I wonder how we came to such abject differences?
This stayed with me. I think I recently read a similar statement again in some text.
From what I understand, labor intensive means work that involves some sort of "physical" labor. How would you classify focus as a labor intensive work? An average individual can't maintain focus all the time. But an average individual can do physical work for long hours. The way our body works is different to way our mind works. Are you tired after hard physical labor? You just need some rest and good food. You can do physical labor even if your mind is not in the right place. Many workers in factories are so used to doing the same repetitive stuff (like packaging items in an assembly line or chopping vegetables for a high-paced restaurant) that they do it subconsciously. All they need to do is to get into a "zone".
But same can't be said about focus intensive work. You can do physical work without thinking. But can you code without thinking? There is nothing repetitive about coding. And if anything is repetitive we end up automating it.
Google has approximately 100,000 employees. Not nearly all of them are software engineers but, for the sake of this argument and to be generous, let's assume that they are.
Let's also be generous in assuming that only people in the US, and nowhere else, use it. That's about 330,000,000 users.
OTOH, the US army has approximately 1,300,000 service members and 800,000 reserves as well as approximately 330,000 civilians.
So (ignoring physical suitability) the potential labour power of the US army is approximately an order of magnitude greater than Google. Moreover, "labour intensive" usually means "people who go out to do physical things": the work scales with the number of hands you can bring to bear. Combat aside, military forces are often involved in work that requires lots of people to do things in "meatspace":
* Rescue operations * Medical assistance in impoverished areas * Food & humanitarian relief * Security at embassies and other locations * Policing in volatile areas * Natural disaster relief * Law enforcement * Piracy and drug interdiction
When the software engineers aren't busy thinking about software, they carry cups of tea between the kitchen and their desks (well I suppose they're probably thinking about programming then as well ;-)).
Finally, Google currently has a big operation, but like many startups, a pretty big product (the original search engine) was built by ~20 people. With those people they crawled almost every site on the web. If you wanted to go and read every document in every filing cabinet and index that then you'd need a labour intensive force bigger than the US army.
Here are the references I used:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273744/number-of-full-ti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Armed_Forces#Per...
https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/army-civilian-career...
https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/military-missions...