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Comment by abc-1 | Hacker News Reader

> Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter [...] Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes).

Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.

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Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be illegal. Albeit I am sure there is plenty of demand for “creative accounting”.

Nope nothing wrong about it at all. Some company’s may structure their business in certain ways to take various trade offs, exactly how software devs make certain trade offs. Then of course there’s shady and illegal stuff you’re getting at, but that’s a separate topic.

> Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be illegal

Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.

  All-or-nothing thinking (often also referred to as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘dichotomous thinking’, ‘absolutist thinking’, or ‘binary thinking’) is a common form of cognitive distortion or ‘unhelpful thinking style’. People who think in all-or-nothing terms may also act in equivalently extreme ways. They may veer, for example, between complete abstinence and ‘binges’, or between extreme effort and none.

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