Decline And Fall Of The American Programmer

Rating:
Summary: A useful book, but take with a pinch of salt
Review: Firstly, this is a pretty good read as computer books go. It contains a lot of good information in an easily digestible fashion.

It's a good book to learn about a range of contemporary (ish) issues in IT - software processes, CASE tools, QA, metrics reuse etc etc. Short chapters and Yourdon's chatty style help greatly. The chapter on recommended reading has some great pointers too.

The negatives are that it's pretty superficial at times and reads very much like a consultant / salesman selling his wares rather than someone who actually runs projects for a living. In particular, the chapter on software methodologies seemed very simplistic to me (and I have had experience of many, believe me!)

Still, all in all I'd recommend this to any IT profesional who feels he/she is only exposed to a narrow range of software tools & methods and wants to know more about what else is out there.

Rating:
Summary: Does this Book Belong in the Humor Section?
Review: Five years after reading this book when it was first published, I bought a secondhand copy (as well as a copy of Rise and Resurrection) to take another look. Obviously, the American Programmer is in decline, so Ed Yourdan got that right. The question is whether the book has anything important to say to us today.

This is a book about case tools. Anybody remember them? Yourdan's argument was that the willingness of Indian programmers to use case tools would enable them to produce good, cheap software at a fraction of the cost of that generated by American 'cowboys'. His strong advice for programmers in the US was to start using mechanistic methods, so that they could also start churning out code like cookies in a cookie factory.

Most probably, Decline and Fall will remain an interesting book for students of computer science to read for many years into the future - not for what it got right, but for what it got wrong. Common wisdom today (which may become foolishness tomorrow) is that American Programmers can't hope to compete against people living in poor nations by trying to undercut them on cost, but only by using their native creativity and willingness to explore new frontiers to create truly new products.

In other words, Yourdan correctly forsaw the future, but badly misjudged the solution.

Rating:
Summary: Plausible possibility. Feeble solutions.
Review: I never bought the book but read it in one sitting at a bookstore a few years ago. I had every intention of buying the book but when I casually started viewing it, I could not put it down. By the time I was ready to make a purchase, I already read the book. (Sorry, Ed). The author is no stranger to controversy and I must admit the book at the time provoked everything from fear and anger to denial in me regarding my chosen profession. Although it's publication predates the emergence of the Internet and the vast changes that have taken place since then, industry guru Ed Yourdon gives a rather plausible thesis as to why software development could move overseas. There is no question that software engineering in India has developed a worlwide reputation for high quality and only now, in the last 3 years has the realization of his prophecy accelerated. However, the main impetus behind this trend has been to take advantage of the cheaper labor pool. It is for this reason I find the author's proposed solutions to be feeble. Increased use of CASE tools, object-oriented methods, and iterative development may improve the quality of American software but doesn't remotely address the enormous salary differential between say, Indian programmers and their American counterparts. Quality and innovation can only go so far and these practices are now already standard and widespread throught the industry.

That said, even the book's thesis is not without it's problems. The author does not seem to take into account that the workforce in the American software industry is much more diverse than it was 10 or 15 years ago, making the situation more complicated than the stereotypical lazy white guys competing against the rest of the world. Nearly a quarter of my colleagues are from India and there's no reason to suspect they're any less smarter than professionals in Bangalore. Also, the focus of the book seems to be on writing code. If that was all there was to developing and supporting information systems, I'd be inclined to agree with the author 100%. As it happens, the most complicated aspects of system development isn't always writing the code or even design, but communication involving everything from requirements analysis to coordination of development for various parts of the system encompassing database changes as well as client and middleware components. This is not to say it would be impossible to coordinate that with people on the other side of the world but difficult. It IS possible and has been tried but the results have been mixed. If my employer were to try this, they may very well save on programmer costs only to see their savings eaten up by new costs in communication infrastructure, endless business trips, more meetings...

The bottom line: Software development will continue to be delegated to oversees firms and will have a profound effect on some job prospects here and on the nature of the work itself, but the American programmer is far from becoming an endangered species.

Rating:
Summary: Free Upgrade?
Review: If the author followed his own guidelines for quality management, he would offer every owner of this book a free upgrade to "Resurrection of the American Programmer", in which he explains why he was so wrong in this book. But I think you'd be better off refusing the upgrade, and going with DeMarco, Beck, or Fowler.

Rating:
Summary: A must read for all people in the software industry
Review: Regardless of the title, this book is actually about what you can do to become a world-class organization. To quote a line from the book, "if your doing it right, quality is free." This is the book that tells you how to "do it right". Get it, read it, implement it.

Rating:
Summary: This book belongs in Humor
Review: This book claims that nearly all American Programmers would be standing in unemployment lines in 1999. Please note that everything that Yourdon does is *satire* - not real! When you realize the angle he aproaches life with, you understand the satire of this book, as well as his Y2K doomsday predictions. Better hurry, this level of satire seems like a tough one to ride!

Rating:
Summary: Bad content, worse editing
Review: This book is virtually unreadable. While reading along, you may get the beginning of one sentence, and the end of another. Don't waste your money on this book.

Rating:
Summary: I wonder how the 1998/99 reviewers feel now?
Review: This book served as a wake-up call for me in '93. Throughout the remainder of the 90's and on, I've made sure to keep my skills up to date and marketable. I've positioned myself with many technologies instead of specializing in few, and I've acquired the habit of always learning something new, even when it meant substantial investment of my own money into my only product -- me. Essentially, I became what became what is now known as a Guerilla Programmer.

Throughout the years I have been amused at the childish insults and criticizms that many have thrown at Mr. Yourdon for his predictions in this book, but never more than now. It's 2003, companies are falling over each other to "offshore" work, and IT types are literally a dime a dozen. At this point if someone tries to claim they don't know there are problems in the IT industry, they're either lying or suffering from a massive case of denial.

This book is *still* worth your time. I'll conceed that some of the technology in the book is dated (e.g. CASE), but the base concepts are not. People who cannot read this book critically and find some way to adapt the concepts to their own careers, are either not very open minded, or probably not very creative. Either way, I don't imagine the software they create is anything to e-mail home about.

Find some way to get this book and read it! If for no other reason than to compare what Mr. Yourdon predicted with what's really happened. He may have been a few years off in his timeline, but the predictions were accurate. I doubt that you will be honestly able to say that you didn't get at least one thing to think about for your money.

And while you're reading it, look at your own career. Are you in danger of having your project/department/company moved offshore? If so, it's time that you started finding ways to nuke-proof yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Great book but a little scary
Review: This is a wonderful and interesting book. Its a little scary with many cries of the sky is falling but seeing the current cut down in IT staffing levels and the number of projects being exported overseas I don't think that Yourdon was far off.

Rating:
Summary: Does this Book Belong in the Humor Section?
Review: This review is more a review of a review than a review of the book which is accurate in predicting the future but enchanted with vacous methodlogies and associated retooling. (The IT graveyard is littered with these wonderful "new" methodolgies. Speaking of which, when did methodolgy enter our lexicon. Ugh!)

I do not personally know the reviewer, Sam from NC, USA but I know he is arrogant and in for a breataking fall. My guess is he is very young. His type, and the industry is rife with them, is a major problem. I know, he is superman and the rest of us our just naysayers but please clean up your own messes.