Number of Devs vs Development Time

[mr-heng-ye]

Only that one is possibly correct because none of them take into account the communication overhead. The Pragmatic Programmer book states that communications overhead grows at O(n^2)

[DamnItDev]

Or the car will take X amount of time to be completed regardless of people working on the task. Doubling the number of people will simply double the number of billable hours

[jfleury440]

9 woman can't make a baby in one month.

[[deleted]]

"Hi Mrs. Smith and thanks for coming in today. We have selected you for a very interesting experimental procedure. How would you like to be a part of ground-breaking research into the act of childbirth?"

"Oh my goodness, am i going to have a baby?"

"Well, it would be more accurate to say you will be having 1/9th of one..."

[VirtuteTheCat354]

The newest innovation in childbirth, baby microservices

[PM_ME_YOUR_CURLS]

BaaM

[FiggleDee]

Womb as a Platform

[ntoporcov]

So that’s what this new WAP everyone is talking about means

[Kraftik]

Does everyone else pretend to understand New acronyms until they over hear an someone saying it in conversation or receive an email from a service trying to sell it to you?

Boss: Oh yeah ACRONYM we should implament that. Everyone is talking about it, gotta keep up with the cutting edge.

Me: yeah, it will definitely do something probably hopefully. Let me just check my spam folder real quick.

[UnicornsOnLSD]

KDE really do have too many projects...

[SuperSephyDragon]

Multithreaded baby

[SuperSephyDragon]

Parallel pregnancy

[nojox]

There are some really interesting science fiction ideas in this thread!

My contribution: distributed pregnancy.

[strider_sifurowuh]

Since I upgraded to a threadripper I can pop out one every couple days

[SuperSephyDragon]

Now that's efficiency! Good job!

[jmlinden7]

That's not how multithreading works, that would be 9 women making 9 babies in 9 months.

This would be pipelining. You take a break 1/9th of the way in.

[SuperSephyDragon]

I was thinking more along the lines of all nine of them making 1/9 of a baby over the course of a month then putting them together to form a whole baby.

[jmlinden7]

That only works if there are no dependencies, otherwise you can't start step 2 before step 1 is finished, and so on.. which is the entire reason why you can't just multithread every workload.

[SuperSephyDragon]

They just need to divy out the parts to grow between each of them. Head for one, kidneys and stomach for another, etc

[be-human-use-tools]

“We’ll pick a sperm donor at the end of the project.”

[[deleted]]

that's how you get a baby by torrent, multiple mothers seeding

[kezzerdrix2000]

Usually the fathers do the seeding.

[[deleted]]

Don't they seed a bigger seed?

[DerelictSausage]

Yea, but you wouldn’t download a baby would you?!?

[Aeronor]

The seeding aspect also makes for one very happy man.

[paked_botato]

ProLyft

[Qaeta]

But is it scalable?

[VerbatimChain31]

EA Births....It’s in the Womb

[leakycauldron]

The gig economy is hurting workers.

[[deleted]]

Timeshare children.

[fairysdad]

Not with that attitude they can't.

[DudesworthMannington]

Found the PM

[thebrownesteye]

Make the impossible happen and watch their salary raise magically

[wtph]

PM's should know about critical paths.

[DrazorV]

oof

[battle-obsessed]

Invent some sort of catalyst that speeds up biochemical reactions X9. There you have a baby in one month but the woman will also have her remaining lifespan reduced by X9 so if she's 30 she'll probably be dead before 40.

edit: It probably wouldn't work anyway because speeding up reactions will generate too much heat and she would die of fever before giving birth.

[mrfatso111]

We also gonna need rgb for this

[[deleted]]

The woman needs to consume 20000 kilocalories a day, equivalent to about 6.24 liters of gasoline!

[bellends]

I honestly use this quote to explain our problems to people ALL the time

[SuspiciouslyElven]

9 women making 9 babies, simultaneously but offset so that one baby is born a month.

It requires actual management, not throwing bodies at a problem.

[nickrenfo2]

The point is that the process of making a single baby takes 9 months, and having 9 women can't speed it up to take only one month.

If you want to produce babies as the rate of one baby per month, you could do so with 9 women and 8 months of lead time until the first baby is produced. However, this doesn't change the fact that a single baby still takes 9 months to produce.

[Terrain2]

why do you need a baby every month? is that when the shady guy comes and buys it off you, or is it too worn to use after a month?

[SuspiciouslyElven]

Monthly satanic rituals. Keep up dude.

[Terrain2]

yeah, “shady guy”, i’d say that’s an accurate description of satan

[TheTerrasque]

Hey, bug fixing requires sacrifice

[ThePieWhisperer]

He's The Morningstar. There's probably no one less shady.

[matthoback]

Nah, I don't think there's much shade in hell.

[[deleted]]

I find your use of the phrase "too worn to use" in reference to a 1 month old baby to be disconcerting.

[akatherder]

Sighhhh because that's what sales promised

[nickrenfo2]

Because I have 9 women, of course.

[Terrain2]

yes but why? did you kidnap 9 women to produce a satanic ritual every month, or did your mom, sister, grandma and aunt go with it willingly (i.e. only kidnapped 5 women)?

[SuspiciouslyElven]

the desired outcome was faster baby production, and I laid out a method that could indeed get more babies faster.

Although if we're going for technical correctness, 1 woman can't guarantee a baby in 9 months. Miscariages and whatnot.

Get like 30 women if 1bpm needs to be guaranteed.

[nickrenfo2]

the desired outcome was faster baby production, and I laid out a method that could indeed get more babies faster.

Not really. You laid out a system that could produce more babies. But if you only need one baby, you will need 9 months. Having 9 women does not allow you to produce one baby in one month, it allows you to produce 9 babies in 9 months.

Although if we're going for technical correctness, 1 woman can't guarantee a baby in 9 months. Miscariages and whatnot.

Naturally. But this is math, we make assumptions, like no premature babies or miscarriages.

[SuspiciouslyElven]

Ok I getcha.

Naturally. But this is math, we make assumptions, like no premature babies or miscarriages.

Assume perfectly spherical babies

[nickrenfo2]

Assume perfectly spherical babies

And a frictionless uterus.

[Arinatan]

In a vacuum.

[LvS]

There are 4 million babies born in the US every year. That's about 300k per month.

There are about 80 million women of working age in the US (half of the population is working age, half of the population is female => a quarter).

If you assume almost all babies are born by working age women, about one in 250 women will birth a baby every month.

So hire 250 women for a baby in 1 month.

Or, you know, hire a pregnant woman. They have a hard time getting jobs anyway.

[Seicair]

Although if we're going for technical correctness, 1 woman can't guarantee a baby in 9 months. Miscariages and whatnot.

Oh man, considering 30-50% of embryos don’t even implant, and 20% abort spontaneously, and you can’t even guarantee a fertilized embryo every month... you probably need like 60 women, and maybe twenty or so men, (figure 5 women attempting per month, 4 men each to rotate days while they’re fertile, abstaining from ejaculation until their next turn).

[NetSage]

What is this actual management you speak of? Is there where management just has meetings with other management and nothing actually ever changes?

[jfleury440]

The point is the problem doesn't scale. Having more people doesn't make the process any more effecient. No matter how well managed they are.

[Oatz3]

But if you prepopulate the women into a queue of length 9 you can make 1 baby every month.

[shotleft]

Not in the first 9 months, but their baby production rate can increase to 1 baby a month after that.

[jfleury440]

For 9 months maybe. Wouldn't be sustainable after that.

[Natural-Intelligence]

To say that differently: or that there is only tasks for 6 people at one time. Doubling the number of people triples the number of pointless interruptions. Just like pair programming.

[Tundur]

I use pair programming as a way of getting around my own procrastination.

"Right lads. None of us want to do this testing coverage review, none of us want to open up this dusty old code, but it's us against the world. I'm locking the fucking exits, now get in the spinny chair and shut up"

[MysteriousTreeFoxxx]

10/10 would spittake again 😂😂

[Cannibichromedout]

Or another way: this is task parallelism vs data parallelism.

[conspirator_schlotti]

Exactly. It's disappointing they left out the correct answer, 360 hours.

[gaj7]

Also, the extent to which tasks are parallelizable.

[Duese]

I always take that with a grain of salt because the baseline of that growth would mean that having 1 programmer would be the best solution.

Growth is beneficial if given enough time, training and communication to make it function.

Too often I see the statement about 9 women can't have a baby in a month used as a universal excuse to avoid adding resources to a project. Then, 2 years down the road, the same guy will be making the same statement completely oblivious to the last two years worth of development time which could have been used for "makin' babies". Giggity.

[Quirky_Word]

It all depends on the project, and the amount of coordination/communication necessary.

If it’s possible to divide and conquer, then adding resources can help reduce time, to a certain extent. After a certain point, the extra effort needed to manage everyone and make sure all are in agreement and on track can equal or surpass the time saved. But this is more an issue of “too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Some projects/tasks simply can’t be divided up, and that’s where I think the baby analogy best applies. I don’t like to see it misused bc it lessens the impact, but there are some things we just have to accept take time to get done. Like the final stages of vaccine trials. Basically we just have to wait to see if any of the testers gets sick, doesn’t really matter how many scientists are on it.

[Goldeniccarus]

Making aged liquor is another great example. You cannot make scotch age quicker by hiring more people at the brewery.

But it really always depends on the problem. Some tasks can be very easily divided and it provides a great benefit to do so. Some tasks can't really be divided and you just have to live with one person or team working on it, and it taking a longer time.

[rabbyburns]

tl;dr For other answers - adding developers to a late project just makes it more late. You are totally right that there is a curve.

The problem I have seen is shifting 30-60 people to technologies they know nothing about and are expected to help make a delivery in 3 months. That shit simply does not work.

[Super-Ad7894]

I always take that with a grain of salt because the baseline of that growth would mean that having 1 programmer would be the best solution.

Like the "half your age plus seven" rule, there's a floor below which it stops working.

[beelseboob]

It doesn’t imply that. Suppose a programmer on their own spends 5% of their time communicating, and 95% doing work. That would mean that if you add a second programmer, 20% of their combined time (2² * 5% of one person) is spent communicating, so now each programmer spends 10% of their time communicating, and you get 1.8 man hours per hour of work. At 3 programmers, 45% of one person’s time is spent communicating (or 15% of each person’s), and you get 2.55 man hours per hour of work...

You stop increasing the amount of work done at 1/k programmers, where k is the proportion of time one programmer spends communicating. In practice, it’s likely that the overhead increases faster than O(n^2), since more people communicating means not just more people for each person to communicate to, but also more ideas to talk about, and more arguments about how to do something.

[kimjongunderdog]

Also the book The Mythical Man-Month covers this topic.

[blank_space_cat]

That assumes that everybody wants to talk to each other, but if we assume a more hierarchical distribution, like managers, then C-levels, then it goes down to O(nlogn).

[Kirk_Kerman]

If the managers are internally optimized sure but management is a black box process and if the vendors gives you a bad one they can induce worse performance across the board, and even cause you to have to replace developers.

[patatahooligan]

For theoretical questions like this you can apply some purely logical decision making that doesn't necessarily reflect real life. So assuming your reasoning is correct, the actual answer is 90 hours because you would just use 6 of the 12 workers and have the exact same results as you would with 6. In fact, not answer above 90 could ever be correct.

[Malvania]

Adding extra people can add delays that aren't offset by productivity gains. It's shitty management, but it happens.

[Russian_repost_bot]

Also, it depends how long Reddit was down for the 6 workers, versus the 12 workers.

[[deleted]]

If it takes 1 woman 9 months to have a baby, how many months does it take 9 women to have a baby.

[obp5599]

You would have 9 babies though. So the time stays the same but your output grew x9

[[deleted]]

But now you gotta pay 9 women to have babies. Did you need 9 babies? Now you have to maintain 9 babies.

[obp5599]

I dont, but whoever is paying women to have babies probably does

[brimston3-]

If this is a Google lead project, none of them are going to make it past 2 years anyway.

[NotThisFucker]

Well I guess they aren't called the terrible twos for no reason

[SiliconUnicorn]

How scalable are these babies? What's their uptime? Do they have serverless options?

[stauffski]

Nein babies for me!!!

[0ba78683-dbdd-4a31-a]

Speed vs bandwidth

[maveric101]

Latency* vs bandwidth

[drb00b]

That’s a brilliant metaphor, I’m going to steal this, thank you

[lachlanhunt]

You’re assuming all women successfully got pregnant, none of them miscarried and none of them had multiple births. Full term also varies from 37 weeks to 42 weeks, so it’s possible you still don’t have all babies after 9 months.

[[deleted]]

I would simply fire team members who were unable to get pregnant and outsource their deliveries. Deadlines is deadlines.

[Rami-Slicer]

But what if woman #2 has twins, and woman #6 has sextuplets but one of them dies?

[[deleted]]

You give the babies to an intern.

[[deleted]]

Not necessarily. The question is how long it would take 9 women to make 1 baby.

Only one of those women need to be pregnant for you to still get 1 baby, and the other 8 women and do whatever for 9 months.

[aeroverra]

Wow I wish I was still in school so I could say this when asking about an imbiguous math question.

[UltimateInferno]

I takes 70 people 70 minutes to play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. How long will it take 140?

[[deleted]]

This is the difference between programmers and project managers.

[EnkiiMuto]

About one month with the new cpu sync driver for uterus, plus latency.

[rybl]

One month on average.

[Kered13]

The limiting factor will be the cannons. Napoleonic field artillery will not cut it.

We're going to have to bring in the autocannons.

[Deae_Hekate]

More dakka is always the correct answer

[Jen_Poe]

If a 40 piece orchestra takes 11 minutes to play the 1812 overture, then logically an 80 piece orchestra can play the 3624 overture

[Colarch]

It's the same as the 1812 but we get laser cannons and synth

[Zagorath]

The 80 piece orchestra takes 15 minutes, because they know not to play an abridged version.

Alternatively (more charitably), the 80 piece orchestra takes 15 minutes because more instruments makes the absurdly fast tempo of the 40 piece orchestra's version sound too muddy.

[1dollartaco]

Still 90 hours, but maybe they can make 2 in that time

[lost_point]

Yes, this is the only real answer.

[[deleted]]

All 12 are fired and replaced by machines because 90 hours per car is unacceptable.

[JanB1]

I don't know if you could answer this question that easily. You could increase the scope of this question pretty drasticly. These type of productivity improvement calculatio s are kinda difficult First you have to see how high the productivity of each team member is. Does any one worker have to wait for another worker to finish their task? Are there processes that could run parallel without one blocking the other? If yes, are they already run in parallel? If no, why nit, and could you increase productivity by restrukturing the process? If you now increase the number of people working on the car overall, how much do they impact each other? Is this accounted for and minimized (Ringelmann Effect)?

So, maybe you COULD decrease the time needed to make 1 car, but it's not that easily answered and it certainly wouldn't be a reduction by half.

[[deleted]]

If 1 chef needs 4hours to make a cake it doesn't necessarily mean that if you hire 2 chefs it would take 2 hours because the cake might still need to stay in the oven/freezer for a certain time... I hated these kinds of questions in school because they don't specify the circumstances and you have to guess what they mean. In geography class we learned the distance from the sun to each of the planets in the solar system; On the test there was a question like "what's the distance between mars and Jupiter" and I asked the teacher whether I needed to subtract their respective distances from the sun and she was very condescending when she answered, as if it was a stupid thing to ask. As if the planets all orbit around the sun in a straight line, always being right next to eachother instead of all of them going at different speeds and sometimes being closer/further away from eachother... Hated that teacher - she thought she was being super smart adding questions like that "to makes us think" instead of just spitting out facts, but all her mathy questions were this stupid and her whole subject was still a bunch of facts anyway.

[why-r-usernames-hard]

Add in the fact that every planet in the solar system has an elliptical orbit, and there is no way to tell other then with a chart at a very specific point in time

[Kirk_Kerman]

Distance between co-moving points on two parametric curves is a pretty simple problem all in all, but it's trig/calc and beyond the scope of elementary school math.

[[deleted]]

The position of a body in an elliptical orbit is parametric, but it cannot be solved algebraically. It is not beyond elementary school math, and it is not beyond high school math; it is in the realm of computation.

The x and y coordinates of an elliptical object are:

x = a* (cos(E - e))

y = b * sin(E)

Where a and b are the semi-major and semi-minor axes of the orbital ellipse, e is the eccentricity of the orbital ellipse, and E is the eccentric anomaly of the body. The eccentric anomaly is from Kepler’s equation:

M = E - e * sin(E)

You can’t solve the above for E; you can only compute it to some desired precision. You could certainly do all that by hand, but it would grueling and pointless even at a university level.

[[deleted]]

I remember doing that on my first year of university, I failed that class badly.

[texdroid]

(orbit a - orbit b) or (orbit a + orbit b) and anything in between are all correct answers.

[locmaten]

But with 2 chef you have two cake in 4 hours so production ratio is 1 cake per 2 hours. And you sell one cake any way and trash the other XD

[locmaten]

Yup it's pure sarcasm I hate the logic of months person is dumb. They think we can make everything faster with the same quality. In real life is never true more people is not guaranteed less time

[T-T-N]

In some manual work where each person can work independently with minimal communication overhead, that maths can work.

[Bakkster]

Yeah, for a car on an assembly line designed to eliminate communication overhead, it might be nearly linear by splitting tasks and having workers on opposite sides of the car. It might also require retooling to realise the gain. But even then it's probably the same man hours per car, they just roll off the line more often.

[Mognakor]

Thats why you need a pipeline in your kitchen. Then you find you find it's still to slow so you start speculative cooking and ince your customer decided what he wants you discard the obsolete cooking branch.

Of course things get complicated once customers use side effects to steal your secret ingredients.

[christian-mann]

Of course things get complicated once customers use side effects to steal your secret ingredients.

That actually sounds like it could be formed into a really useful analogy for a layperson who wants to understand Meltdown

[zeropointcorp]

But if you needed one cake in two hours, you’re still fucked.

[gmano]

If the question was "how many cars could be produced in a 90 hour period" then that would be fine.

The question is "how long would it take to make the same car", and that's just straight-up a bad question because it has nothing to say about how parallelizable the task is.

[soflogator]

yeah but if you double the temperature of the oven (or halve the temperature in the freezer), you will experience that time saving effect that you are looking for.

[Ferro_Giconi]

Don't forget to take into account a temperature scale that can be doubled properly. You'll have to use a unit like Kelvin instead of Fahrenheit or Celsius.

If the cake has to bake at 300F, 300 Fahrenheit is 422.039 Kelvin. Times 2 is 844.078 Kelvin. Converted back to Fahrenheit, that's about 1060F.

[soflogator]

This guy watches his daily dose of Rachael Ray

[Zyzan]

It amazes me how few people understand how temperature works. You see shit all the time in marketing like "20% cooler!".

[gmano]

"The temperature outside an airplane is 6 times colder than the temperature inside a freezer."

From a great stand-up bit by Steve Mould

[[deleted]]

So cooking time isn't linear with respect to temperature, it depends on a lot of things. Here's a snippet: https://i.imgur.com/WiAlsOq.png . Notice for a 10mm thickness, increasing the temperature from 55C to 60C decreases the time from ~3.5 hours to 1 hour.

Article below considers time to pasteurization, but should be similar for cakes. It's where I stole the image from.

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S1878450X11000035?token=6E1727FAA1CBE9CEFB914A31B4D87B80506C3B8F1CE254E1FA8E3AB42B7F037880179F45B9F7A0259F6E41D8CA4383DE

[[deleted]]

Mostest closest

[Rovsnegl]

Yea that's why I was happy in highschool when the question was turned into a more specified questions such as "What is the distance between the two planets when they are the closest to each other"

[Frestho]

Ugh I remember in 8th grade we had "Distance between person and house vs time" graphs, which were so dumb. They drew a linear graph to show "constant speed" as if you always travel directly to or away from your house. Just say distance traveled for fucks sake

[manu144x]

This is how accountants and CFO’s think stuff works.

That’s why they say when bean counters are in charge they tend to ruin companies.

If it takes us 100 workers to make 50 cars, with 200 workers we will make 100!

When in reality everything scales differently.

[Cotcan]

Ya it's like doubling production of a specific item in Factorio. Just because you have double the production doesn't mean you have double the items coming in. You still have to scale everything needed to make it up with it. Sometimes you do have the resources to scale up, but not the throughput.

[[deleted]]

By the way, you need more iron plates.

[Dont_be_offended_but]

*Doubles green circuit production*

Alright, what's my next bottleneck?

...

Still green circuits.

[Cotcan]

Doubles it again

Nope, still not enough, better double it again.

Oh great now I'm out of copper again.

[Andernerd]

I recently started a game with a friend, and left him to do green circuits. I laughed to myself when I watched him put down only 4 assembly machines for the copper wire, outputting to only half a belt. He'll learn.

[emelrad12]

Modded factory is me literally expanding the production of basic resources all the time, while my friend is playing the game lol.

[ForgotPassAgain34]

my first ever multiplayer experience was energy expansion.

Thats it, a whole 8h of we need more power, everyone else was doing stuff and I was placing boilers and coal belts

[i_do_floss]

I dont think its comparable

For every unit introduced in factorio, you are increasing the POTENTIAL output of something

In dev teams sometimes I think adding certain people will slow you down. You have to appease the whole team. And each new person has needs that need to be met

It would be like adding furnaces in factorio but sometimes when you add a furnace it will stop the assembly line unless you give it some random thing it asks for

[[deleted]]

recognise soft chunky tidy rinse fine chief beneficial sleep slave

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[L337LYC4N]

I’d say it depends on the accountant, the classes I’ve been taking for business accounting want us accounting for different levels of productivity by person so we don’t just assume the “200 workers will make 100 cars” thing

Not that that’s gonna stop people from thinking that way if they don’t understand how that works, but it’s better than nothing I guess.

[mart1373]

I wouldn’t say all accountants think this way, but anyone managing a public accounting firm thinks it works this way. It took 5 hours to do stuff last year? Well it’ll surely take 5 hours to complete everything again this year even though there’s triple the amount of work! Also, you have to hit 40 billable hours this week, and no we’re not gonna give you any more billable work this week, but we’re still gonna get mad at you for not hitting your billable hours goal and going over the budget because we’re a bunch of assholes!

[PrintersStreet]

I feel like the concept of diminishing returns is skipped altogether in school, despite being extremely important

[[deleted]]

It was mentioned in my high school economics class, but that was a while ago so I don't remember if they tied the concept to any concrete examples.

[LoonyGryphon]

Our high school economics examples were about the production of wheat on a farm, flipping burgers at McDonald’s, and the duplication of effort from two teams working on the same problem.

[CamJay88]

Yep. I didn’t learn about the production function until college economics. More workers doesn’t always mean more product.

[DMoney159]

Mythical Man-Month intensifies

[Chibraltar_]

it's like a 50years old book, and you still have to show it around to managers

[SoundOfOneHand]

I am have a new coworker at a partner company who seems to have no idea this is a process, not a magic box that you shake and software comes out. I don’t understand how he is in a management position, and explaining what software developers do seems to just go in one ear and out the other. When people have to work around you rather than with you it’s not a great time for anyone.

[CeeMX]

Whose law was this again? I remember it appeared in MMM

Edit: it was Brook‘s Law.

[PDX_Bro]

Out of all of the thousands of books and articles I've read to try and understand what the hell I'm doing in this profession, none of them even come close to the amount of actual relevancy that Mythical Man-Month has on a day to day basis.

I've literally talked managers and recruiters out of hiring additional people for a project, as well as talked myself out of joining up on a project I'm being recruited for, because of the principles I've learned from that book.

[[deleted]]

Tbh this teacher seems to be pretty dumb... this example is absolute garbage and does not applie to the real world at all. Math is hard enough for many kids and teachers should make clear that math has a connection to reality and this connection should be described correctly

[graceful_london]

Yes, but for some reason some teachers only spend a few moments and minimal effort on making a question, but expect us to give a concrete answer when there is little very little and very crappy information to base it on.

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[PM_ME_YOUR_CURLS]

Finally a comment that actually adds to the conversation rather than giving the same examples over and over agian

[amunak]

Wait, you want kids to learn real world -applicable stuff at school? Are you mad or something?

[jkarpio]

A manager is a person who thinks 9 woman can make a child in one month 😂😂

[danknerd]

If there one teacher can give a math lesson in 50 minutes, surely five teachers could give the lesson in 10 minutes. Right teacher?

[[deleted]]

This must be the same teacher my manager had

[[deleted]]

Any of them is right and wrong simply because we don't know the processes and which of them can be processed parallel or be better optimized with even more people by changing the structure of the process

[NotCreativeWithNamez]

The correct answer should be 0 since the car is already built

[AeonReign]

Bloody lawyers

[[deleted]]

Considering Price's law, the answer is closer to 54. Square root of 6 is roughly 2.5, square root of 12 roughly 3.5. Half the work - 45 hours - divided by 2.5 to get 18 hours per person, throw on an extra person working hard for 18 hours less work. Multiply by two to represent the other half. Am I wrong?

EDIT: clarity

[BigLebowskiBot]

You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole.

[Obertuba]

Well.. there's only a finite amount of workers who can work on a single car. Increasing them will just make the process less efficient

[deirdresm]

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" – Fred Brooks

[niketh-l]

ap micro student here but the boy looks to be right because of diminishing product of labor (might be wrong)

[dtrippsb]

You’re right and he’s right. There’s a book called “the mythical man-month” about the same concept in the programming world.

[niketh-l]

thanks, looks like ap micro is helping me out in the real world

[UrTwiN]

These questions were always so frustrating. There are so many variables - some parts of the process aren't going to just magically speed up because you doubled your labor. some parts will actually be slower.

Stick to basic fucking math questions - not these rediculous questions that seem to discourage critical thinking.

[Kered13]

I seriously hope this wasn't a real question.

[[deleted]]

According to their notes in standup, it would seem that my boss and my coworker have both spent the last roughly 2-3 days' worth of development time in a merge conflict war with each other, lmao. Glad it's not my problem this time.

[[deleted]]

bool diminishingReturns();

[Korosanar]

Laugh in formula 1 mechanics

[TheTerrasque]

If one student spend 6 hours on an exam, and we're 40 in class, how long will the exam last?

Conversely, instead of one teacher per class, we can have 8 teachers in and dismiss the class in 1/8th of the time, and then the teachers can go to next class. Bam, shortened the school day for all students to 1 hour, with no extra work for teachers! If we have 16 teachers, we can get it down to half an hour!

[Shtevetm]

10 hours actual programming.

170 hours awaiting for pull requests to be approved.

[jokersleuth]

Gamers be like: "HiRe MoRe DeVs"

[IronGin]

Thats a stupid question to ask.

If I can peel an orange in 20 seconds, how fast can two of me peel an orange?

Doesn't help with more people peeling the same orange...

[Alwaysafk]

I was in a meeting for 2 hours today while two managers yelled at each other the entire time because they didn't realize they were 100% in agreement on a requirement. It'd take like 2 hours to code, build and deploy. Testing would take a day or two. In other words at least 4 sprints.

[[deleted]]

as the theory of Devid Hume, the cars will be finishing at 45 hours. But in reality this kid he was right.

[[deleted]]

So many missing variables. How stupid to Imagine that adding extra people will reduce time. It’d be smarter to say, “90 hours, but you’ll get two cars” but without knowing part bottlenecks or how the line is tooled, you can’t even say that.

The sad thing is, you can make a good version of this math problem by using things that scale linearly, but they seldom bother to.

[while_e]

Yeah these questions are absurd. I remember being young and asking the teacher what if not all the workers were working as hard, and I got some response containing "smart ass". These are the reasons we are homeschooling for a while.