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Comment by dansiemens | Hacker News Reader

> I did try to improve the office productivity as a whole a few times by patching up the wonky database they used for accounting, but got shut down each time because of fear of change

I too have found that accounting is where new ideas go to die. They don’t really understand the technology that their jobs are bound to, so any increase in perceived complexity is just a no-go.

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Agreed - accountants are a unique breed. They do a fair amount of basic numeric analysis and rote work that is of the sort that is beneficial to automation. But they're often very averse to technology, often stop learning any new tools early on in their career, and tend to stick to the methods they learned as juniors, even many years later.

That's a broad brush, and is certainly unfair to and untrue of some accountants. Some are Excel gods and can VBA it up with the best of them, and would have been productive software engineers in another life. But it's surprisingly true for much of the profession.

Well, alternatively, the guy who streamlined his job got fired so someone else can do it cheaper. Accounting managers will not thank them for making their job easier with better tech, they will say oh that's easier than I thought it was, let me get someone else to do it for less. They have no incentives to accept better tech, in fact their incentive is to make it worse so they cant be easily replaced.

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