This is a hilarious joke.
A pet store owner places an advertisement on Monster.com. The ads says “Programming moneys to replace your expensive programmers”.
This is another way of “Outsourcing”. Does it sound familiar?
An IT manger sees the ads and stop by the pet store. He sees many cages when see enters the store. Each cage has one monkey and a price tag hung on the cage.
He grabs a monkey with a $5000 price tag and figure it is only worth one month salary for a middle level programmer which is not bad deal at all. He asks the shopkeeper what kind of programming language this monkey knows after he pays the $5000. The shopkeeper replies “Ah, that monkey can program in C – very fast, tight code, no bugs, well worth the money.”
A month later, the IT manger showed up in the store again, the cages were half empty already. He told the storekeeper that he is very satisfied with the performance with the monkey and he let his C programmer go. He bought another $10000 monkey and asked the storekeeper the same question what kind of programming language this monkey knew.
“Oh, that one's a C++ monkey; it can manage object-oriented programming" said the shopkeeper.
A month later, most cages were empty and there are only a few cages which still had monkeys. The IT manager grabbed another $20000 monkey and asked storekeeper the same question again what the programming capability this monkey has. “Oh, this one knows every programming from C, C++. Java and Microsoft Dot.net.” the storekeeper replied.
The IT manger saw only one monkey left in a cage with a $50000 price tag, when he returned to the store a month later. He was puzzled why this monkey is so expensive and curiously ask the storekeeper what kind of specialty is worth $50000.
The storekeeper replies “It says it doesn’t know any programming at all, but it claims it is a contractor”.
Guess what? I am the last monkey in the pet store. What do we learn from this joke? You don’t have to be a doer, but you need to be a talker.