Today I saw an image that made me smile—every engineering team has probably encountered this scenario: The PM asks, “If we add two more people, can the project go three times faster?”
Some people still believe that engineering output grows linearly: add a few more people, and progress naturally accelerates. The logic is simple and seems reasonable—on the surface, adding more people appears to speed things up.
However, software development is never an assembly line where tasks can be infinitely parallelized. Cramming more developers into a project won’t double or triple the delivery speed. It’s like how you can’t make two pregnant women deliver babies twice as fast as one.
Instead, more people often bring increased communication overhead, coordination efforts, reviews, and ramp-up time for newcomers, adding extra complexity. External expectations are almost always much faster than the team’s actual pace.
Truly fast-moving teams are never the largest in terms of headcount; rather, they are teams with clear goals, sharp focus, predictable processes, defined responsibilities, and excellent engineering practices.
Sometimes, the right choice isn’t to blindly hire, but to hire the right people. The wrong people are worse than no hire at all; they will only make the team seem larger while actually causing disunity.
Goal: To deeply discuss Brooks’s Law, use the analogies of roasted chicken and pregnant women to enhance resonance, provide technical-level insights, and encourage readers to share and comment.
