The Mythical Rose Month
Why The Bachelor/The Bachelorette doesn’t work, according to The Mythical Man Month
Everlasting Love (but like, fast)
The Bachelor/The Bachelorette: A bachelor/bachelorette spends 2 months dating ~25 people who all live together in a mansion on TV, culminating in an engagement to their supposed everlasting match. As we all know, Reality TV competitions are the best, smartest way to solve any problem.
However, in looking at the data for the 38 Bachelor/Bachelorette seasons so far, only 5 are married to their final picks, a 13% success rate. This falls far short of the show’s premise.
So, the question that no one needs to ask in a framework that no one asked for:
Using ideas from the Mythical Man Month, why doesn’t The Bachelor/The Bachelorette work?
First, a little Mythical Man-Month background…
For those unfamiliar, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks is a popular book on software product development that carries a seemingly counterintuitive central theme:
adding engineers to a project slows development down rather than speeding it up.
Brooks discusses the idea of a “man-month,” a unit of work to measure time and effort on a project. The conventional wisdom to calculate a project deadline is to estimate the number of man-months a project requires, then divide that by the number of engineers. Additionally, to speed the project up, increase the number of engineers. What a cool, smart, way to create accountable, vital business dates for incredibly complex work. Of course, Brooks rejects this idea.
The idea that you can reach a tough goal more quickly by increasing the number of people involved is held by many organizations…and also the Bachelor franchise.
The Bachelor/Bachelorette believes that to find a marriage partner in such a short time period, you have to add in more people.
Let’s see why this falls apart using ideas from The Mythical Man-Month:
Overestimating Productivity
Coding requires time, and you have less coding time than you think. Often, project estimates are based on ideal states of 100% of time being efficient coding. It doesn’t account for:
- Ceremonies (standup, all hands, planning meetings, etc.)
- Requirements discovery/rediscovery
- Administrative tasks
- Friday afternoons
- Cool internet videos that must be watched
Same thing goes for The Bachelor/Bachelorette. While all the contestants and the lead are there at once, only a small portion of the time goes to productive relationship building:
- Production/shooting needs: capturing b-roll, filming in-the-moment/talking heads, talking to production
- Inefficient dating: with only 1 lead but multiple contestants, the time spent is often in group dates where it’s difficult to strengthen a single relationship significantly
- Travel: dates are all over the world, and for the long trips, the leads don’t travel with the contestants
Former contestant and lead Ali Fedotowsky has said, “You spend so little time with the person you choose before the final rose ceremony. I would say you probably spend about 72 hours tops with the person you wind up choosing…”
More people = increased communication needs
Coding requires communication, as projects cannot be perfectly split into separate tasks that can be worked on solo. This means that adding people to a project increases the amount of communication necessary. With so many cooks in the kitchen, there are a multitude of decisions and vital information spread across several brains. Ultimately, that has to be aligned into working software as well one product vision. Woof. Adding more people slows things down.
In the world of The Bachelor/Bachelorette, adding people adds more communication. It’s bad enough for communication needs that the lead has to communicate with each of the contestants individually and establish several separate relationships, but the lead also has to manage communications and relationships between the contestants.
Supposedly, the main tension of the show is, “Who will the lead pick?” However, much more time is dedicated to, “How will the lead manage all of the conflicts between the different contestants?”
No silver bullet.
Brooks states:
“…there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.”
Software projects are hard.
Stuff is hard.
Finding everlasting love is hard, and probably harder on reality television.
But people will keep trying, and I will keep watching.
So if The Bachelor/The Bachelorette doesn’t work, how are you supposed to find your soulmate?
Based on a thorough analysis of reliable data, the clear answer is to airdrop memes to strangers while on the subway.
