Feel like I have the same argument at work everyday. Some things just take a definitive time. 20 cooks won’t make a cake faster. Cooking that cake at 1000 degrees won’t make it faster. It will take the time it takes.
I get your point… But I feel like people in this thread doesn’t know how cake making works…
20 people will make a single cake faster. Not 20x faster, but faster. There are multiple part of the work that can be divided out to different people. Like you can have one person make batter while other makes icing. Fancy cakes actually do take multiple people to make simultaneously.
Super, a super simple task you can throw more people at.
The cake one I like because it highlights that this is a complex task where more people are going to get in the way. If you throw 5 more people into baking a cake halfway through it’s going to take 5 times as long because now you have to explain to them what you were doing, what your system is, how they should work together as a team. The overhead of adding them isn’t worth it, and you’d probably just say “go stand over there I’ll finish it”
Now, if you knew ahead of time you had an order for 50 cakes and you were given 5 people, now that’s a completely different problem to solve. You now have a leader, tell this person is on mixing, this person is on frosting, etc etc.
So, in short, it’s clear you aren’t an engineer, and it’s extremely clear you don’t know what a strawman is
It’s not even that more people get in the way. A cake, and a baby, and in some ways dev work, take a set amount of time under which you just can’t do, or you get an undercooked baby, or a miscarried cake.
Some tasks are serializable other tasks are sequential.
A lot of game dev tasks are sequential, the code to do thing X has to be developed before feature Y can be implemented. And you can only have one dev working on one feature at a time, even version control has its limits.
How is it a strawman to compare one set of serial tasks to another? Do you not understand what a strawman actually is? Can you elaborate on your logic?
Because progress would be made faster with additional devs. Not everything is/will be sequential and just because a large task is, doesn’t mean it could be broken into smaller tasks. Doesn’t have to be 50 devs.
Yes, I do: “an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.”
It seems like both of your analogies are strawmen. Game development is likely to be not like pregnancy or moving stones, in terms of its ability to be sped up by adding manpower. It’s obviously much more complicated than manual labour like moving stones, but not as immune to assistance as passively ‘being pregnant’.
They could, but they wouldn’t, they would organize their work to be more productive and achieve the stone moving faster.
Paraphrasing Proudhon’s What Is Property :
The capitalist, it is said, paid for the workers’ days; to be exact, it must be said that the capitalist paid as much ‘one day of work’ that he employed workers every day, which is not at all the same thing. Because the capitalist did not pay for this immense force which results from the union and harmony of workers, and the convergence and simultaneity of their effort. Two hundred grenadiers in a few hours erected the obelisk of Luqsor on its base; one cannot assume that a single man, in two hundred days, would have achieved the same feat.
Hiring 50 people to work on a project fundamentally changes the way the project was led by a single person, suddenly you will need additional workers to plan for the work to be done, to organize each task, to keep track of what’s being done, and whatnot. Howard claimed there were 450 people working at Bethesda, and look at the state of Starfield ; Larian Studios allegedly grew from 100 to 400 people, and look at the state of Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s a lot more complex that just numbers
9 women can’t deliver a baby in 1 month
They can, but the babies are probably not gonna be fine.
Feel like I have the same argument at work everyday. Some things just take a definitive time. 20 cooks won’t make a cake faster. Cooking that cake at 1000 degrees won’t make it faster. It will take the time it takes.
20 cooks won’t make 1 cake faster, but they sure as hell can cook 20 cakes at the same time!
I get your point… But I feel like people in this thread doesn’t know how cake making works…
20 people will make a single cake faster. Not 20x faster, but faster. There are multiple part of the work that can be divided out to different people. Like you can have one person make batter while other makes icing. Fancy cakes actually do take multiple people to make simultaneously.
*can make
20 people poorly setup or managed can fuck up 100 cakes in the time it took one person to just make one good cake too
As the meme goes
If it takes 1 person 9 days to move a pile of 900 stones, 9 people could move the same pile in roughly a day.
Feels good attacking a straw man…
Super, a super simple task you can throw more people at.
The cake one I like because it highlights that this is a complex task where more people are going to get in the way. If you throw 5 more people into baking a cake halfway through it’s going to take 5 times as long because now you have to explain to them what you were doing, what your system is, how they should work together as a team. The overhead of adding them isn’t worth it, and you’d probably just say “go stand over there I’ll finish it”
Now, if you knew ahead of time you had an order for 50 cakes and you were given 5 people, now that’s a completely different problem to solve. You now have a leader, tell this person is on mixing, this person is on frosting, etc etc.
So, in short, it’s clear you aren’t an engineer, and it’s extremely clear you don’t know what a strawman is
It’s not even that more people get in the way. A cake, and a baby, and in some ways dev work, take a set amount of time under which you just can’t do, or you get an undercooked baby, or a miscarried cake.
Some tasks are serializable other tasks are sequential.
A lot of game dev tasks are sequential, the code to do thing X has to be developed before feature Y can be implemented. And you can only have one dev working on one feature at a time, even version control has its limits.
I know, and agree but the pregnancy argument is a straw man argument
It’s not an argument it’s an analogy, that can help understand the argument.
It’s an argument about critical paths in a project. Also, is no-one going to credit “The Mythical Man Month” where this quote comes from?
How is it a strawman to compare one set of serial tasks to another? Do you not understand what a strawman actually is? Can you elaborate on your logic?
Because progress would be made faster with additional devs. Not everything is/will be sequential and just because a large task is, doesn’t mean it could be broken into smaller tasks. Doesn’t have to be 50 devs.
Yes, I do: “an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.”
It seems like both of your analogies are strawmen. Game development is likely to be not like pregnancy or moving stones, in terms of its ability to be sped up by adding manpower. It’s obviously much more complicated than manual labour like moving stones, but not as immune to assistance as passively ‘being pregnant’.
A metaphor is not a strawman.
You keep using that term, I don’t think you know what that term means.
They could, but they wouldn’t, they would organize their work to be more productive and achieve the stone moving faster.
Paraphrasing Proudhon’s What Is Property :
Hiring 50 people to work on a project fundamentally changes the way the project was led by a single person, suddenly you will need additional workers to plan for the work to be done, to organize each task, to keep track of what’s being done, and whatnot. Howard claimed there were 450 people working at Bethesda, and look at the state of Starfield ; Larian Studios allegedly grew from 100 to 400 people, and look at the state of Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s a lot more complex that just numbers
Tell that to Apple