Great Drama and Oil Trading

This is one of my favorite scenes from Syriana (no spoilers):

Alexander Siddig as Prince Nasir Al-Subaai : I want to create a parliament. I want to give women the right to vote. I want an independent judiciary. I want to start a petroleum exchange in the Middle East, cut the speculators out of the business. Why are the major oil exchanges in London and New York anyway? I’ll put all of our energy out for competitive bidding. I’ll run a pipe through Iran to Europe like you proposed. I’ll ship to China. anything that achieves efficiency and maximizes profit, profit which I will then use to rebuild my country.

Matt Damon as an energy market analyst: Great, that’s exactly what you should do.

Al-Subaai: Exactly, except your president rings my father and says, I’ve got unemployment in Texas, Kansas, Washington state. One phone call later and we’re stealing out of our social programs in order to buy overpriced airplanes. We’ve owed the Americans but we’ve repaid that debt.

Awesome Drama!

And yeah, why in the world are the major oil exchanges in London and New York anyway?! Okay, those are the two major financial centers of the West, which is the center of humanity’s financial power, but what business do speculators have as the largest buyers and sellers of petroleum? I would love to see a thousand barrels of crude delivered to the Goldman Sachs reception desk. Commodities trading originated as a way for supply and demand to lock each other into contracts. As uncertainty about prices grew, so did the commodities trading business, and so entered non-supply-non-demand players like these investment banks and hedge funds. What good do they do for anyone? The best argument I have heard in their defense is that their trades provide liquidity and data points for market researchers, but that does not seem plausible. Since financial trading floors represent neither supply nor demand, they introduce noise, not true votes on the intrinsic price of the commodity.

This is one of many signs I see of over-financialization of a modern economy – more and more of our GDP derives from financial papershuffling rather than actual value creation. Not to make any predictions of a Rome-like decline, but it’s a shame.

A Golden Age for Software Engineers

I recently attended a discussion about Agile, and I realized there that I’m pretty spoiled as a software engineer. I entered into this profession at a time when I can complain about the Eclipse IDE because it is not as good as IntelliJ and when I can submit code changes via Perforce rather than by paper. And my first industry experience is at a company that practices Agile and TDD, utilizes separate code branches for active development versus stable, maintains a huge test infrastructure of unit tests and automated UI test scripts, and has a cubicle-free open office setup in which founders sit next to new hires.

Like a fish never knowing air, these are all second-nature to me and I only realized that they are not ubiquitous until I experienced how difficult it is to pick up someone else’s (broken) code that is totally devoid of tests, or learned that a company like Google only has one code branch… so that any other engineer working on something completely unrelated could break your piece of functionality. I’ve surprised engineers at other companies by telling them that our test infrastructure is completely automated, prompting them to ask, “So what do your QA do?” “…. They write the automated scripts!” And I’m really glad that my projects are prioritized and defined a la Agile rather than by spec writers or sales & marketing professionals or, worse yet, government bureaucrats. Things could be better at my company, but then they could also be much, much worse.

As for all this discussion about Agile this and XP that and Scrum somesuch, I used to wonder what all the fuss was about. Agile (click for “manifesto”) is basically about maximizing collaboration within a software team and being flexible enough to absorb changes in requested features. Actually, I believe that XP and Scrum fit that description, too, and I don’t care what you call it as long as it works for the team. I also thought it was all fairly commonsensical, until I realized that it was only in recent years and in certain circles that people started talking about Agile or XP or Scrum. For example, software team management at Microsoft is definitely not agile. I’m not saying that’s good or bad for a company like Microsoft, but I have to believe that large corporations and government contractees do not naturally think in terms of product releases with adjustable feature sets. Works well for the typical smallish Silicon Valley software company, though. Mehran Sahami once described computer scientists as akin to geometers in the time of Euclid, and to a lesser extent the same could be said about Agile practitioners.

The question I’d like answered next is, What is the maximum team size at which the team can still be agile?