Krister Fardig
kfardig

I agree with the majority of what Mr. Brooks is saying.  Most of his
examples are from developing operating systems, a genre in which I have no
experience, but the generalities do tend to conform to my
experiences.  His observation that the complexity of human interaction
goes up dramatically as the number of people increases was illustrated
pointedly in my internship over the summer.  I was working as a tester for
one of Microsoft's online tendrils.  Initially, the projects I was working
on were internal testing tools, and as such they were completely designed
by two or three people (my mentor and his boss and maybe an interested
party) and completely implemented by one person (me).  We met at the
beginning and end of the project, and probably once a week
formally.  Whenever I had an issue I could take it up with him almost
immediately, and progress proceeded smoothly.  However, during the second
half of the internship, I worked on a component of a much larger scale
product that was to provide a suite of semi-related functionality to be
used by multiple unrelated products.  We had well over a hundred people
working on the product, maybe twice that if you include people working on
functionality for the specific products.  Instead of having one person as
my source of information, I now had three or four primaries and a much
larger list of people to occasionally consult with.  Add to that a wealth
of meeting that probably accounted for a fifth of every day, and my
progress slowed considerably.  However, I was kept informed of everything
needed to perform my tasks, and given the scope of the project I can
understand how such a perceived time drain actually does make everything
more efficient.