this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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9 women can’t deliver a baby in 1 month
Feel like I have the same argument at work everyday. Some things just take a definitive time. 20 cooks won’t make a cake faster. Cooking that cake at 1000 degrees won’t make it faster. It will take the time it takes.
I get your point... But I feel like people in this thread doesn't know how cake making works...
20 people will make a single cake faster. Not 20x faster, but faster. There are multiple part of the work that can be divided out to different people. Like you can have one person make batter while other makes icing. Fancy cakes actually do take multiple people to make simultaneously.
*can make
20 people poorly setup or managed can fuck up 100 cakes in the time it took one person to just make one good cake too
20 cooks won't make 1 cake faster, but they sure as hell can cook 20 cakes at the same time!
As the meme goes
They can, but the babies are probably not gonna be fine.
Tell that to Apple
Some tasks are serializable other tasks are sequential.
A lot of game dev tasks are sequential, the code to do thing X has to be developed before feature Y can be implemented. And you can only have one dev working on one feature at a time, even version control has its limits.
It's not an argument it's an analogy, that can help understand the argument.
It's an argument about critical paths in a project. Also, is no-one going to credit "The Mythical Man Month" where this quote comes from?
You keep using that term, I don't think you know what that term means.
How is it a strawman to compare one set of serial tasks to another? Do you not understand what a strawman actually is? Can you elaborate on your logic?
It seems like both of your analogies are strawmen. Game development is likely to be not like pregnancy or moving stones, in terms of its ability to be sped up by adding manpower. It's obviously much more complicated than manual labour like moving stones, but not as immune to assistance as passively 'being pregnant'.
A metaphor is not a strawman.
Super, a super simple task you can throw more people at.
The cake one I like because it highlights that this is a complex task where more people are going to get in the way. If you throw 5 more people into baking a cake halfway through it's going to take 5 times as long because now you have to explain to them what you were doing, what your system is, how they should work together as a team. The overhead of adding them isn't worth it, and you'd probably just say "go stand over there I'll finish it"
Now, if you knew ahead of time you had an order for 50 cakes and you were given 5 people, now that's a completely different problem to solve. You now have a leader, tell this person is on mixing, this person is on frosting, etc etc.
So, in short, it's clear you aren't an engineer, and it's extremely clear you don't know what a strawman is
It's not even that more people get in the way. A cake, and a baby, and in some ways dev work, take a set amount of time under which you just can't do, or you get an undercooked baby, or a miscarried cake.
They could, but they wouldn't, they would organize their work to be more productive and achieve the stone moving faster.
Paraphrasing Proudhon's What Is Property :
Hiring 50 people to work on a project fundamentally changes the way the project is led compared to how it was by a single person, suddenly you will need additional workers to plan for the work to be done, to organize each task, to keep track of what's being done, and whatnot. Howard claimed there were 450 people working at Bethesda, and look at the state of Starfield ; Larian Studios allegedly grew from 100 to 400 people, and look at the state of Baldur's Gate 3 ; ZA/UM reported laying off 25% of their workforce, implying they were a team of 100, and look at the state of Disco Elysium (on release and/or Director's Cut, the ongoing legal battle is a whole other subject), it's a lot more complex that just numbers