[jarrett]

For anyone who's unfamiliar with the term "Mythical Man Month," it's the title of a book which argues, amongst other things, that assigning more engineers to a late software project will make it even later.

The book can argue more convincingly and thoroughly than I can, but briefly: When new engineers join a project, they have to spend a lot of time familiarizing themselves with it, so they're not productive for a while. They take time away from the project's original engineers by asking a lot of questions, which actually means progress slows down.

Further, more people means more complexity to manage. There will be more miscommunication, more instances of engineers' work conflicting with other engineers' work, more differences in coding style, etc.. With more than 200 people on a project, I can only imagine the nightmares.

I'm not familiar with the F-35 codebase. But I have a hard time imagining it could benefit from 200+ people working on it simultaneously.

I'm also skeptical about this idea of 24/7 shiftwork. Will each person will have their own little piece of the codebase that nobody else touches? If so, then why have a nightshift? Why not just have everyone work in the day, since it's all in parallel anyway? If not, how in the world can you have engineer A coding a given module on the dayshift, who then hands it off to engineer B on the nightshift? Software is not like laying bricks. You can't just come on the next shift and pick up where the last person left off. You lose all the context they had in their heads while coding, which is absolutely essential.

[john_b]

Frequently aerospace companies will have a limited number of licenses for various pieces of software. C++ as a language obviously doesn't have this limitation, but a limited number of licenses for various custom test suites and third party software (e.g. Matlab) is frequently a bottleneck. If this is a bottleneck, it makes sense to have these licenses in use 24/7.

Purchasing more licenses is always an option, but usually not a quick one.

[TheCondor]

Maybe it's really obvious, I mean it should be, but Lockheed clearly isn't much of a software company.

Office space and third party software licenses mandating a 24 hour work cycle for the most expensive defense project of all time?! Maybe it should not be surprising. Their peers seem to just appropriate rights and constitutional interpretation to meet their needs, can't these guys just appropriate more matlab or whatever compiler it is licenses? Just seems like it is being treated like a manufacturing problem.

This same class of folks who are making these decisions are all contracting for NSA and have access to your data to keep us all safe...

[jarrett]

Good point. It does make me wonder though: Does the time and money cost of purchasing more licenses outweigh the effect on employee morale resulting from night shifts?

[jfb]

Fascinating, thanks for the insight.

[outworlder]

> I'm also skeptical about this idea of 24/7 shiftwork. Will each person will have their own little piece of the codebase that nobody else touches? If so, then why have a nightshift? Why not just have everyone work in the day, since it's all in parallel anyway?

Because that way you can fit more people in the same facility? Otherwise, it will be unused for 8 hours each day (being optimistic).

[jarrett]

So they're running low on office space? That's a bottleneck for the F-35?

[jfb]

Why not? It's not like they can just go down to the local HackerNinjaRockStar DojoSpace and rent some Ikea standing desks. At Apple, for instance, there are sealed buildings and security requirements that impose a cost on expansion above espresso machines and foosball tables -- and they're not required to meet DoD legal standards.

[jarrett]

This is probably true. Still, it seems like a red flag to me that on a project like the F-35, which presumably has adequate funding for office space and other such things, their only solution for providing offices for their own employees is night shifts.

There's a very good reason not to have engineers work nights. While some are undoubtedly night owls, many (most?) will have lives and families which will suffer from night shifts. That accelerates burnout and increases resentment--both of which are usually running high in a troubled project anyway.

[jfb]

Oh, the project seems certain to be a total clusterfuck; it's just not 100% surprising that they could be gated on physical space.