I have never come across a post on HN that was so scarily describing my current day to day and with a comment I agree with so wholeheartedly.
I’ve spent the majority of my career in tech with a finance angle to it, mostly sales and use tax compliance.
What I never fully appreciated was how much those accountants, controllers, and lawyers were rubbing off on me.
I was recently advising a pretty old startup on their ledgering system and was beyond appalled at what it looks like when a bunch of engineers with no finance or accounting background build an accounting system.
We don’t have to find magical accountant engineers either, it will wholly suffice if we sit actual accountants in with our engineering team during the design process.
After my design of their complete overhaul I had a friend who is a CPA completely review my work, we found a few holes in certain scenarios, but by and large we were good.
Money is a difficult engineering problem because with money comes all the human goofery that surrounds it.
I’ve spent the majority of my career in tech with a finance angle to it, mostly sales and use tax compliance.
What I never fully appreciated was how much those accountants, controllers, and lawyers were rubbing off on me.
I was recently advising a pretty old startup on their ledgering system and was beyond appalled at what it looks like when a bunch of engineers with no finance or accounting background build an accounting system.
We don’t have to find magical accountant engineers either, it will wholly suffice if we sit actual accountants in with our engineering team during the design process.
After my design of their complete overhaul I had a friend who is a CPA completely review my work, we found a few holes in certain scenarios, but by and large we were good.
Money is a difficult engineering problem because with money comes all the human goofery that surrounds it.