mythical man month

This post on silver bullets is a great one. Makes you realize that while some software is just poorly designed, software engineering is an incremental process and that anyone that thinks different is fooling themselves. The author is mostly talking of fad technologies, but I also remember another paper of the problem with "throw-it away and design it again" software engineering. Sometimes you can do it better again. Most of the time you can't and just end up wasting a lot of time and money. The Mythical Man-Month should be required reading for all software engineering managers - and not as a "we can do better than that" document.