The Panic Hire
It is the most natural instinct in business. If you need to dig a ditch and you are behind schedule, you hire more diggers. Two people can dig a ditch twice as fast as one. Labor is interchangeable.
Managers assume coding is like digging ditches. It is not. Coding is like performing surgery.
In his 1975 classic The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks observed a phenomenon that plagues the tech industry to this day: The “Rescue” Paradox. When a project is late, adding fresh bodies to the team actually pushes the delivery date further out.
The Math of Mess
Why does this happen? Brooks identified two silent killers.
1. The Education Tax Software is context-heavy. A new developer cannot just “start coding.” They need to set up their environment, understand the architecture, and learn the business logic. Who teaches them? Your best developers. The people who were writing code are now spending 4 hours a day mentoring the new hires. Result: Total team velocity drops immediately.
2. The Communication Explosion (Combinatorial Growth) This is the math part. If you have a team of 2 people, there is 1 communication channel. If you have 5 people, there are 10 channels. If you have 10 people, there are 45 channels.
The formula is:
Channels=n(n−1)/2
Every new person you add creates a web of new relationships that need to be managed, synchronized, and aligned. Eventually, the team spends more time coordinating (meetings, Slack, standups) than actually building.
When Brooks’ Law Doesn’t Apply
To be a nuanced PM, you must know the exception. Brooks’ Law applies to Complex, Interconnected Tasks (like building a core software engine). It does not apply to Partitionable Tasks (like manual data entry or QA testing). If the work can be perfectly isolated (e.g., “You paint this wall, I will paint that wall”), you can add people to speed it up. But software is rarely that clean.
The PM Solution: Cut, Don’t Add
If your project is late, you have only three levers:
- Time: Move the deadline (Executives hate this).
- Resources: Add people (Brooks’ Law says this fails).
- Scope: Cut features (This is the only way).
The courageous PM doesn’t ask for more budget. They ask for a machete. “We are late. We cannot launch with A, B, and C. We are launching with A. We will ship B next month.”
Conclusion
You cannot force a baby to be born in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Respect the incubation period. Protect your team from “help.”