The vanished grandeur of accounting (2014)
bostonglobe.com
bostonglobe.com
“I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.
“But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.
“The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable.
“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
There's a balance to strike. You want to be able to be bored (when I worked at a government elections office for 8 months). But you also want to have the drive to not be bored anymore (when I automated away my job and got in a lot of trouble).
Computers truly are magic.
Imagine teaching coding skills to an impatient friend. “Okay, today we’re going to learn about Node package management and resolving merge conflicts!”
Lisa: a challenge I could do!
Even when we "solve hard problems", they mostly come down to convincing a computer to process some mundane data faster.
At the end of the day, we spend all day in front of a monitor talking to the most pedantic bureaucracy ever made, one with no human leeway unless explicitly specified.
But we have so many tricks to convince ourselves we're not bored or boring! We "automate", "solve hard problems", and "optimize".
Absolutely beautiful. It so wonderfully captures the essence of modern day work life so well.
This is also pertinent to much of corporate america as well. Corporate office jobs are prone to magic of ennui and boredom.
I've often wondered how people dealt with office work or jobs before the internet? Did they play solitaire and minesweeper all day?
https://www.businessinsider.com/personality-conscientiousnes...
As a programmer, I love watching her work because it’s so similar to programming on a higher level.
I have a weird, romantic, fascination with what others might find dreadfully boring bean-counting...
Indeed it is. The logic of the `results` has to stand out relative to the result itself. A programmer can hide the logic without too much pushback; an accountant must not only unhide what is hidden, but explain every "trace route" behind what is hidden. In highly complex systems, this has to be done in a methodical way to ensure audit trails. A non-methodical audit trail is the sign of a bad accountant, or of fraud. One of the most insidious things in the accounting world today is the widening discrepancy between what companies are reporting to shareholders and what GAAP requires they report. Both GAAP and non-GAAP earnings must be reported together (for publicly-traded companies), but in a lot of tech companies, they are getting away with "selling" the non-FASB numbers to shareholders to deceive them that they are doing better than they are.
Another interesting comparison of the two: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmaCQ5rcvfwhVNmLWdWydKBFDwnVZzexKePMxiy...
There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"
"An operating system," replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.
"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"
The programmer made no reply.
The Dutch figured out how to make low-margin businesses work at scale. They built big, slow, stable ships with large cargo capacity to ship routine cargo. They were derided as "herring-tamers", because pickled herring was a profitable business. These low-margin businesses required cost control, or the whole operation could deliver the goods and still lose money. Thus the importance of accounting.
Today, it is totally opposite. In provincial Russia today, only two professions that are guaranteed to make person a living are programmer (because these can work for Western customers so earn a lot) and an accountant (because these need to cook the books and be really inventive at that, as without it, any business will go bust, system works like that). They are just as respected as programmers are. And the job itself isn't as boring as it used to be because it require a lot of trickery because you usually need to be able to scam several parties at once, not just the government, but also the formal owners.
I enjoyed his perspective but I can't help but wonder what his ultimate point is. For everyone to appreciate accounting in our culture and art? If anything I feel we have a healthy appreciation of accounting and auditing where it matters; in our institutional & governance frameworks. We have audits of auditors, schools, financial institutions, governments, agriculture and foodstuffs etc etc. It's far from perfect but the 1600s could only dream of the role and importance of accounting and auditing today, regardless of the cultural position.
Accountants used to be merchants, businessmen, politicians, lenders, financiers, and insurers all rolled into one. Now they are (at entry level, or working for the state at least) seen as excel jockeys and bean counters enforcing some arcane business/legal code that nobody else wants to touch
And as much as I hate to bring in taleb, most accountants/auditors have no skin in the game, and therefore what they do is intriscally boring. If they stood to lose a pound of flesh as in the merchant of Venice when the businesses they oversee go bankrupt, perhaps they would be written about in Shakespearean terms today
Bit of an ironic comment given that almost all accounting/auditing firms are partnerships. The participants arguably have more skin in the game than any other corporate entity of comparable complexity.
Few entry-level jobs are glamorous. An accountant at the top of their trade is a CFO or financial crimes prosecutor.
Sarbanes-Oxley says otherwise
[1] https://www.wikiart.org/en/jan-provoost/death-and-the-miser
Having relatives that are accountants, I am interested in seeing more of the Dutch and English paintings of accountants described, but not named, in the article. If anyone knows any, please post.
Edit: This article contains a list of such paintings, and there is a link to the PDF which contains images. https://www.accountant.nl/magazines/accountant-2016-q2/boekh...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndics_of_the_Drapers%27_Guil...
I need to publish ... :-)
The current wave of reducing everything to a combination of 'data & algorithm' and tackling every problem with more data and better algorithms is the logical end-point of the control revolution that started in the 19th century. - Ashwin Parameswaran (2012)