The Mythical Man-Month

The Pleasures and Challenges of Programming

Why do people enjoy programming? They like making things, especially useful things. They savor the complexity of it all, and the learning that comes with it. They appreciate the joy of “working in such a tractable medium.” Like poets, programmers work with almost pure thought. But unlike poets, programmers’ thoughts create real changes in the physical world. Like magicians, programmers must perform their craft perfectly – and, yet, any program always has countless bugs. Moreover, anytime you create a good working program, you know it is doomed to become obsolete soon, as technology advances and new programs emerge.

“Large-system programming” involves special complexities, but “programmers are optimists” and assume everything will work out well. Further, people have a common, fundamental misunderstanding of how work works. The metric called a “man-month,” which measures time by how many people are needed for how many months to complete a task, makes dangerous, faulty assumptions. It posits that “men and months are interchangeable” – that is, that project managers can divide work perfectly, that anyone can do any job and that...