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Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: do you find there is creativity and the satisfaction of creating something from nothing in accounting work? It has always seemed so dull from the outside looking in (cue the joes about accountants) but is this the reality?

Many people don’t see software engineering as creative but it certainly can be!

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I think it is the naive idea that bookkeeping is accounting.

I am an accountant, I never do any bookkeeping.

Last week a few things I did were

1) worked on a way to get sales rebates to correctly reflect in the product cost. This is half accounting knowledge and half ERP.

2) presented accounts at a meeting where I was trying to use the numbers to make the business take a different strategic direction.

3) reviewed and questioned the commercial sense in other people's plans

4) worked out how to run a new process through the ERP so the accounts flowed through correctly

In other weeks I may be forecasting cash needs, doing an investment appraisal, building business plans, getting funding, writing sql to get data, building a BI system...

I like the creativity and the amazing variety of what I get to do in accounts.

I work around financial software, so I met a lot of accountants over the decades.

There is some creativity in defining where to stash this or that number so that everything works out in the best way for the business. As others said, it's a bit like solving puzzles, and it's harder than it looks - it requires a significant level of preparation, and keeping up with constantly changing regulations.

What a lot of them also get pride from is formatting their reports "just so" - so that they're readable and enjoyable by businesspeople, while still being exact, comprehensive, and meeting formal standards. To me, that sort of thing is kinda boring and trivial, but for them it can be career-defining, life-or-death stuff. In a way, it's a hyper-specialized branch of graphic design.

My sister is an accountant and she genuinely enjoys working with the numbers. She finds it, not exactly fun, but kind of fun? She describes it like every situation is a puzzle she gets to solve, and then maintain. She also likes working with her customers and enjoys those interactions, like she gets a good feeling from helping her customers out. That's enough for her.

Not the vocation for me but it's very interesting to talk with her about her experiences, because they're so remote from mine...

FWIW I share your sister's take. A large part of my job involves accounting and audit/compliance, and few things stimulate me more than trying to figure out "what the fuck were they thinking" and fixing it.

Sounds like some hardcore deep backend software dev jobs (I have similar for more than a decade), but actual creativity is scaled down to few %.

Accountants are extremely limited by rigid tools they use and laws they have to adgere to. Then comes given company's 'way we do things here' limit.

Take any modern programming language, you start with unique big problem/task, have to crack hundreds little and big problems, often with use of stackoverflow and other webs, but ie hard alghoritmic problems I solve mostly on my own since nobody faced those in exact mix of technologies, data and other constraints. There are sone further limits but my alghoritms are my solid creations, nobody ever questioned them nor made me refactor them for any reason.

To outsiders it may look exactly same weird nerd stuff of course. To me, accounting has very little room for creativity, its there but almost microscopic. And the joy you describe is also present, thats there in many jobs that actually create stuff, digital or not

Note your sister doesn't just work with "numbers". She works with a structure of interrelated accounts. In a sense she is working with the structure of the business. She is observing the business-process which is a bit like looking at a simulation.

Very true and well said!

I'm a small business owner and I get a lot of satisfaction from the feeling of confidence that everything is properly counted down to the last cent. Both for business and for IRS I have a confident answer. Kinda like designing a proper DB schema for the use case, using proper data types, optimal queries etc.

It is boring, incredibly so. There's no real creativity involved unless you're trying to stretch the rules capture a transaction in a certain way or make it look like you're doing something you're not really. Its not fun and at some point you become aware of what you're doing and you quickly supress the memory in the deepest part of your mind. Its a hugely usefull skill though that helps you with so many other things, like budgeting, raising finance, running a business, investing. The the profession itself is like being force fed cold porridge for eternity.

Accounting work is in many ways similar to a garbage collector in program runtimes (e.g. JVM). Their primary goal is to manage available resources: keeping track of current usage, anticipate future availability and prevent misuse. In that sense, there can be a lot of creativity in the optimization of that process just as software people have from tweaking a piece of code to work better.

Accountants are like attorneys. The shitty ones go through the motions and create problems. The great ones often solve problems before you know you have one. They get a bad rap from a stereotype perspective!

At one point many years ago I did tax preparation. I liked to joke the secret to being a good tax preparer was to be creative. But not so creative that the IRS gets angry.

Creative accounting and tax avoidance do exist tho

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