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Context from the book: bringing on new workers has a one time cost of bringing them up to speed and an ongoing cost in synchronization / communications complexity. General consensus, try to assign the optimal number of humans to as specific a task as possible and shard / divide and conqueror the tasks to minimize the headcount per task.

He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? The GP to me seemed to imply that.

>He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he?

No you are totally right, it was just about that you then waste even more time to introduce those people to the project then it will save you time.

Yep, and in general more time on communication and coordination overhead -- ongoing, not just for the period of introduction -- the more people you have involved.

While I find this a very insightful and important observation -- I'm not sure I see much relevance to current tech layoffs.

More about Brooks’ Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law