"Assumptions which may be adequate for peeling potatoes and erecting brick walls fail for designing systems." - Conway #readingToday  

One fallacy behind this calculation is the property of linearity which says that two men working for a year or one hundred men working for a week (at the same hourly cost per man) are resources of equal value. Assuming that two men and one hundred men cannot work in the same organizational structure (this it intuitively evident and will he discussed below) our homomorphism says that they will not design similar systems; therefore the value of their efforts may not even be comparable. From experience we know that the two men, if they are well chosen and survive the experience, will give us a better system. Assumptions which may be adequate for peeling potatoes and erecting brick walls fail for designing systems.