The Mythical Man-Month: Why 9 Women Can't Make a Baby in a Month

Remember the old joke: "If a project is late, just add more people — and it'll become even later and even more expensive"? Frederick Brooks captured this in 1975 in "The Mythical Man-Month". And although nearly half a century has passed, many managers still believe 9 women can produce a baby in one month. Spoiler: they can't.

The Essence of Brooks's Law

Brooks argued that adding manpower to a late project only delays it further. Why? First, new people need to be ramped up — which distracts those who already know the ropes. Second, communication grows non-linearly: with N developers, the number of communication channels is N*(N-1)/2. So instead of writing code, the team holds meetings. Sound familiar?

Why It Still Matters

Modern management methods — Agile, Scrum, Kanban — are supposed to tackle this. But how many times have you seen a scrum master add another developer to a sprint because "the backlog is huge"? The result: the codebase turns into a mess, and CI/CD fails more often than your morning coffee spills.

What to Do Instead

Brooks suggested rethinking the approach: find bottlenecks, automate routine tasks, improve architecture. And yes, sometimes it's better to cut features than to hire five more juniors who'll get lost in the legacy. As they say, "it's not about the number of lines of code, it's about the number of brain cells that understand them."

METABYTE studio's comment: We run our projects so that the team doesn't grow to battalion size, and all communication fits in a single chat without 47 threads. If your project is starting to resemble the Tower of Babel — maybe it's time to reassemble the team, not add more floors?