In 1975, a software engineer named Fred Brooks published a management book that described the inherent difficulty of scaling technology companies. He called it The Mythical Man-Month, and the title gestured at a simple insight: more manpower doesn’t mean faster output.
Put simply, scaling the output of a software team is completely different from increasing the output of workers at a widget factory. Ten more workers gets you ten more widgets. But ten times more capital and ten times the number of programmers does not get you ten times more lines of code.
Brooks knew this from experience. Working on IBM’s 360 mainframe operating system project, he watched software organizations collapse under their own complexity. Every new worker contributed exponentially to communication costs. New people needed training, and ramp-up time means they are slow to produce. Existing workers had to stop what they were doing to train the newcomers — a double whammy that compounded with every new hire.
