Re Twitter: Ancient wisdom (1975) about human side from a software manager

[Bernardo de La Paz]

I remembered this, thinking about Musk's demand for Herculean efforts from abused workers.

What is happening is he is slashing his workforce to a half or a quarter of what it was, while driving his primary customers away (advertisers).

How to get his customers back? Keep eyeballs engaged reading/watching tweets.

Problem: Egoloon can only keep his high traffic numbers while he is the center of attention.

Solution: Create fascinating engaging interactivity.

Problem: Many have tried with great resources. (Is Meta a success yet?)

Solution: Create many attempts and throw them against the wall like ketchup at merd-a-loco and see what sticks. Since he has broken the social trust on Twitter, it is all he has left to do and it's a nerdy thing to do.

Problem: Musk will soon find he has to suddenly hire more workers, more engineers or hire back at enormous cost.



Result? It won't work, even if he is able to hire/rehire masses of engineers.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law

Brooks' law is an observation about software project management according to which adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer.[1][2] It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. According to Brooks, under certain conditions, an incremental person when added to a project makes it take more, not less time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Brooks wrote the book, in 1975.
I bought it and read it decades ago.
It has wisdom.

I memorize the law as "To make a late project later, add people."

1. People take time to get up to speed on a project they haven't seen before or on their own project after it has been mangled by a mollusk.

2. Inter-communication and meetings and decision making multiplies at a greater rate than the rate of adding people.

3. Adding more people to a highly divisible task, such as cleaning rooms in a hotel, decreases the overall task duration (up to the point where additional workers get in each other's way). However, other tasks including many specialties in software projects are less divisible; Brooks points out this limited divisibility with another example: while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month".

Musk broke Twitter's social contract so that he could forge a new one. But he has limited time and there are, before, now, and later, many funded and eager competitors, some of them open systems.

I think he will fail.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Presumably, you bring this up because Fred Brooks died yesterday

Fred Brooks, RIP

It’s fitting that the mass exodus of Twitter engineers coincided with the death of Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month. There is no more influential book about software engineering, and I really can’t say enough about how Brooks influenced my thinking about my chosen profession. The key insight that everyone repeats from the book is that adding engineers to a project won’t make it go faster, and might make it go slower. For me, though, one of the big lessons from the book is how Brooks takes an obvious fact — some engineers are far, far more productive than others — and tries to use that insight as a basis to form software teams. Brooks used the analogy of the “surgical team” where one surgeon (the best engineer) performs the most critical work, to try to leverage this disparity in ability.

https://balloon-juice.com/2022/11/18/fred-brooks-rip/

Link to tweet

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for alerting me. I hadn't looked at the Wiki bio page either. . . . nt

[Hermit-The-Prog]

3. If Egoloon has heard of The Mythical Man-Month, he will assume he's above it.

"Egoloon" is an excellent moniker for him.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Thanks! I coined it myself

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217351151

[GoneOffShore]

4. Thank you for pointing me towards Fred Brooks - And for Egoloon - Yet another moniker for Mollusk