That example from the mythical man month, however to really put it in context, it would be like hiring 9 pregnant women and giving a bonus to the first one to deliver a baby and aborting the other 8. And yes, that is an overreach because aborting a later term baby is a way more serious thing than canceling a project you've worked on for nearly a year. However, projects that were "late to deliver" were de-funded and it was really hard on the project leaders. When it happened I did not see it instilling in those engineers a desire to work harder and faster next time, rather it just made them cynical and bitter.

I think importantly, not all approaches requires equal time to achieve. Some approaches might have been more viable in the market if the PMs had simply been given more time to achieve the product rather than just tossing out the first thing to cross the finish line.

It really explains the sloppy state lots of Google products ship in.

I'm slightly missing the point, but have to ask. Why 9?

Average pregnancy is 9 months long.

"Limited divisibility of tasks. Adding more people to a highly divisible task such as reaping a field by hand decreases the overall task duration (up to the point where additional workers get in each others way). Some tasks are less divisible; Brooks points out that while it takes one woman nine months to make one baby, "nine women can't make a baby in one month"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%E2%80%99_law

Average pregnancy may be 9 months long, but that's not even the right metric: the cycle time from one successful birth to the next is longer than that.

Out of every nine women, less than 9 are able to have children once age and various conditions, medical history, choices etc come into play. I think I was over thinking the scenario...

1 woman can make 1 baby in 9 months, so 9 women can make 1 baby in 1 month.

My wife recently made two babies in 33 weeks. That's less than half the average time per baby! Granted, they spent a combined total of 62 days in the NICU, but even accounting for that, we're still ahead, I think.

Congrats! A premature baby in NICU might appear even cuter to many on the internet. The game and app reviewing public is less charitable to premature software, however.

62 days -> 9 weeks

42 weeks overall

4.33 weeks in a month

42 weeks -> just shy of 10 months

I'm not so sure if you are ahead on weeks. But you are ahead on kids! Congratulations and good luck

You can only double count the babies' NICU time if you're looking at the average baby per week. We averaged 0.048 babies per week, as opposed to the baseline 0.025 babies per week.

Well full-term is often given as actually being 37-42 weeks, with the due date estimate being 40 weeks (not 9 months), making 42 weeks a normal(ish) pregnancy duration.

Not that I want to derail the well-wishing!