2022 has brought a lot of serious losses in many areas between the return of pandemic-as-usual COVID-19 cases along with the aging of many of the early pioneers of computing and software engineering, but for me none has been more significant than the loss of Dr. Fred Brooks, Jr, the author of The Mythical Man-Month and many other foundational works on the practice of turning the abstract ideas of programmers and electrical engineers into reality. As a student in the 2000s, nothing changed my perspective on the role of project management and the associated cultural/social technologies that go into organizing the creation of computers and software quite as much as reading The Mythical Man-Month while dating someone with a deep background in Industrial Engineering and operations research.
In many ways, the practice of creating software (especially video games) has not progressed much beyond a lot of these early works, especially when it comes to delivering projects on time and on budget. This is doubly true in video games, where so much of the production lifecycle of the game is spent on things that in movies or TV we'd call "pre-production": going from pitch and concept art to in-game assets; building the tools and technologies necessary to go from an artist's imagination to worlds that can be constructed without toil and crunch; figuring out the fun; reacting to players and different perspectives; integrating that all into a single product or SKU. Brooks' Law (adding people to a late software project makes it later) still applies today and no amount of agile or anti-waterfall management style has yet to reduce the risk involved in making software. We still build games like they're aircraft being constructed in a hurricane or typhoon. From my perspective, this represents a real failure on the part of both technical and non-technical parts of many studios to find sustainable models to organize their work, but it's also just the reality of the hard work of making something that integrates art, craft, technology, and sometimes even a little research since into a shipped game.
For a more official obituary, I'd suggest Professor Steve Bellovin's remembrance which includes a very brief overview of some of Dr. Brooks work but also a lot of great personal stories about the man behind the books. In the interest of full disclosure: Professor Bellovin is also the person who most motivated me to read The Mythical Man-Month in the first place.
May Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.'s memory be a blessing and a guide for us for many years to come.
