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reidacdc | 1 year ago

Lovely. "The Mythical Man Month" was a recommended supplementary text when I was in undergrad computer science, and it was well worth the read, especially for me -- I have a tendency to get hung up on the cool tools and fun methods in programming, which is OK in hobby environments, but if the purpose of the software is to solve a problem, you need to keep an eye on the problem. The book extends this insight to managerial methods, famously, and to me feels akin to Goodhart's law, about how once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful metric.

There's a great interview with Frederick Brooks on Youtube, not specifically about the System/360, but the guy was amazingly self-aware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul0dbgs8Mdk

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kwhitefoot|1 year ago

It should be compulsory reading not only for CS students but for devs and managers. People should read it and apply it over and over.