For those of you admiring my sweater it was bought for me by my daughter and is from the Nottingham-based Paul Smith men's fashion house. Not as famous a name as Ralph Lauren (say) but Nottingham is very proud of Sir Paul (as he now is)

There's also Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Another day of Professor Brailsford, casually blessing the internet.

I have a coworker who, instead of performing a 5 minute task, will spend 5 minutes explaining it to someone else to have them do it. Doubling the manpower used has tripled the manhours needed to complete the task.

It's not just team intercommunication. You are forgetting the managerial overhead - the push to have so many subordinates, middle managers, more middle managers.... limit their staff count (unless more levels of managers are inserted), etc. "Oh you can't possibly manager more than N people because we'd have to give you a pay raise.... we now have to get another manager..." An entire push for more people that's got nothing to do with solving the programming problem. Managers managing managers. The curve does indeed start to climb again as overhead becomes THE issue.

"Non-partitionable task" is now in my explanatory vocabulary when interacting with unrealistic management.

After women's day, comes man month

I can't believe I misread it and this wasn't about the mythical Man-Moth.

"Adding more manpower to a late project makes it more late"

"Man moth?" - Karl Pilkington

I read "The Mythical Man-Month" in just one hour by paying an offshoring company to have each page read by a different person.

I've been in industry nearly 20 years and time and again I've had to say: "9 women cannot have a baby in 1 month."

The way I'm most familiar with putting it is "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

I ran into the mythical man month problem at my previous job. Upper management decided to add a bunch of offshore developers to the team, thinking it would make us so much more efficient because we'd be staffed almost around the clock. The time zone difference of close to 12 hours made communication incredibly difficult. We couldn't effectively collaborate with each other because any meetings had to take place during some people's off hours. Getting email responses from the offshore people would almost always take until the next day. The people we hired were great workers, but we couldn't simply hand off tasks to them at the end of the day. An effective hand off would require a lengthy real-time conversation about the details.

Perfect explanation of something I've had to communicate to management too many times in IT over the past 30 years. I was once offered an entire team to do something in one month, and I told them it would take a year, regardless. They gave the project to another senior engineer, and it didn't take a year; It took a year and a half.

Ah, that beginning section triggered some memories. :)

"You're a dial up connection I'm a gigabit lan. I'm a mythical man month you're a one minute man"

This principle has been known since prehistoric times.

The biggest point of confusion which still percolates all businesses today:

I had the privilege of taking "A Personal History of Computing" from Professor Brooks when I was a university student (probably 2013, but I don't remember for sure). It was basically an hour of him telling stories of his life every Friday for a semester. I wish I could remember more than I do, but I do remember that a lot of it was fascinating to hear!