I thought I was done posting content for the night, but I'm not. Not quite yet. There's one more little rant to post, and well, it just sort of popped into my head out of nowhere. Please be aware that the story which follows is purely hypothetical, and not in any related to actual persons or events. [wink wink]

Imagine that there exists a company. A company with vision. A company that has a mission statement. A company with a purpose. A company that needs things to be done. Not just one thing, but a lot of things, because these are happening times!

What does this company do in order to get all these great ideas off the ground? In the bad old days, back before the great new discoveries of "efficiency" and "cost savings", a company might have engaged in an archaic practice known back then as "hiring employees". These "employees" could then each be responsible for completing needed tasks, getting things working, keeping them maintained and running in good shape, and evolving as needed.

Though not 100% perfect, generally speaking, "employees" could be counted on to make sure things ran smoothly, especially if they were treated well and not overburdened beyond reason. This because any life form with a reasonble degree of intelligence can recognize that its own best interest is served by helping to sustain the mechanism which feeds it. Therefore, an entity with a an ongoing symbiotic affiliation with the system has an incentive to perpetuate its continued existence within that system. Common sense, right?

But there was a problem. These "employees" costed money. Not only did they demand regular salaries paid in a timely and predictable manner, but also other expensive things, like ancient concepts such as "benefits", "health insurance", and "paid vacation". No company in its right mind would want to foot all these enormous expenses, if there was any way at all they could be avoided.

Thus was born a great and mighty innovation. The era of outsourcing began, complete with the far superior system involving "contractors". Though usually more expensive than employees in terms of strict hourly pay, overall, contractors are a far cheaper solution.

(In this particular tale, we're ignoring any ideas involving overseas labor where unbalanced currency conversion ratios drastically deflate prices.)

So now let us consider the path of hypothetical Company A in this brave new economy.

Company A needs something done. A fairly large project, involving many phases of production. Those who were paying attention in Systems Analysis and Design class know the drill. Analysis must be performed, requirements must be drafted, these requirements must later be revised, fancy diagrams drawn up and presented, somewhere along the way a little bit of code might get written if you're lucky (but only after a sufficient quantity of other stuff happens), this code must then be evaluated and re-strategized, and the multifactored phases of the lifecycle commence in a synergistic response flow to balance the baseline forecasts against respecified design patterns which together produce the hyper-integrated output. Simple stuff, when you break it down.

But in our new economy, instead having employees perform each and every one of these important steps, the work is outsourced to the much more cost effective contractors. Contractors, being in no short supply due to an large influx of entities formerly classified as employees, can be found at ever cheaper rates, thus allowing Company A to approach the asymptote of 0 on the Expenses half of the balance sheet. Think of that as a sort of corporate nirvana.

To further increase efficiency, the same contractor or group of contractors need not be involved in every phase of the lifecycle. One contractor can draft the requirements, another can write up documentation ("no wait, documentation is a superfluous expense, skip it"), and since coding isn't really all that important, any random temp agency idiot can be found on the cheap for that part.

"Oh yeah, and we'll also need to find somebody else to do that last part where all the pieces fall into place and everything comes up and buzzing. It shouldn't take more than a couple hours, because all the prerequisites will be ready to go."

I don't suppose there are any bars open at 5am? Or any other places that might serve up some whiskey?

Didn't think so. Goodnight.