Communication overhead Memes

Posts tagged with Communication overhead

Makes Sense
Agile Programming
2 days ago 124.2K views 0 shares
Makes Sense
The eternal struggle of explaining Brooks' Law to management who think software development is like cooking chickens. Sure, you can crank up the heat to 900°F and cook it in 1 hour, but the result is a charred, inedible disaster. Meanwhile, the proper approach at 300°F takes 3 hours but yields something actually usable. Same logic applies to dev teams: throwing 2 more developers at a late project doesn't make it 3x faster—it makes it slower. Why? Communication overhead scales quadratically. With 3 devs you have 3 communication channels, with 5 devs you have 10. Plus there's onboarding time, context switching, merge conflicts, and the inevitable "wait, who changed this file?" Slack messages. The PM sees "3 devs = 3x speed" but reality delivers a burnt chicken that nobody wants to merge into production.

The Mythical Man Month Chicken
Programming Devops Agile
2 months ago 208.2K views 4 shares
The Mythical Man Month Chicken
This meme brilliantly roasts project managers who think development scales linearly with headcount. Just like cooking a chicken at 900°F for 1 hour produces a charred disaster (left), while 300°F for 3 hours creates perfection (right), software development can't be rushed by simply throwing more developers at it. It's a delicious reference to Brooks' Law from "The Mythical Man-Month" which states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Each new dev needs onboarding, increases communication overhead, and fragments the codebase. The chicken doesn't cook 3x faster at 3x the temperature—it burns to a crisp!