Outsource This!

By Jack J. Woehr

November 29, 2004

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Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race
Edward Yourdon
2005, Prentice Hall
ISBN 0-13-147571-1

Ed Yourdon should have stopped while he was ahead. After his 1992 Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, which announced the apocalypse for that class of knowledge workers and failed to predict the Internet boom which immediately followed, Yourdon hurried to retrace his steps. His 1996 no-contest plea, Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, more or less successfully buried alive his early phatic utterances. Yourdon's titles themselves tell you all that you need to know about the man as a writer. A resurrection is just a special case of a rise. He might have titled it Resurgence of the American Programmer, but as the reader soon discovers, Yourdon's four literary cornerstones are redundancy, superficiency, truism and tautology.

It's up to you to decide where you're willing to compromise and negotiate, and where you're not.
—Outsource, pg. 113

The author, one suspects, feels he deserves our thanks for having cleared that up. And here's a passage in which he explains the law of supply and demand, a passage composed entirely of undigested snippets of conventional thinking juxtaposed in a fashion which calls to mind Matt Stone and Trey Parker's satirical "Team America" movie:

We don't just "want" cheap prices; we demand cheap prices. And we have an effective way of imposing our demand: As long as we live in a country that supports free enterprise, within certain regulatory limits, we have the ability to choose Product A over Product B. if we do it often enough, and consistently enough, Product B eventually disappears from the marketplace. Unfortunately, this creates a conflict that oblivious consumers don't recognize, astute consumers don't want to accept, and politicians get punished for even acknowledging.

By 1996 Yourdon was roughly even at the green baize tables of futurism.

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