The Mythical Man-Month Quotes

“Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, hustle, as an essential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too.”
― Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“As time passes, the system becomes less and less well-ordered. Sooner or later the fixing cease to gain any ground. Each forward step is matched by a backward one. Although in principle usable forever, the system has worn out as a base for progress. ...A brand-new, from-the-ground-up redesign is necessary.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“The challenge and the mission are to find real solutions to real problems on actual schedules with available resources.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“By documenting a design, the designer exposes himself to the criticisms of everyone, and he must be able to defend everything he writes. If the organizational structure is threatening in any way, nothing is going to be documented until it is completely defensible.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them (Fig. 2.1). This is true of reaping wheat or picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer has two choices—wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the same choices. The cook has another choice; he can turn up the heat. The result is often an omelette nothing can save—burned in one part, raw in another.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.”
― Frederick Phillips Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“In fact, flow charting is more preached than practiced. I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“To only a fraction of the human race does God give the privilege of earning one's bread doing what one would have gladly pursued free, for passion. I am very thankful.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Organizations must be designed around the people available; not people fitted into pure-theory organizations.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Peopleware. A major contribution during recent years has been DeMarco and Lister's 1987 book, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Its underlying thesis is that "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature." It abounds with gems such as, "The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work." It deals with such mundane topics as space, furniture, team meals together. DeMarco and Lister provide real data from their Coding War Games that show stunning correlation between performances of programmers from the same organization, and between workplace characteristics and both productivity and defect levels. The top performers' space is quieter, more private, better protected against interruption, and there is more of it. . . . Does it really matter to you . . . whether quiet, space, and privacy help your current people to do better work or [alternatively] help you to attract and keep better people?[19]”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Especially noteworthy is his comment that new people added late in a development project must be team players willing to pitch in and work within the process, and not attempt to alter or improve the process itself!”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, cleaner, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Reducing the role conflict. The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering