Notes on "Mythical Man-Month": "Why did the tower of Babel fall?"

Brooks uses the metaphor of the tower of Babel to again emphasize the importance of but difficulties with communication. Several times he (again) brings up problems with potential superlinear complexity owing to to the number of pairs or other groupings of workers.

"How, then, shall teams communicate with one another? In as many ways as possible: Informally... Meetings... Workbook..."

He goes into some detail talking about the workbook and processing surrounding it. It seems that online documentation has solved a lot of his problems though introducing new ones. He talks about the introduction of microfiche to avoid printing out an unwieldy number of pages, but notes the lack of ability to add notes as an important limitation. We have that problem too with online docs -- no margins to write in as an individual reader. Also, support for showing diffs in documentation is pretty uneven.

"If there are n workers on a project, there are (n^2 - n)/2 interfaces across which there may be communication, and there are potentially almost 2^n teams within which coordination must occur. The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary... The means by which communication is obviated are division of labor and specialization of function."

A tree structure arises because no one should have two bosses. Brooks also notes even if the reporting change forms a tree, plenty of communication outside this is necessary, forming a network.

Necessaries for any subtree:

1. a mission
2. a producer
3. a technical director or architect
4. a schedule
5. a division of labor
6. interface definitions among the parts

What Brooks calls "producer" sounds very much just like "manager" or "technical lead manager" to me while "technical director" seems to map very closely to what I think I know of as "tech lead". (In the group I'm reading this with, we had noted some of the roles he described seemed a bit unfamiliar, but here even if the names are different, the roles seem pretty close to what we have today.)

He talks about three possible arrangements between producer and director: same person, director reports to producer, or producer reports to director. He illustrates the 3rd arrangement, which I don't believe I've seen in real life, with a quote from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" where the top engineer is happy to be freed from management work.