I, Engineer

Written by Jamie Wednesday, 13 October 2010 13:13

in defence - master deck.001
We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.
Chesterton

Financial Agile is a charity. This message seems to be a very difficult one to get across. People don’t believe me. Our aim is to help groom the next generation of software and financial engineers and managers. We do this via our essays, our talks, and, in my case, via coaching. Last night was our first talk, which was based on our essay from the summer. Two things happened:

at the end of the talk, a participant said that what I was saying would be tough for our clients and therefore, since scrum, according to him, is easy to sell, we’d struggle to sell our concepts.

I offered another participant the talk for her colleagues and she asked me what it would cost.

My responses were, ‘we aren’t selling anything’ and ‘it would be free’. I do notice that many people are really battered by there jobs and get themselves stuck in a certain pattern of thought. I always say that the real scarcity for the poor is time and education, not a lack of money. Ridley wrote in Francis Crick Discover of the Genetic Code, the middle classes are defined by memories and habits. So too are the poor. ^{The poor are operational and the middle-classes strategic. Each can learn from the other. But, what is a fact, and what I talked about last night, is that without a strategic eye, growth is impossible.} It’s circular: we need time to educate and education to find time. The modern professional has to break out of their own poverty cycle. This requires great sacrifice and a lot of hard work. Giving up a Tuesday evening is an example of this and I am very thankful for those who made the effort.

The night was a laugh. We managed, which was maybe our greatest achievement, to get in the room financial engineers, software engineers, managers, a record producer and a black-belt in Aikido. The discussions, to my surprise, moved forward rather well. One participant said she’d recently been on a course in MatLab and all of her fellow participants agreed how cool it was that they could write something, throw it over the wall (her expression, not mine) and never have to deal with software engineers *ever* again. This got a laugh but kicked off a great discussion about a truth that we often ignore: financial and software engineers can’t usually stand each other. We continued to talk about processes to get the two working together and that caused me to chip in with my experiences from web-development. In the old days, 2000, the web-agencies I knew struggled getting designers and programmers to work together (they also despised each other). I suggested that financial engineering could therefore learn from what happened with the web lot.

Other things came up. Finance companies often send a man to do a machine’s job because they can afford to. Again, some web-agencies still do this and pass the costs on to their big customers (which is why a site that my mate Micha and I could do for €13,000 ends up costing €130,000). The morality of using a well-qualified analyst to crunch numbers was discussed. We talked about the failure of the agile software development movement, the danger of models and how the ones that make software development look easy are the easiest to sell. We spoke about the Leonard E. Read’s 1958 essay, ‘I, Pencil’ and compared the pencil to modern projects... the retromovers must not succeed because anything interesting now needs a lot of people to work on it. No one person can make a pencil or anything interesting in the world of finance.

The evening was action packed. I deliberately didn’t wrap my slides up. I am trying my best not to be didactic and instead just explain, story tell, and let everyone make their own minds up.

References
Ridley, M[att]. ((2008) [2006]) Francis Crick Discover of the Genetic Code. Harper Perennial.

Read, Leonard E. (1958) ‘I, Pencil’, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Available from: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPnclCover.html.