Which leads us back to Brooks. When he tried to figure out why adding more people to a project made it take longer, he discovered two reasons. The first is the time it takes to bring people up to speed. As you’d expect, bringing a new person up to speed slows down everyone else. The second reason has to do not only with how we think but, quite literally, with what our brains are capable of thinking. The number of communication channels increases dramatically with the number of people, and our brains just can’t handle it.
