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Re:Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy? by jmagoon on Thursday December 12, 2013 @03:23PM (#6896939)
This is totally true, and as the original article mentions:

"Unless you can afford to have two or more competing teams solving the same problem, and c’mon, who would do that, you will never know."

So, the above metaphor is almost always impractical, and it's hard to tell what the alternative is to the one bricklayer you have.

Re:Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy? by penguindev on Thursday December 12, 2013 @09:22PM (#6898699)
...I wonder how many times competing teams have been used for something? It actually sounds fascinating.

The mythical man month never mentioned that. It mentioned multiple implementations of one architecture, but that was for hardware IIRC.

Re:Are Your Programmers Working Hard, Or Are They Lazy? by zwdr on Friday December 13, 2013 @06:05AM (#6899972)
AFAIK it is used in failsafe systems: you have two systems who deliver the same output, but are developed independently.