The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
Fred Brooks Carolinian
Source
Page 17, cf. Theodore von Kármán (1957): "Everyone knows it takes a woman nine months to have a baby. But you Americans think if you get nine women pregnant, you can have a baby in a month."
- work
- The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975, 1995)
- year
- 1957
Cite this record
“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many…” Fred Brooks. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E73D1B6A88. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e73d1b6a88
More from Fred Brooks
The "Second System Effect": An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used “next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."
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