Or: Brooks' Law --- > _"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."_ > -Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law Among the countless sins of non-technical management is a failure to understand Brooks' Law. What is the source of this law? What makes it true of software, when it is so obviously false of other tasks, like moving bricks from one place to another? The origin of this law is a rarely spoken truth: _Software development is the least rote and repetitive discipline in all of human endeavor._ In any field of human endeavor, there is some amount of mindless repetitive work. Not so in software development. In software development, any repetitive task can be automated. The only tasks we don't automate are those not sufficiently painful to justify writing the code to automate them. Programming is unique among creative disciplines in that any sufficiently costly repetitive task will be automated. Programmers therefore, especially the more competent ones, spend their days confronting a constant stream of problems that the author does not yet know how to solve. Programming is therefore the most extreme example of a discipline for which naive planning and naive attempts to parallelize it by adding developers fails. This is the origin of Brooks' Law. Software development requires a higher density of creative output than painting, poetry, pottery, or prose. For these artists do not have a "for loop" at their fingertips that is capable of automating any task they find repetitive. For disciplines with these properties, when it comes time to plan work and coordinate a group of humans, "engineering" is the least effective metaphor. For disciplines with the properties, don't plan like "engineering." Instead, [Plan Like War](https://social.thedynamiclinker.com).