[locallost]

Amdahl's law says something similar, adding more processors to a problem eventually gives almost no speedup because parts of the problem cannot be parallelized and need to be done sequentially.

To the people wondering the meaning of the article, it's I think this.

[CyberDildonics]

amdahl's law is trivial tautological nonsense and has nothing to do with the mythical man month.

The mythical man month is about communication between people and the amount of work to be productive in a project. It's about people colliding with programming.

It has nothing to do with a vague statement that "eventually" you have diminishing returns on processors (of course there is some limit even though different tasks could be many orders of magnitude apart).

[locallost]

Amdahl's law states diminishing returns are because some processes cannot be parallelized, thus eventually they become the bottleneck.

For Brooks the communication between people starts to dominate the time spent the more people you add, so it will eventually become the bottleneck.

For me it's an interesting parallel. Feel free to come up with your own conclusions.

[CyberDildonics]

thus eventually they become the bottleneck

It's completely obvious and the "eventually" is where anything interesting happens. This comes from the early days of computers which is why something trivial became a supposed insight.

For Brooks the communication between people starts to dominate the time spent the more people you add, so it will eventually become the bottleneck.

Not just the communication between people while working in general but the communication to get someone involved in the project weighing down the people who would be making progress.

Feel free to come up with your own conclusions.

I did come up with own conclusion, the only similarity is the word bottleneck.

[locallost]

You try to speed up work by parallelizing, either by adding more machines or more humans. Seems pretty similar.

[CyberDildonics]

It might seem obvious if you don't think about it much, but one is a pragmatic breakdown from experience and one just says "adding cpus won't work forever if there is some part where you can't add more cpus".

One is basically 1 + 1 = 2 and the other is a warning of a non obvious situation that comes from lots of experience and effort.

[locallost]

It's still an interesting parallel, but that might be not be of interest if you're trying hard to be the middle guy from the bell curve meme.