Comments on Mythical Man-Month: Who the hell am I to say anything

Anybody can say anything about anything. a cat can look at a king. But you got a point, how does one trust, put weight, care about things said?


So what possible way can I justify that what I say anecdotally or with the scent of authority has any potential to be extrapolated successfully? We all have many layers of what we do: the accountant has to manage people in addition to being a whiz at adding/using excel, the plumber a whiz at knowing the hidden possibilities of where pipes go and dealing with suppliers not just how to connect PVC to iron, etc. A major part of my immediate purposeful salaried work is doing and managing software engineering: I program, and I manage other programmers. Not many programmers, and not a huge project (actually conveniently scaled), but I have to interact with a number of other IT organizations (company internal; few working contacts outside). I have worked in 'industry' just out of college but only on smallish things (one self-contained) and one that involved groups but self-contained within around 20 software types, did absolutely nothing of any use or nontrivial size in grad school.

So without a complete month-to-month CIA file biography, there it is. Not a lot of experience with large projects. But I have some experience, enough to be able to comment intelligently.