Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

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This is what happens when you let the accountants run the business.

This is so completely not true. Worked with the Finance Dept heavily at my last job. The accountants keep track of the expenses, and make sure everyone is sticking to the budgets...but the accountants don't make the budgets. Management does. The accountants are the ones making sure that the company can actually pay for everything.

To an accountant, a drop in costs is as valuable to the business as a rise in revenue.

This is also false. To an accountant, a drop in costs is literally the exact opposite of a rise in revenue. (For comparison, it would be like saying that to a software developer having a more powerful computer is the same as writing your software to be more efficient.) A drop in costs is only valuable to the accounting team if there's not enough money to pay for everything, because then the drop in costs makes it possible to pay for more of the bills that the rest of the company incurs. The Finance Dept would absolutely prefer to see more revenue over a drop in costs, because revenue is repeatable and sustainable, while reducing costs is not.

Management are the folks that only cares about the bottom line regardless of how it's reached.

Blame management.

> Blame management.

By "blame accountants" the OP was referring to management being accountants. Nobody sincerely believes that accountants have the power to do layoffs, but managements that were previously accountants won't see the long term destruction in value, only the short term profits.

If anyone understands the concept of investment, it is someone in finance. To claim they only care about cutting costs maximizing revenue today at the expense of the future is ridiculous.

The typical techbro understanding of corporate finance is shockingly shallow

the typical accountant's understanding of technology and product development even if they're in a company that does that is shockingly shallow

An amazingly uninsightful truism: people have a shallow understanding of topics that they are not intimately familiar with.

Perhaps this is why accountants and MBA types run businesses and software devs continue to just develop software for their bosses. You know, the ones who understand business more deeply. Because that's what they do. To misappropriate Sorkin: if software devs are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?

The difference is, accountants aren't telling the software engineers that they don't know how computer science works.

People in finance don’t really understand or care about engineering R&D and long term investment in engineering culture, possibly because the effects of these things haven’t been quantified scientifically. It’s simply another line item. They do acutely understand the effects of numbers on their stock compensation though.

and people in engineering R&D and "engineering culture" (whatever that means) are completed disconnected from reality when it comes to making payroll. And i say this as a software engineer myself.

Im not sure what your point is except to state a contrary position. Try to contribute better next time.

The problem is that the management that we are referring to were accountants.

They were engineers.

Yes, the guys who had the bright idea to just cut R&D and all capital investment were engineers, not accountants.

There is a world of difference between accountants, and the MBAs who are running the show.

Yep. When you're at a growth company that enters cost reduction mode, it's a good time to start looking for another opportunity. "Why is AWS going up? Get that cloud bill down. Do you really need all these monitoring services? Cancel them." They should be focusing on revenue, like you said.

I don't blame anyone. I want the world to evolve into one where our society puts human welfare first. Blaming does not help that happen at all.

It is easy to get caught in a trap thinking heavily about money. When thinking about things we own, the emotion and fear centers are aroused far more than when we think about other people. To avoid this, I believe our society must be trained away from neoliberal and 'greed is good' thought.

Blaming people for this state of events, or the addictive qualities of facebook, or the dangerous misinformation spread designed to take advantage of cognitive flaws of the human mind - these practices will get us nowhere. One thing that businesses started doing right was the blameless postmortem.

Find the problem, fix it. Move on.

I don't disagree with the main point you are making, but I would consider this argument to be a bit weak "For comparison, it would be like saying that to a software developer having a more powerful computer is the same as writing your software to be more efficient."

There's a lot of companies out there that just throw some more hardware at a problem.

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