Brooks's Law
Brooks's Law β "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" β was formulated by Fred Brooks in his 1975 classic The Mythical Man-Month. It explains why the intuitive response to a project falling behind schedule (adding more people) reliably backfires in software development, and often makes things worse. The underlying insight extends to any knowledge work where ramp-up time and communication overhead scale superlinearly with team size.