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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

Deliver faster? Find 9 women for a baby in one month.

Sales is trivially parallelized, engineering is not.

Even the post acknowledges that it's not really true of sales either. Maybe if your sales is about cold calling prospects, just amping up the rate of contacting people has some correlation to closed deals. Of maybe expanding geography does with B2B sales. But things like building channels, digital marketing, field enablement/training, doing planning for major accounts, managing the whole process etc. are often a lot more important than just adding warm bodies.

Expected Anti-Pattern #1 - Engineers will trivialize other's contributions to the process and consider it "trivially something."

That analogy always bothers me, because you absolutely can increase throughput in your ..'business' with more women; an established ..'pipeline' of 9 women will produce one baby every month.

(There might be an off by one error there if you want to take it too literally; even aside from the variation in gestation period. Point is it is a parallelisable task, whereas the whole point of MMM is to argue that it's not parallelisable, that you can't increase throughput with more resources.)

Great if you can wait 9 months for the pipeline to start producing babies, but the analogy is if you want the first one in a month.

And it isn't just the first "baby". What if you decide to pivot your animal production pipeline from horses to cows? In software development, unfinished work set aside to start from scratch is worthless and it doesn't even allow you to recover some capital by selling replaced animals.

I said 'an established' pipeline. I don't believe the analogy is ever used in the 'you want the first one in a month' way, because there's myriad other ways to say it's idiotic to just go out hiring if you need something done stat.

(Primarily: short-term, hires will reduce productivity, because established colleagues see an increase in the amount of support & knowledge-sharing they need to do, reducing their output by more than the new hire can yet offer.)

"If I buy you another copy of the mythical man-month, will you be able to read it twice as fast?"

That's a waste of money: simply rip all the pages out of the book and lay them out separately on a flat surface somewhere. Then I can read half the book at once, flip all the pages over, and read the other half. Easy.

Pfft, read? Just take a picture of all the pages laid out and feed it to AI. Boom, that's productivity baby! You don't even need to ask follow-up questions as accuracy and usefulness are irrelevant. How could you judge anyway, you didn't read that damn book!

If you have two copies, following that logic, you can then actually read it twice as fast!

Yes I thought of that but my method allows us to drive down latencies significantly, while keeping costs about the same overall. If we want to get them as low as possible though, as you say we could still benefit from having two copies. Not only do we get greater concurrency, we also can skip the step where we flip all the pages - so it's even better than twice as fast, actually.

We could even get the best of both worlds by laying the pages out on a clear surface, putting a camera on the other side, and hooking one of my eyes up to a feed of that camera. That would require some custom hardware and a little more up-front cost, though. We can look into whether that's cheaper than just buying another book.

Either method is a huge improvement on this "read two pages at a time" business, in any case.

If only there was an audiobook - listen to it at 2x speed. :^)

Here is a ten minute summary: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6EwppFDqNNyXIFZqbbITvt

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