Rise & resurrection of the American programmer
Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer is a book written by Edward Yourdon in 1996. It is the sequel to Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
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2recommend
7mentions
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2012–2025years
29% recommend71% neutral
Mentions per year
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- I can give you the names of a handful of books that might be useful. Some are more technical, some less so. Some are more about personalities, some about the business aspects of things, some more about the actual technology. I don't really have time to try and categorize them all, so here's a big dump of the ones I have and/or am familiar with that seem at least somewhat related.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineeri...
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le...
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espiona...
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet - https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing - https://www.amazon.com/Open-Compaq-Domination-Helped-Computi...
Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - https://www.amazon.com/Decline-American-Programmer-Yourdon-1...
Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer - https://www.amazon.com/dp/013121831X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&key...
Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date - https://www.amazon.com/Robert-X-Cringely/dp/0887308554/ref=s...
Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle - https://www.amazon.com/Softwar-Intimate-Portrait-Ellison-Ora...
Winners, Losers & Microsoft - https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Competition-...
Microsoft Secrets - https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Secrets-audiobook/dp/B019G2...
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture - https://www.amazon.com/The-Friendly-Orange-Glow-audiobook/dp...
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age - https://www.amazon.com/Troublemakers-Silicon-Valleys-Coming-...
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire - https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp...
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...
The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and The Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer - https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...
Bitwise: A Life in Code - https://www.amazon.com/Bitwise-Life-Code-David-Auerbach/dp/1...
Gates - https://www.amazon.com/Gates-Microsofts-Reinvented-Industry-...
We Are The Nerds - https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Nerds-audiobook/dp/B07H5Q5JGS/...
A People's History of Computing In The United States - https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-Computing-United-Stat...
Fire In The Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer - https://www.amazon.com/Fire-in-Valley-audiobook/dp/B071YYZJG...
How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone - https://www.amazon.com/How-Internet-Happened-Netscape-iPhone...
Steve Jobs - https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648...
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovatio...
Coders - https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Making-Tribe-Remaking-World/dp...
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software - https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-in-Code-Scott-Rosenberg-audi...
The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency - https://www.amazon.com/Pentagons-Brain-Uncensored-Americas-T...
The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World - https://www.amazon.com/Imagineers-War-Untold-Pentagon-Change...
The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - https://www.amazon.com/Technical-Social-History-Software-Eng...
Also...
"The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Englebart - https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY
"Jobs vs Gates" - https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Vs-Gates-Hippie-Nerd/dp/B077KB96...
"Welcome to Macintosh" - https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Macintosh-Guy-Kawasaki/dp/B00...
"Pirates of Silicon Valley" - https://www.amazon.com/Pirates-Silicon-Valley-Noah-Wyle/dp/B...
"Jobs" - https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Ashton-Kutcher/dp/B00GME2NCG/ref...
And while not a documentary, or meant to be totally historically accurate, the TV show "Halt and Catch Fire" captures a lot of the feel of the early days of the PC era, through to the advent of the Internet era.
https://www.amazon.com/I-O/dp/B00KCXJCEK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=U6Z...
And there's a ton of Macintosh history stuff captured at:
- He wrote a sequel The Rise and Resurrection Of The American Programmer not that long after. Its worth checking out if you can find a copy. A real snapshot of history and insight into the culture of the time.
- Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992.
Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.
Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.
- And when it didn't happen he wrote "Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Resurrection_of_the_A... .
> In the original, written at the beginning of the 1990s, Yourdon warned American programmers that their business was not sustainable against foreign competition. By the middle of the decade Microsoft had released Windows 95, which marked a groundbreaking new direction for the operating system, the internet was beginning to rise as a serious consumer marketplace, and the Java software platform had made its first public release. Due to such large changes in the state of the software industry, Yourdon reversed some of his original predictions.
- This saturation of demand for software talent has been predicted for literally decades. In 1992, Ed Yourdon published “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” only to reverse himself four years later with the publication of “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
If anything, the rate at which capable software professionals can create value has dramatically increased over time. Software is not a zero sum game, cumulative advances make it possible to solve an expanding frontier of problems with increasingly effective and efficient solutions.
- I think you are actually exactly opposite on this.
There are actually two books that were written about this very topic, one called "The decline and fall of the American Programmer", which was essentially making your argument, that American quality going down meant we would get eclipsed, and "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer", written by the same author, saying "oops, I was wrong", because "good enough" is the winning strategy, not quality at all costs.
Note that at the time of those writings, the 'sloppy' guys were Microsoft, which is still way way more process than your typical RoR shop today has. In the days of shipping new software to websites three times a day, pragmatism rules all.
As the saying goes: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
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