Relevant Definitions
(from the Hacker's Dictionary)

:Mongolian Hordes technique: [poss. from the Sixties counterculture
   expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy]
   n. Development by {gang bang}.  Implies that large numbers of
   inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed
   by a few skilled ones.  Also called `Chinese Army technique'; see
   also {Brooks's Law}.

:gang bang: n. The use of large numbers of loosely coupled
   programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a
   product in a short time.  Though there have been memorable gang
   bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in
   Steven Levy's "Hackers"), most are perpetrated by large
   companies trying to meet deadlines; the inevitable result is
   enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in
   {orthogonal}ity.  When market-driven managers make a list of all
   the features the competition has and assign one programmer to
   implement each, the probability of maintaining a coherent (or even
   functional) design goes infinitesimal.  See also {firefighting},
   {Mongolian Hordes technique}, {Conway's Law}.

:Conway's Law: prov. The rule that the organization of the software and
   the organization of the software team will be congruent; originally
   stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll
   get a 4-pass compiler".

   Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the
   Burroughs 220 called SAVE.  The name `SAVE' didn't stand for
   anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings
   because they all had SAVE written on them.

:Brooks's Law: prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project
   makes it later" --- a result of the fact that the expected
   advantage from splitting work among N programmers is
   O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity
   and communications cost associated with coordinating and then
   merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the
   square of N).  The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of
   IBM's OS/360 project and author of "The Mythical Man-Month"
   (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an excellent early book
   on software engineering.  The myth in question has been most
   tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks
   established conclusively that it is not.  Hackers have never
   forgotten his advice; too often, {management} still does.  See
   also {creationism}, {second-system effect},
   {optimism}.

:creationism: n. The (false) belief that large, innovative software
   designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly
   magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of
   normally talented programmers.  In fact, experience has shown
   repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary,
   exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of)
   exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population ---
   and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong.
   Unfortunately, because these truths don't fit the planning models
   beloved of {management}, they are generally ignored.

:management: n. 1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by
   their distance from actual productive work and their chronic
   failure to manage (see also {suit}).  Spoken derisively, as in
   "*Management* decided that ...".  2. Mythically, a vast
   bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations.
   Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed `The Mgt'; this
   derives from the "Illuminatus" novels (see the Bibliography in
   {Appendix C}).