Most people associate "The Mythical Man-Month" with Brooks’s law: adding people to a late project makes it later. For me, the best part of it is one page at the end of chapter one, entitled The Joys of the Craft.
I always enjoyed the part that basically said that management exists to decrease the number of lines of communication necessary for a project to function...and that's pretty much the only reason they exist ;)
In a way yes, but they do care about time to completion, even a lazy, cheat-first manager would love to have that. Then, all things considered it seems easier to implement a 'put more resources, fake some numbers, notify client of delays (just like every other projects so they won't rant that much)'
It is excellent on what makes programming so great: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/