Tidy First?

Chapter 24. Economics: Time Value and Optionality

Somehow I got to my mid-30s understanding nothing about the nature of money. I could buy and sell stuff, I could “make” money, but I didn’t understand the physics of moving money at all.

Computing came to the rescue. A series of finance-related projects forced me to program basic money-related concepts. Since programming is how I understand the world, I started to understand money. Over time the lessons soaked into my intuition and changed how I saw development.

James Buchan in Frozen Desire (Picador) makes the case that we often want stuff but not right away, and that money represents this “frozen desire.” If you have created enough value to eat for a month, but you don’t want to store a month’s food, it’s extremely convenient to be able to store the value you’ve created and turn it into fresh lettuce a week at a time.

Money, though, is curious stuff. It has its own nature. The combination of money’s nature and money’s centrality to the work we do leads to tension. What makes sense for us to do as programmers may go contrary to the nature of money. When geeky imperatives clash with money imperatives, money wins. Eventually.

Once my lessons in the nature of money had soaked into my intuition, I found my attitude toward programming shifting. Strategies that had made perfect sense to me now seemed bizarre where they contradicted the nature of money. Strategies that had seemed fringe or sketchy or naive became just sensible money ...