The mythical man month is another impossible beast.
I hate firefighters–people who commit a project to disaster. “Leaders” sometimes think that if one woman can have a baby in 9 months, then surely 9 women can have a baby in one month. Those leaders/firefighters create career death marches for their subordinates and coworkers. Too often they are rewarded for being able to get so many hours out of their team.
The Mythical Man Month is a great book about the fallacy that projects can be infinitely divided and finished sooner.
To increase productivity on a 2 person project by 50%, you have to add 2 more people. Adding one more person does little. More time is spent communicating and coordinating than the person adds to the project.
A 9 month project with 7 solid, committed, experienced programmers will take as long to complete as the same project with 25 engineers, a manager and 4 team leaders. Why? Because communication becomes a major burden in a large project.
One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. (Elbert Hubbard)
In any complex project, adding people in the last month rarely speeds things up. The folks who can finish the project have to train the new people, supervise them, and check their work. The experienced people lose all productivity and the new workers are marginal no matter how strong their background.
In your job do you know how people really work together? Do you know the cost to productivity of adding more people to a project?
For your job search
Are you making your job search more complicated than it needs to be? Are you dooming your search with lots of undirected activity?
Are you spreading your search efforts so broadly that you are depending on luck? Contacting 500 recruiters is rarely as productive as closely working with one or two or ten. Spamming 1000 companies is not as effective as calling 10 managers who may be able to use you or refer you. Networking with 5 CEO’s or Directors beats lunch with 50 production line workers.
What really gets more done?
Something To Do Today
Find a copy of The Mythical Man Month. It is a classic.
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More firefighting problems: The Elmer Fudd job hunt
Doctor No
Dead fish
Poisons
Liars
The incredible strength of weak connections
And later: How to work a convention