calderarrow

I think building a superior product would be trivial and profitable for a reasonably funded, small team of developers. Most of the accounting profession uses tools that are from the 80s and 90s, so the user experience is horrible for staff accountants.

The main problem is that selling to accounting firms is difficult because procurement usually goes through partners. At the firms I worked for, our procurement process required buy-in from a majority of the partners and the product would require serious security features that are beyond my current abilities, so those two facts deterred me from pursuing that route.

The real future is integrating audit software with financial bookkeeping. This is one area where I think blockchain/smart contracts actually could be utilized to ensure audit quality. Auditors essentially look at a small portion of the transactions made by a company during a year, so software could monitor it in parallel. You’d still need an audit team to review the findings and ensure the software was working properly, but the cost would be a fraction of what it takes to audit a company by hand today.

Thank you for asking — it’s been a while since I’ve been able to geek out like this! One day I’d like to build those tools, but in the meantime I’m working on a personal finance product. It’s almost done, so hopefully you’ll see it when I submit it to HN to get dragged across the coals.

This was the book that got me into programming. About three years ago, I was an auditor looking for ways to automate the more mundane tasks of my job, and stumbled a across this book.

I had no prior experience with programming, and at the time I only wanted to learn how to write enough code to help me with my job. This book was perfect for that goal.

It took me a couple of weeks to get through it all and write the program I needed to write, but when it worked, I was amazed. I remember going to grab coffee to celebrate and on my walk I started thinking about other job tasks I could automate. Most of public accounting deals with comparing PDF reports and Excel data, so I genuinely believed I could write programs to automate the majority of tasks at my job.

I started to learn on my own with some common online resources. I would get so excited to come home from work so I could dive further into my studies, and the more I learned, the more opportunities I saw: what if there was a way for a computer to perform all the analysis and statistical processing for an audit? What if a program could monitor financial transactions and automatically complete taxes for clients?

Flash forward a few months and I went all-in on software development. Quit my job as a public accountant, finished a boot camp, and started working as a developer.

It was the best decision of my life and this book was the catalyst. I’m so grateful that Al wrote this, and I highly recommend it for people whose jobs have a lot of boring stuff —- especially public accountants :).

Tangentially related anecdote:

As an undergrad, I got to spend a semester in the ROTC capstone for second semester seniors called “Leadership and Ethics.” I remember walking in on my first day in cargo shorts and flip flops as the only civilian and non-senior student. Everyone else was in full uniform. The class was taught by a Marine Officer.

As a business student, I realized how similar the military and business can be. Most of the theory of leadership and management aims to address a fundamental goal: how do you get people to do something they may not necessarily want to do. Whether that’s making widgets or killing someone, the underlying theories are quite similar.

The main difference I noticed between the two fields was the military’s emphasis on trust. You were to respect a chain of command because you could trust your commanding officer. You were expected to perform your best because you could trust your teammates to do the same. The reason soldiers could rely on this trust was because their superiors had gone through the bullshit and could manage from a seat of positional and experiential authority.

In the business world, they taught management as if having positional authority would automatically create trust and inspire subordinates. MBA students graduate and come into supervisory roles without any prior experience in the underlying work and get mixed results. Part of me wonders whether this is due to ineptitude or simply inexperience.

I remember finishing that course and thinking I really should study engineering because I knew that wanted to play a role in managing and leading technical teams working on innovative problems.

Fast forward a few years and I left my role in public accounting to go into industry, but instead of going into finance or internal accounting I chose to learn development and spend a few years experiencing what it’s like to be a developer, so that one day when I’m managing a technical team I can actually know when they’re giving me a legitimate justification for something, and when they’re just bullshitting me.

Having been a developer for a couple years now, I don’t know how I could have managed a technical team without this experience. I think back to my “career plan” before I took that class and remember thinking that I’d not only be able to find a managerial position upon graduation, but that I’d be able to lead effectively as a 22 year old. What a foolish 20 year old I was!

Anyway, this is really just a roundabout way of saying I loved my class and have tremendous respect for military leadership. I would have loved to have more classes with officers and veterans, and hope my kids get that opportunity someday.

This is excellent advice which has even been echoed by Warren Buffet [0]. Time is a finite resource and therefore everything we do is a trade-off between depth and breadth. In a given day, you could spend 1 hour learning 24 subjects, or 24 hours learning 1 subject. One isn't necessarily better than the other, but it's a constraint we all operate around. Learning 24 subjects may be interesting and fulfilling to some, but from a professional standpoint those that tend to be most influential in their respective fields are those that devote the most time towards their subjects. There are exceptions of course, but this is the general advice for the general population.

Recently, I've started to adopt a similar perspective by rigorously evaluating everything with a simple question: "20 years from now, will my kids be proud that I did this?" If the answer is no, I stop it. So far, I've stopped playing video games and using social media, and I've noticed that I've gotten an extra 10-15 hours per week to spend on things that will make me a better person in the long term, like reading, working out, and spending time with my friends and family.

The same approach could be used with any endeavor: "In X years, will I be better at <subject> if I continue to do Y?"

[0] https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus

One of the subtle considerations when discussing non-profits is that any organization can be a non-profit, but in order to get tax exemption you have to meet certain requirements related to your mission and how your organization is organized [0]. One of the exempt requirements is education, and there are numerous ways in which it could be argued that a local news outlet can operate as a medium for educating local constituents of important events.

I spent a number of years working in public accounting in the DC area, almost exclusively with non-profit organizations on both the audit and tax side. Tax exempt organizations come under a fair amount of scrutiny, because of how valuable their tax exemption status is, and the government checks everything from executive compensation to programatic expenditures. Most have to get audited annually, and you can read their audited financial statements just like how you could read Apple's or Google's [1].

A key note about tax exempt organizations is that as soon as they start to earn income from activities that compete with typical for-profit organizations, they have to pay corporate taxes on that income. I saw some people implying that Amazon could become a subcompany of WaPo and avoid taxes, which, while technically is in the realm of possibility, would have 3 major consequences: firstly, the 501(c)3 non-profit parent organization can't make dividend-like disbursements to shareholders, so the money would be tied up in the non-profit, secondly, excessive compensation to employees could result in massive punitive taxes [2], and thirdly, the revenue that WaPo would receive would most likely be taxable unrelated business income. Bezos would be better off keeping Amazon separate and donating cash to WaPo -- at least then he'd be able to get a write off.

[0] irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/exempt-purposes-internal-revenue-code-section-501c3

[1] There are several sites, but guidestar.org is the one I've mostly used.

[2] irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organizations/intermediate-sanctions-excess-benefit-transactions

During the American revolutionary war, France was a tremendous ally and instrumental to the colonies’ secession from Britain. The Marquis de Lafayette came over to fight for us, without pay, in his early 20s, forgoing his family’s desires and aristocratic opportunities. His family was so opposed to him going to the colonies, that local governments were involved in finding and preventing him from boarding ships. He eventually made his way over here, and fought for glory and because of his own sense of morality.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the HK scenario and wondering what I can do, but I can’t shake a nagging feeling that I could simply go over there and fight alongside the protestors. I often deflect with observations like “I don’t speak the language,” or “I don’t know what I would do to help,” and yet the thought keeps coming back.

I wonder whether Lafayette would have done the same if he were alive in our time. I think the answer is he would, and that I am more of a coward than I want to believe.

Often is subjective, but he does contradict himself a number of times greater than 0. http://www.trumpcriticizestrump.com/