People seem to have forgotten the lessons of The Mythical Man-Month: it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort.
> it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort.
Yes, but Brooks was speaking about the effect of bringing new people on to a project. His words, "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". However, had those same people been brought on board at the start of the project, they would not have had the same negative affect on the timeline. Certainly some people turn out to be what G. Gordon Schulmeyer called "net negative producing programmers" (NNPPs)[1], but presumably they could have been let go before their impact was a problem.
Could companies be just now laying off the NNPPs they should have let go long ago? Of course, but the track records of these companies hiring the top talent would suggest that NNPPs don't stick around long.
Context from the book: bringing on new workers has a one time cost of bringing them up to speed and an ongoing cost in synchronization / communications complexity. General consensus, try to assign the optimal number of humans to as specific a task as possible and shard / divide and conqueror the tasks to minimize the headcount per task.
Yep, and in general more time on communication and coordination overhead -- ongoing, not just for the period of introduction -- the more people you have involved.
While I find this a very insightful and important observation -- I'm not sure I see much relevance to current tech layoffs.
