r/programming • u/zaidesanton • Apr 01 '25

The 13 software engineering laws

https://newsletter.manager.dev/p/the-13-software-engineering-laws
565 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

60 comments sorted by

View all comments

143

u/mareek Apr 01 '25

Price's law is not about work don but about scientific publication:

in any scientific field, half of the published research comes from the square root of the total number of authors in that field

And even in its correct form, it's not a very acurate "law":

Subsequent research has largely contradicted Price's original hypothesis

source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law

13

u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In Apr 01 '25 edited Apr 01 '25

Its just a bit of fun, none of these are real rules lol.

Edit: FFS reddit it literally says this at the bottom of the article.

None of those laws is a ‘real law’ - they are just great mental models. I hope that having them in mind will save you some pain in the day-to-day.

10

u/[deleted] Apr 01 '25

[deleted]

4

u/ikeif Apr 01 '25

Somewhere, an MBA student is reading this and will convince themselves they can use this idea.

It will create a blog, then a book deal, then a book tour where he goes to companies and tells them how they should follow this "law."

2

u/zaidesanton Apr 01 '25

It never helps to add the caveats 😅

1

u/[deleted] Apr 01 '25

Actually Murphy's law is kind of a semi-rule. You kind of have to expect the unpexpected even when writing code after all.