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The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

4.04 · Rating details · 10,995 ratings · 725 reviews

Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive ...more

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Paperback, Anniversary Edition, 322 pages

Published August 2nd 1995 by Addison-Wesley Professional (first published 1975)

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Dec 09, 2009 Manny rated it it was amazing

Shelves: linguistics-and-philosophy

In this classic book on the software development process, Fred Brooks demolishes several persistent myths. They never quite go away: every new generation just has to learn them over again.

The first and most dangerous of these myths is the belief that putting more people on a project means it'll be completed more quickly. Brooks includes one of the most brilliant graphs I've ever seen, plotting number of women against time required to produce a baby. Would you believe it: the graph is flat at ni ...more

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Oct 17, 2016 David Bjelland rated it liked it

Shelves: cs-software

As far as I can tell, the core tenets of this book aren't really even up for dispute anymore. I don't mean to sound like the grumpy reader mentioned in the epilogue, complaining that the book offered "nothing I didn't know already know" (however experienced he might have been, I still doubt it), but whether from my limited experience in the industry first hand or second-hand through the various managers I've had over the years, the tenet that developers and time aren't interchangeable resources As far as I can tell, the core tenets of this book aren't really even up for dispute anymore. I don't mean to sound like the grumpy reader mentioned in the epilogue, complaining that the book offered "nothing I didn't know already know" (however experienced he might have been, I still doubt it), but whether from my limited experience in the industry first hand or second-hand through the various managers I've had over the years, the tenet that developers and time aren't interchangeable resources felt both familiar and self-evident. So, in a certain sense, I don't feel like I have any more business critiquing this as a book than I do "Relativity: The Special and General Theory." Still, another part of my brain is content to separate a critique of the book qua book from any kind of dispute with the actual arguments and share some petty little snipes that made this less enjoyable of a read than it could have been:

1) His stubborn refusal to ever acknowledge the reality of female programmers.

This frustrating trend starts with the title (what the hell is a "man"-month? Does your project need beards to get grown or code to get written?) and just never. Lets. Up. Except for a grammatically-necessary "she" when mentioning Frances Spence (on the final page!), I'm not sure that female pronouns show up once in this entire book. Sure, "they" didn't have the same legitimacy as a gender-neutral singular pronoun then that it does today, but this thing was reissued in 1995, a time when "they" might have been cutting edge, but "he or she" was standard practice even in elementary school grammar. It's not just developers either - system architects, managers, everyone on the "surgical team"; hell, even USERS, at least the ones with any amount of initiative in testing the limits of the software, are all male by default.

Wait, I just remembered - women DO come up. To paraphrase: "you can't make nine women pregnant and expect a baby in a month."

Ugh.

I'm sure this isn't a new point to make, and I'm sure he's responded with grace and candor about how the standard of writing he grew up with used male pronouns as a convenience to refer to EVERYONE, and of COURSE he's had the pleasure of working with plenty of competent, even visionary women throughout the years, and such and such and such. If making the original text even a little bit gender inclusive was an innocent oversight on Brooks' part, his editor for the reissue gets less of a free pass. Women code. As a courtesy to them, please update your grammar.

2) The gratuitous religious overtones

Don't get me wrong - I still vividly remember the almost spiritual ecstasy of that first day when I really "got" recursion, and I completely understand how someone might position the beauty of software design within their existing framework of spirituality, Christianity. Unfortunately, a consequence of building your whole cosmology around a being like the Western monotheistic God is that it necessarily consumes anything and everything else; it then becomes almost impossible to write about the beauty or nobility of some pursuit or principle except to the extent that it supposedly emanates from the nature of this supposed entity. A connection between good software design and Christian ideas of holiness pop up again and again, and they grate on me not just because they come across as a bit sanctimonious, but because oftentimes, the Christian lens actually distorts the content.

Two examples spring to mind: the first comes in the chapter "Aristocracy, Democracy, and System Design", which argues for conceptual integrity as the supreme virtue of a software system. I'll grant that the book predates all of the advances that made true open-source systems possible or the achievement of GNU/Linux to prove it was a viable model, but Brooks seems so wrapped up in the analogy of the God-like software architect that he never gives the heathen "bazaar" model fair consideration - the "cathedral" is self-evidently superior to anyone who sincerely believes the entire world represents a unified, intentional design by a single entity.

The second is in the chapter "Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail?", and my objection boils down to this: the Tower of Babel didn't fail because the builders "lacked organization and communication." It failed because an omnipotent being intervened to make it impossible to have organization and communication; this happened, in turn, because the Christian God (and especially the Old Testament God) is an angry, spiteful, and sometimes downright petty being, and that the organized human enterprise of building this tower represented a challenge to his authority. The interpretation Brooks chose to go with confuses proximate and final causes, which made it hard for me to buy any of what followed, no matter how legitimate the points themselves might have been. ...more

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Dec 05, 2015 Daria rated it it was ok

Except blatant sexism* it was a pretty good book. It's a series of experiences that you gradually pick up when you're working in the software industry. It's a little outdated, e.g. we don't have printed manuals anymore and we don't have to deal with the woes of constantly updating them, but a lot of wisdoms from this book are still valuable.

* the entire book never uses a female pronoun. ever. it makes it sound like engineers, managers, technical leads, clients are always only male. plus there's ...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Jan-Maat added it

Shelves: 20th-century, thinking, business-management-pm

Since what I know about programming probably could be written on the back of a postcard and wouldn't be worth reading there's nothing worthwhile that I can say about the software engineering side of this collection of essays about software engineering.

Further Brooks was writing in the 60s, in part based on experience from the 50s, which I suppose means I'll be making some claim to wider applicability with regard to project management & people management and understanding the nature of tasks.

I re ...more

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Apr 03, 2016 Pratul Kalia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I want to print many copies of this book.
I want to print many copies and roll them up.
I want to roll them up and take them to meetings with my clients.
I want to take them to meetings and hit them over the head repeatedly while screaming "more... than... 30... years... and you... still... don't... understand... anything... stop... making... me... write... bad... software...!"

Seriously.

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Apr 16, 2018 Brian Yahn rated it liked it

The Mythical Man-Month starts of strong--with a solid mix of good humor, great story-telling, and even better analogies and metaphors. Most interesting, the claims Frederick Brooks made more than 40 years ago remain true today. But even so, the book has not aged well.

Chapters 5-8 and 9-15 seem wildly out of date. I give some reasoning below, but the gist is that the middle is mostly skippable. Worse is that the religious overtones get a little out of hand in this section. And to make it even mor The Mythical Man-Month starts of strong--with a solid mix of good humor, great story-telling, and even better analogies and metaphors. Most interesting, the claims Frederick Brooks made more than 40 years ago remain true today. But even so, the book has not aged well.

Chapters 5-8 and 9-15 seem wildly out of date. I give some reasoning below, but the gist is that the middle is mostly skippable. Worse is that the religious overtones get a little out of hand in this section. And to make it even more obvious how out-dated it is, the sexism is rampant--where Brooks intentionally uses "he" for every pronoun. Granted, nearly all programmers were males at the time, so it's not like his usage is misleading. But reading it in this age, it feels like the book intends to be sexist.

Questionable pronoun usage aside, the first four chapters, chapter 7, and the final chapters are still really insightful. They mostly detail how and why software development costs so much (even today), and why adding more engineers to a project is unlikely to speed productivity linearly.

The key take-away is that the biggest problems in software development stem from 1) communication and organization, and 2) managing added complexity. In some ways, I think I always knew this. But the chapters articulated it very clearly and convincingly.

It makes me wonder why engineering interviews select so much for problem-solving and hardly at all for communication and organization skills, or the ability to manage growing complexity.

I'd highly recommend chapters 1-4, 7, and 16+. Here's a summary of why I'd skip the rest:

Chapter 5 can be summed up with Ernest Hemingway's famous quote: "The first draft of everything is shit." Brooks gives some detailed explanations about why the first draft of every program is shit, and how to prepare for that and design around it. Chapter 11 mostly re-iterates this.

Chapter 6 describes how cumbersome the OS/360 manual became. Although insightful--because of how laughably out of date it is--manuals have mostly been replaced with auto-generated websites. But back in the days of OS/360, when engineers first arrived at work, a stack of pages would be waiting at their desk. These pages represented the changes made to the system in the previous day, and the engineer was supposed to find the pages in the FIVE-FOOT-TALL manual and replace them with these new pages. Brooks chronicles the problems of maintaining such a manual, and how switching to a microfiche manual helped in some ways, but hindered in others.

Chapter 10 talks about important documents for a software organization. While these might hold relevance in a major enterprise-y setting, they seemed pretty out-of-place in a startup environment.

Chapter 13 explains the properties of a good testing framework, basically preaching the importance of unit tests and integration tests. This is taken for granted in the modern work-place as every company at least knows of the importance.

Chapter 14 similarly explains the importance of milestones, or major goals with clearly discernible and verifiable endpoints. Again, this is taken for granted in the modern work-place. Kanban, Agile, and every other Software Development Life Cycle mostly revolves around this.

Chapter 15 spells out the importance of documentation. But peering into the future, Brooks sees this becoming obsolete, admitting that newer languages of the time, like Ada, allowed for code to be almost human readable. Nowadays, code is human readable enough that most programmers prefer for code to be "self-documenting". It's always up for debate if the code written is in fact self-documenting. But the importance of documentation is constantly diminishing as languages become ever-more declarative, and systems are better and better designed. ...more

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Nov 01, 2009 Graham rated it really liked it

Shelves: computer-books

I read this book originally in college and then re-read it after a couple years of coding professionally. While there are certainly some dated sections, such as the idea of having the analog of a surgical team to code, many of the suggestions have held against the test of time.

The two most popular are "no silver bullets" and "adding developers to a late project makes it later." The former is that no new technology/technique will make an order of magnitude difference in productivity over 10 year I read this book originally in college and then re-read it after a couple years of coding professionally. While there are certainly some dated sections, such as the idea of having the analog of a surgical team to code, many of the suggestions have held against the test of time.

The two most popular are "no silver bullets" and "adding developers to a late project makes it later." The former is that no new technology/technique will make an order of magnitude difference in productivity over 10 years ago. This is especially important when dealing with vendors or the latest proselytizer of a language or process ideology. I find this is a nice complement to Robert Glass's opinion that the biggest difference in productive teams is the quality of the developers. The second is more self-explanatory. The ramp up cost of adding new developers exceeds the value they will deliver within a reasonable amount of time.

There are also less referenced lessons to be gleaned from the book. For example, long before Agile, this book eschewed waterfall development in favor of an iterative approach. My favorite lesson in the book is that of conceptual integrity. In essence this is how Brooks refers to the idea that a piece of software should do one thing well and if it tries to fit many roles it will be a poor fit for all of them, instead of a good fit for one. As an example, he cites several Cathedrals that took centuries to complete. The Cathedrals that fell victim to egotistical architects in the middle or later stages of construction are less aesthetically consistent and therefore appealing than those in which the original style was respected.

Brooks also recommends keeping two independent career tracks for developers. In many organizations developers are forced into management after a certain level. Brooks argues this is a mistake and that in many cases it is better to let some developers stay developers. This requires title and compensation parity with the management track.

While many of the technology specific examples are dated, Mythical Man Month is a recommended read for every developer. ...more

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Apr 10, 2017 Dorin rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I was underwhelmed with how badly this text has aged. The references, which made sense 15 years ago, no longer hold water, and the most-referenced-project is certainly no longer the way we write software nowadays. While the idea remains valid, I think people writing about this text are more relevant than the text itself, holding only historical value, at most.

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Dec 29, 2015 Matt Diephouse rated it liked it

I'm really surprised that people still recommend this book. It's primarily concerned with very large scale software projects (i.e., an operating system), much of the "data" is anecdotal, and many of the assumptions are simply outdated. For instance, Brooks writes about (1) creating paper manuals with documentation about the system that get updated daily for the engineers, (2) strategies for time-allocation on centralized computers, and (3) about optimizing for compiled code size. Those simply ar ...more

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May 09, 2019 Canan is currently reading it · review of another edition

en bilinen kısmı unutmuşum:) “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging.”

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Dec 06, 2018 Bill rated it it was amazing

Shelves: tech-lead, top-five-tech, software-delivery

I re-read this recently after recommending it to a colleague, mainly just for nostalgia and planning to read a few of the more popular essays, like "The Tar Pit." Instead I read the entire book again and still found it fresh and insightful, over 40 years since publication. The prose manages to be dense with ideas but brilliantly clear and often witty. Now as I read contemporary writing (blogs but even books), I deeply lament this lost art.

Aside from his bold statements, most famously Brooks' Law I re-read this recently after recommending it to a colleague, mainly just for nostalgia and planning to read a few of the more popular essays, like "The Tar Pit." Instead I read the entire book again and still found it fresh and insightful, over 40 years since publication. The prose manages to be dense with ideas but brilliantly clear and often witty. Now as I read contemporary writing (blogs but even books), I deeply lament this lost art.

Aside from his bold statements, most famously Brooks' Law, that have been cited to the point of cliche, what struck me most this time around is how much his enthusiasm for building systems and leading teams comes through. You'd expect a grizzled veteran of massive IBM projects to be somewhat jaded, but personally I found his descriptions of what builders love about building to be quite beautiful. If I am half as enamored with my craft at his age, I'll feel lucky.

IMHO this ranks right up alongside Peopleware and Psychology of Computer Programming as absolutely essential reading for technical leaders. The specific references, even from the 2oth anniversary section, are dated (MS Works fans out there?) but 80% of the points made haven't aged a day. If anything, the obsolete sections will be a sobering reminder that your Macbook is basically a supercomputer you can bring on the train for your own exclusive use. I'm so thankful I no longer have to worry about the size of my functions in memory and can use beautiful, interpreted languages like Ruby at web scale, for example to run this website ;-)

Some reviewers have noted the exclusionary language of only male pronouns. There were actually far more women programmers in 1975 (before the PC era), so I have to assume this is purely a stodgy style convention (and was not used in the 1995 add-on chapters). And yes there are some religious undertones scattered throughout but they didn't get in the way of the ideas for me.

Highly, highly recommended. A great book to read with your team to share war stories. ...more

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Apr 03, 2019 Nente rated it liked it

Shelves: read-original, nonfiction

This is more of historical importance than a go-to book nowadays. Still, I'm glad to have read it.

I agree with the points made in these two reviews, especially the ones about the default male programmer and the overextended Christian viewpoint, which actually makes Brooks misstate one of his examples.

Still, I loved the positive and realistic message of "There is no royal road, but there is a road." I can stand behind both parts of this one. ...more

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Aug 07, 2012 Philipp rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, programming

Interesting book with a pretty narrow focus, a collection of essays on the management and planning of good software engineering. The author instilled the mistakes and successes of his work on the IBM 360 Operating System in the 70s, and most of what he found still applies today. For example, wisdom like: more programmers make a project only late, and if you add programmers to an already late project, results will arrive even later. Have an architect and a manager, hopefully in two different pers ...more

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Oct 03, 2015 James Oden rated it it was ok

Shelves: computer

Many times when I read a book that is dated, its pearls of wisdom are still there in clear view to be harvested and made use of. I can't say the same thing about the Mythical Man Month. I will grant that Brook's Law still holds, and managers still today stumble over this one. However much of his advice fell flat in the face of the more recent agile development movement and still more recent devops movement. In the end he was still preaching a kind of waterfall type approach to development which ...more

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May 12, 2011 Megha rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

04/23/11

Dr. Brooks is the founder of our department, more than enough reason to read his book.

The recent extension to our department building was named after Dr. Brooks. Apparently the money for the building came as an anonymous donation from an alumnus, on the condition that it be named after Dr. Brooks. That is the kind of respect he has won from several people. ...more

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Feb 28, 2020 James rated it liked it

This book had some insightful ideas regarding software engineering practices, but a large portion of the book is no longer relevant.

The author dove into some specific details about situations that he had encountered, for example, practices involving developers planning how they would divide the debugging computers amongst themselves.

Modern machines can handle much more than computers could in the 70s, and this book needs an update to reflect that.

The main takeaways I got from this book are that ...more

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Apr 18, 2010 Mouly rated it it was amazing

* Estimating software project completion time is really hard. (Requirements change, software is intangible and it has to fit with idiosyncrasies of human systems)

* Aristocracy in managing projects is better. There should be one final decision maker. Metaphor is a surgical team.

* Cost of coordination and communication within large teams is often ignored. This causes poor estimation.

* If a project is delayed - rescheduling or reducing scope is recommended. Adding manpower will result in further de ...more

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Jan 31, 2016 Joan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Fascinating series of essays about building software and managing teams. Some bits really resonated, especially about the craft of software engineering. Brooks said that the hardest part about learning to program is adjusting to the necessity of perfection, which I think is still true today. He also had the most apt description of what it feels like to actually write code, and the differences between the essential work of building software and the "accidental" work imposed by poor tools, process ...more

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Jan 02, 2009 Tiago rated it it was amazing

I have read it as part of my PhD, since it's part of the classical books of software engineering. Yet the book tackles very important issues not only about management but how people interact during software development. I've recognised myself in many situations described by the author (even that I'm not part of a software development team).
One might wonder, as I did, how many of the concepts explained by the author apply to current technology of the 21st century, but the author tackles that in t ...more

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May 23, 2012 Senthil Kumaran rated it it was amazing

Shelves: computer-science

This is a master piece of software engineering. Many people have read this one because this one is an extremely approachable account. When I read this book in 2007, I felt how much of value this one book brought which was written more than 20 years ago brought even then. Since then, I have heard many people talk and swear by this book. I have one gripe against the readers and people who talk about this. They use this book to support their stances and most often these people do not possess the ki ...more

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May 14, 2016 Jim rated it it was amazing

Everybody should read this book, not just programmers or project managers. It's easy and fun. There are 9 chapters, but you only need to read 3 of them. You'll know which ones. When he starts slinging equations, skip over those parts. He uses cooking metaphors where most software books use building construction metaphors. The unconscious gender bias, typical of the time, is almost funny. He keeps saying how many "men" does it take to do a project.

I'm frequently surprised at how many software pro ...more

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Nov 07, 2011 Shyam rated it really liked it

Shelves: tech-books

Even for an inexperienced undergraduate student like me, this book made a lasting impression and left me pondering on the various human dynamics involved in software engineering. Definitely a must-read.

Warning: It does get a little dry at times, and most of the examples are very outdated,but the principles explained are timeless.

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Sep 12, 2017 John Mehrman rated it it was amazing

Originally written in 1975, prior to the PC explosion in the mid-1980s, Brooks book is still relevant today. The same systems management "rules-of-thumb" and potential pitfalls still exist in largely the same form. Many of his bigger lessons expand beyond just software development and apply to program management as a whole. A must read for anyone in that develops complex systems.

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May 28, 2017 ABC rated it it was amazing

I just leave my rating at here and dont say anyfuckinthing.

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Sep 15, 2018 Maria Ines Parnisari rated it it was ok

Shelves: it

Don't add people to a late software project or you'll make it later.

There, summarized the book for you.

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May 19, 2020 Regis Hattori rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: management

I love to read "old" books. The fact they were written a lot of time ago and are still relevant prove that it really worth reading them.

But I didn't like this book as much as I wanted to. Maybe because I had an expectation far from reality based on so many good reviews of a lot of people I admire. I know its content is still relevant today. But some parts are not. And some parts are still relevant but we need to "translate" to our days. And some parts have been better explained by other books li ...more

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Jan 09, 2020 Jeffrey rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: computers-and-tech

Dated, unapproachable, and in some ways misogynistic (systemic but unintentional I'm sure). I really understand why this is still the #2 most popular programming book on Safari Books Online (right after Clean Code).

Probably more than half the lessons and suggestions don't make sense in the modern world of high-level languages, agile software development, and continual development/release.

Other lessons are still widely applicable... so widely applicable that they're near-universal knowledge alrea ...more

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Mar 03, 2020 Marcin Jałbrzykowski rated it really liked it

Reading this book was time-travel for me. It's a pretty outdated book from nowaday perspective. That was amazing to read about totally different everyday problems like techniques and strategies of updating paper-based documentation.

Nevertheless, software engineers, architects, IT project managers, in spite of nowadays agile techniques and experience of previous generations, are still struggling with some problems like correct project estimations of time and cost. A lot of rules are still valid, ...more

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Jun 29, 2020 Ramanan Balakrishnan rated it liked it

Picked it up as it is often cited as one of the most popular books on software engineering. The slightly dated nature of the book (originally written more than 30 years) does come across in many sections.

Some portions of the text have now been made into legendary quotes ( Brook's Law adding manpower to a late software project makes it later ), but the rest of the book is probably hit-and-miss.

Also, the terminology used is different now, a software architect, as described by the book, is closer t ...more

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May 02, 2019 Thomas Dietert rated it it was amazing

In the context of this history of software engineering and management best practices for effectively building software systems and managing all sizes of projects and teams, this book is invaluable. I recommend every software engineer who is interested in building software systems at a meta-level (technical/social systems that help you build software systems), or wants to gain insight into these processes. Remarkably, only the specific methods and tools mentioned have changed since this book was ...more

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