Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

> But as far as I can tell, being a good accountant is mostly a function of good training. I don't hear people described as a "born accountant". I don't see people arguing about whether one accountant is 10X more productive than the average.

Unless the author is an accountant or otherwise close to the field (e.g., talkative friend is an accountant), this is a weak statement. I doubt people not in tech know that people in tech write articles arguing about "born programmers" and "10X" programmers. Such talk is internal to our field.

Most people do know a lot about sports, because sports is very interesting for most people. Accounting and programming, on the other hand, are opaque and boring-sounding to most people. When the author talks about accounting, then (again, unless the author is an accountant or close to the field - I see no mention of either) that could be talk about a stereotype of the field of accounting, not actual accounting.

Just for fun, a non-stereotypical super-accountant is Lewis Litt from the TV show Suits. He's clearly a rockstar accountant in that show, capable of achieving things 100 average accountants can't. Is he a realistic character? I don't know, just like I don't know if the "all accountants are about the same" stereotype is true.

All of this doesn't necessarily undermine the entire point of the article, of course - maybe accounting is not a good example, but some other field could be.

I am not an accountant, but I wrote accounting software for some time.

There are two basic parts to accounting: one is very much following an algorithm. Okay, this real transaction occurred in the real world. Now you have to update your books to account for that transaction. If it's a routine transaction, there is pretty much a straightforward way to record it in your books, and you just do that until the transaction is fully recorded, and you're done.

That part is at this point in our lives fairly quickly being automated away. It's what was to a large degree responsible for the super-boring old-style image of an accountant being this person bent over mouldering books carefully noting down numbers. You guys are all programmers, I imagine you understand pretty quickly how that used to be necessary and used to involve a great deal of very routine work that none the less had to be done with great attention to detail.

The other part of accounting is essentially deciding HOW you are going to record certain kinds of transactions. Setting up the algorithm, basically, that you will then follow a thousand or ten million times each time you do a sale or a purchase or get new investment or buy more office furniture. This is definitely high-talent work! A lot of it has already been done -- if you just want to do a sale, then well, there are a few different algorithms that you more or less take off the shelf and use them. Kind of like how sorting algorithms work in our field. You don't start from scratch and reinvent sorting when you want to sort an array, you just grab quicksort or mergesort or whatever -- choose the one that's most convenient or works best for you.

What's left to do, then, is decide how to account for novel situations, or stuff that's unique to your business, and to mind the machines -- make sure that data gets fed properly into the routine algorithms.

I think that there's room for a very talented accountant, though in many businesses the accounting might be routine enough that there's not much use for a very talented accountant.

Rockstar accountants make companies like Enron. I mostly mean that in a complimentary way.

They also clean up Enron type companies. It's very different from just doing annual accounts for small businesses!

Big 4 Forensic Accountants:

- Investigate fraud.

- Quantify accidental or deliberate changes in company valuations between agreeing a sale price and the new owner getting control.

- Estimate the cost to complete engineering projects.

- Identify the value of shares and other assets owned by bankrupt banks in the absence of proper records.

And many other things, usually in a completely different domain every 4-8 weeks as their client changes.

One example is this report on electronic monitoring:

http://www.nao.org.uk/report/the-ministry-of-justices-electr...

"The Department believes that both providers charged for work that had not taken place, in a way that was outside what was set out in the contracts for the electronic monitoring of offenders. PwC’s estimate is that the potential overcharge by both providers in total may amount to tens of millions of pounds."

> this is a weak statement

The author admits as much:

"I might be on thin ice here. I need an example of a profession which does not have the same kind of enormous talent differentials that we see in sports. I could choose something like lawn mowing, but the comparison to software will work better with a field that typically requires college education. I mean no offense to accountants or bookkeepers. And if there actually is a Peyton Manning in the world of "assets=liabilities+capital", I'll be happy to stand corrected."

> All of this doesn't necessarily undermine the entire point of the article, of course - maybe accounting is not a good example, but some other field could be.

Yes, exactly.

> Unless the author is an accountant or otherwise close to the field (e.g., talkative friend is an accountant), this is a weak statement.

The author admits in the parenthetical paragraph that the accountant comparison may be weak (and welcomes corrections), but given that the target audience is most likely unaware of a Peyton Manning in the world of "assets=liabilities+capital" (if one exists) it still adequately gets the point across.

One of the commenters over on reddit gave an example of the kind of person who might be considered an elite accountant.

link: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2r845z/do_elite...

Yeah, my stepbrother is a forensic accountant. Spends large amounts of time working on and testifying at trials. And makes way more money at it than any programmer I've ever known personally.

I know a CFO who tells me he's a natural accountant, in that he says he gets intuitions about numbers, can spot problems in spreadsheets straight away, and generally outperform his staff on snap judgements on numbers. He says he thinks he was born with it.

There's a general tendency for professions to Dunning-Kruger themselves out of an understanding of the markers for real talent in other professions - or, in the more tragic cases, of the markers for real talent in their own.

The author is right to doubt his statements about accountants. I know 10x accountants. They exist mostly because the bar for "competence" at the big four accounting firms is extremely low. This results in incredible variation among accountants.

I should have chosen law as my example. No matter what I chose, it would be wrong, but picking on lawyers is more fashionable.

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