[righthand]

I was just discussing this yesterday. The only time when Mythical Man Month isn’t a problem is when C-suite/management needs to burn their budget up and projects are behind. Usually you’ll end with teams with too many juniors. The leads are only focused on the harder problems and dont have capacity to properly onboard juniors. So management hires contractors from Europe/Asia. The juniors offload their work and unknowns to contractors who are often also very unskilled.

This has been going on for a long time in tech. Now with LLMs you have a bunch of juniors who are unskilled and a bunch of management trying to fill the skilled spots with unskilled+LLM workers. The seniors are starting to become plagued with people who are excellent at being unskilled in the work place. They maintain shrewd hiring practices until the projects are behind enough and we arrive at the original need to hire contractors.

“Mythical Man Month” is just something people say to indicate status. No one is using it’s lessons in actuality otherwise we’d have to acknowledge over half the work force in software are a bunch of frauds delegating their work and decision making to others.