Fareed Zarakia in The Post-American World
Throwing more manpower at a problem is not the path to innovation. The historian Philip Huang makes a fascinating comparison between the farmers of the Yangtze Delta and those of England, the richest regions of China and Europe respectively in 1800. He points out that, by some measures, the two areas might seem to have been at equivalent economic levels. But in fact, Britain was far ahead in the key measure of growth – labor productivity. The Chinese were able to make their land highly productive, but they did so by putting more and more people to work on a given acre – what Huang calls “output without development.” The English, on the other hand, kept searching for ways to make labor more productive so that each farmer was producing more crops. They discovered new labor-saving devices, using animals and inventing machines . . . Ultimately, the results was that a small number of Britons were able to farm huge swaths of land. By the eighteenth century, the average farm size in southern England was 150 acres; in the Yangtze delta, it was about 1 acre.
I feel like a lot of software companies are repeating the same mistake by throwing many warm bodies at software projects without investing enough resources into trying to improve the productivity of each programmer, with software best practices and processes instead of with plows and animals.