Brooks's Law
Brooks's Law — "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" — was formulated by Fred Brooks in his 1975 classic The Mythical Man-Month. It explains why the intuitive response to a project falling behind schedule (adding more people) reliably backfires in software development, and often makes things worse. The underlying insight extends to any knowledge work where ramp-up time and communication overhead scale superlinearly with team size.
Rubber Duck Debugging
Rubber Duck Debugging is the practice of explaining a problem in detail to an inanimate listener — traditionally a rubber duck — to solve it. The act of articulating a problem precisely and sequentially, out loud or in writing, triggers the self-explanatory process that reveals where reasoning has gone wrong or where assumptions are unjustified. Widely used in software engineering, it extends to any problem-solving context where verbalisation clarifies thinking.