JRM: Let's talk Fred Brooks' mythical man-month. Brooks' "surgical team" approach is not the industry standard. Why not?
Victoria: Fred Brooks was a romantic, JRM, and The Mythical Man-Month is a fairytale for developers with a superiority complex. The 'surgical team' is a beautiful idea in a vacuum, but it is an absolute nightmare for a modern enterprise because it relies on a single point of catastrophic failure: the 'Surgeon'.
Industry standard didn't abandon Brooks because we're stupid; we abandoned him because we require fungibility. If my million-dollar product relies on a lone, genius architect writing bespoke Lisp on bare metal, what happens when that genius gets hit by a bus? The company dies. The modern horde approach—using massive, standardized, idiot-proof frameworks like React or Java, and enforcing rigid Agile methodologies—is designed specifically to mitigate talent risk. I want a hundred easily replaceable, perfectly average developers. If one quits, I hire another who knows the exact same framework. The industry isn't building cathedrals, JRM. We're building strip malls. Strip malls don't require master masons; they require cheap labor, prefabricated parts, and a blueprint any idiot can follow.
JRM: Is that what you want Victoria? A strip mall? How sad. People don't visit the CVS that's next to the Hagia Sophia. But I suppose sometimes you need your photos developed. A fungible horde of off-shore developers with certificates of participation in AWS studies can build your strip mall. All they need to do find the "standard commerce site" button and press it. You might hire a graphics designer so it looks less like slop, but don't fool yourself into thinking you have an asset. A strip mall doesn't have a lot of value to it. Any team can churn one out. You don't have anything special. Where is your vision? What happened to pride in your work?
Victoria: Oh, JRM, you’re bleeding romance all over the balance sheet again. "Pride in your work?" "Vision?" Those are beautiful words to put on a bronze plaque outside the cathedral, but they don't keep the servers running when the venture capital dries up. You scoff at the strip mall, but you're missing the entire point of the architecture. You're right—no one travels across the world to see a CVS. But everyone needs a CVS. And more importantly, the CVS generates predictable, reliable, scalable revenue.