---
title: Give Every Developer a $5k Outsourcing Budget
date: 2007-07-16T16:41:43Z
modified: 2007-07-16T16:41:43Z
permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/give-every-developer-a-5k-outsourcing-budget/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: ""
wpid: 1201
categories:
  - Uncategorized
timestamp: 2007-07-16T16:41:43Z
tags:
  - Uncategorized
---

Bex Huff is a bit of a contrarian if [this blog entry](http://bexhuff.com/top-down-vs-bottom-up) is anything to go by. Taking on one of Redmonk’s favourite subjects- Top Down vs Bottom up, [encouraged by James McGovern](http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2007/07/enterprise-architecture-top-down-or.html), he suggests that outsourcing could be a useful bottom up phenomenon.

> There’s nothing wrong with giving your middle managers a budget to outsource. Heck, I see nothing wrong with giving every developer a $5,000k budget, and let them “outsource” some tricky code to another developer who can do it in half the time. Or buy a awesome monitor. As long as there’s modest oversight, and your developers aren’t idiots, there’s very little harm that can be done.”

This kind of thinking is enough to give all kinds of people conniption fits, but if you want your employees to help your customers kick ass (as Shirky or Sierra would put it), you may just have to trust them. Of course procurement managers, CFOs, most CIOs, and their key suppliers (and analyst watchers) are going to dismiss the idea that “lower” level employees could make smart purchasing and management decisions. For RedMonk on the other hand, we take it as read that the grassroots gets things done.