> The original reaction for that pathology is "The Mythical Man-Month", it's what started everything.

In software, Gerald Weinberg was writing about how to organize and optimize this stuff at least a decade before Brooks.

And Edwards Deming's work led to a lot of agile ideas. That strain of thinking is traceable at least back to the Napoleonic-era's Prussian artillery. The mythical man month isn't really a software problem; it's a human organization problem.

I very much agree that Brooks didn't "start everything" but I think he brought value to the discussion of those human organization problems in the context of software. Weinberg got there earlier but I feel like I personally got more of value from Brooks. Obviously YMMV.