In the programming field, it’s pretty rare to find a book that’s still relevant even five years after it was published. The Mythical Man-Month is still useful forty years after it was first published, which is either amazing or depressing depending on how you look at it.

What depresses me about how useful the book still is so long after it was written is that in the forty years since, we clearly haven’t learned that much about how to run projects. I first tried to read The Mythical Man-Month ages ago, and I got so frustrated about how little we’ve learned since it was published that I had to set it down. Then I completely forgot about it for a few years because I’m just that organized :) I finally finished it this year, and it’s just as relevant as ever. By all rights everything in that book should be totally obvious and taken as a given by every project manager out there, but sadly it’s not. It is, however, kind of comforting to know that other people have run into the same problems I have.

The amazing part of The Mythical Man-Month is how clearly it shows that the actual programming is the easiest part. Code is simple compared to trying to coordinate a large team and hit a deadline, but as programmers we seem to get hung up on the easy part and largely ignore the hard part. One of the many terrible ironies of programming is that a field that attracts introverts who just want to be left alone to code actually requires huge amounts of communication if you want to get anything meaningful done. For me and probably for most other programmers the code is the fun part, so it’s understandable that we’re not as good at communication as we should be but eventually we’ll grow up as an industry, right?

As sarcastic as that sounds, I think a large part of what we need to do as an industry is accept that things just aren’t as easy as we wish they were and learn to work around it. It’s pretty similar to the way children grow up and understand that the world isn’t as simple as they thought and learn to work around it. I and every other programmer ever have massively underestimated how long something was going to take, and no doubt  we’ll all keep doing that. But understanding that underestimating tasks is common allows you to leave extra space in the schedule and/or prioritize features so you know what can be cut if you aren’t going to hit your deadline.

Basically we just need to learn to account for human nature. Should be easy :)