The Mythical Man-Month: a collection of informative and arduous essays

The Mythical Man-Month (1975)- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (322 pages)

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a collection of essays that focuses on engineering and project management. Today, it is thought of as the seminal work for product management. As I mentioned in my first article, I work in product so my boss recommended I read this collection to further my product management knowledge. For those not aware, product managers manage a team of developers essentially instructing them on what to build. This book focuses on the difficulties of creating software, strategies to improve efficiencies, and analysis of overall team communication. While this work focuses on software it can absolutely be useful in any case where someone has to manage people, some chapters focus on software specifically but most can simply be viewed as management principles.

The writing style of Brooks can be fairly technical. Fred Brooks, the author, was an engineer and managed some of the early Intel software projects. When reading you can definitely tell he is an engineer as he explains certain technical issues and some chapters can go into long tangents such as coding best practices. Many of the software projects he mentions and worked on I wasn’t aware of at all either (note I’m in my 20s), so that can create a little confusion. Overall, I think the writing style can change significantly from chapter to chapter: some chapters are very technical while others are easy to understand chapters on management.

Every chapter focuses on a different primary theme and inside of each chapter Brooks provides tons of great insight for anyone managing a team. I don’t want to explain too many of the themes so I will focus on two: the mythical man-month and the importance of conceptual integrity. A man-month is simply the amount of work a single engineer can accomplish in one month. The mythical man-month concept briefly states that adding more engineers to a project does not necessarily make it finish sooner but rather can create serious delays. This is due to training, communication expansion, and resegmenting of tasks. If a project has one engineer and four man-months left it is simple to say just add 3 engineers and it will be done in a month. This is not the case and often can slow the work even more.

Secondly, the conceptual integrity of a project is vital. For a software project or an ad campaign or any other project, there must be a lead architect or director that makes sure that all components come together to create a cohesive and conceptually sound final output. Without someone patrolling the integrity of the product, it can become a mass of confusing dead-ends and uninformed logical statements. Only with an architect, or someone making sure the whole project blends together can you have a successful, useful, and easy-to-use end product.

Just like the overall writing style of the work, I found my enjoyment changing chapter to chapter. Some sections on the mythical man-month or the tar pit I found very interesting while others like sharp tools I found very technical and thus tough to read. Overall, I would say I found this work extremely informative, despite being written in 1975 I found a lot of my experiences in product management to ring true in this book but informative is different than enjoyable. Definitely a great read but I will not score it too high for enjoyment.

Brooks creates a very interesting analysis of project management that rings true today. I would recommend reading the anniversary edition, mine has a copyright of 1995, as Brooks analyzes many of his points again in the final chapter. In many cases, he states his arguments continue to be true but in some instances, he analyzes some major flaws in his original claims and provides further insight into the evolution of the software industry. In conclusion, I think Brooks’s collection is an extremely informative work but lacks great enjoyment.

As always, my scoring breakdown is below. Thanks for reading!

Score: 6- Packed with extremely useful management knowledge but can be dull at times.

Readability: 5- Depends on the chapter, sometimes easy-going other times filled with technical detail.

Thematic Questions: 9- Tons of great information on how to manage teams and communication lines.

Enjoyment: 4- Absolutely informative but not necessarily enjoyable.