The Mythical Man-Month

I find that programmers seem better at coordinating work and communicating about work compared to other fields that I have experience with. The work is organized in a much more humane way than the email inbox driven hyper-active hive-mind model of other office workers so vividly described in Cal Newport’s in “A World Without Email”. In fact, programmers seem to already be living in that future utopia of an emailless world. How did it get to be this way? I think this book may have played a major role.

Despite being only a few years removed from computer programs consisting of stacks of cards, high level languages being a new thing compared to assembly language, and changesets being distributed via microfilm, this book, originally published in 1975, outlines a way of developing software that resonates today:

In “The Surgical Team” Brooks outlines the roles required in a software development shop: The surgeon/copilot (product development), the administrator (project management), the toolsmith (dev-ops), and the tester (QA).

In “Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail”, Brooks advocates for a “Project Workbook” with features that today are available in tools such as Jira and Github.

The idea of developing a MVP and iterating on it is the topic of “Plan to Throw One Away”.

“The Other Face” advocates for writing self-documenting code with meaningful names, formatting, and comments. These ideas are greatly expanded on in Clean Code by Robert C. Martin.

That said I would not recommend this book for someone just wanting to get up to speed on these topics. For one thing, I found the outdated language distracting; as the title suggests, every programmer in this book is a “man.” Much of the book is spent discussing obsolete software and hardware systems. But as a fascinating time capsule into the history of computing and the development of the practice of programming it is worth a read and still offers relevant lessons 48 years later.