Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager

Victims of Your Own Success

If you’ve ever worked in a small company that has grown into a big company, then you may have experienced the feeling that things have slowed down as you’ve gotten bigger: the time it takes to make decisions, the time it takes to ship new features, and the time it takes to merge code and for it to be deployed to production.

The Mythical Man Month [Bro95] had this covered way back in 1975 with a concept that became known as Brooks’ Law: that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” In fact, this observation can be made more general, insofar that adding more personpower to a team, department, or company makes everything more complicated. Knowledge work cannot be easily split into discrete tasks: ...