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Comment by Merman_Mike | Hacker News Reader

> Hi, this is Michał Nowakowski – the second question; would having more developers help deliver the game on old-gens? In terms of delivering the game at a certain point, it’s really not about the number of people; it’s not like throwing in – in the last month – 200 or so people would actually help. So, the answer is no; this is not related to the fact that we could have thrown 300 or 500 more people into the fray and things would have happened differently.

This is interesting info for someone like me that doesn't work in this field. It's something that I can understand intuitively, but it's nice to see that confirmed.

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There is a maxim from the essay "The Mythical Man-Month" saying that adding people to a late software project makes it later.

It takes time for new people to become productive, communication becomes difficult and some tasks can't be "parallelized".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

Two copies of MMM is a great gag-ish gift to your manager on Christmas that i highly recommend.

Nine copies would be better, of course.

That wasn’t really the analyst’s question though. He wondered given the size and complexity of the game, should more people have been on the project from the ground floor (not added in the last month once they weren’t going to clear the bug tracker), or was it a organizational/management issue that they couldn’t get something good from the talent they had?

You are correct. I think that Nowakowski misunderstood the question, and assumed it's mainly about the delays.

I've come up with what I think is reasonably relateble analogy.

If I want to build a 1000 brick wall and it takes a bricklayer 1 sec to lay a brick will getting 1000 brick layers allow me to build the wall in 1 sec?

If you analyse this analogy you see where you might be able to get some scale, such as pipeline and starting on different parts, but it highlights challenges there such as alignment and communication.

Maybe the speedup is not linear, but thinking back to the hospital built in a few days in Wuhan, you can speed up building by employing lots of people.

A massive contributor to that would also be a lot of prefabrication. Which also fits well, if you can some how have much of construction standardised and ready to go. The brick was that what at a very granular level.

I think this can still relate to software in many ways as well.

Yeah it confirms the sort of teachings of the mythical man month.

The old adage is that 9 women cannot make a baby in a month,

The problem with that adage is that it assumes you want only one baby (which, to be fair, most people do, at least initially) :)

Nine women can't make two babies in a month either.

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