I’m a software engineer and a CPA, so I’ve got the domain knowledge. However, I’m not sure how to find a gig where I can apply that. It seems everywhere I look vastly prefers someone with twice my experience as a software engineer and zero domain knowledge over my years of experience in accounting and fewer years of experience as a software engineer. Any insight on how to utilize it effectively?
Unfortunately, the likely solution to this is to keep banging out work at wherever you can gain experience as a software engineer.
Modern hiring practices are too rigid and filter-friendly for you to likely appear as a strong candidate based on the fact you have good accounting experience on top of your growing software skills.
What will really help you though, is having friends who work at a bank in the software departments. It's almost always who you know in this world. You need to network, network, network!
You know, it's kind of funny, but it seems like most businesses are not interested in doing things "right". As doing things "right" is time consuming, hard, and cuts off avenues to "innovate". "That's not how accounting works" is like telling management to clean their room. No one wants to hear it.
As someone who worked on a bookkeeping system without being an accountant (or bookkeeper in any sense), I'd say your challenge is that it's very possible to learn enough to build a decent system, assuming your engineering knowledge is strong.
I don't say this to blow my own trumpet, only to say that the non-engineering leadership at the company in question were very invested in the product details and making sure I understood basic accounting principles.
That said, I went from that role to working in a billing system that was originally built by a team where leadership weren't invested in the details. The result was a lot of issues and frustration from Finance leadership. Storing monetary values in float was not the biggest issue, either.
That being said, maybe branch out of just looking at accounting/bookkeeping and market yourself as "I know how money works in software systems." Your skills are extremely transferrable and knowing the Finance expectations will make it easier to make good design choices further upstream.
Your ideal job for utilizing both would either be to work for one of the ERP providers or accounting software providers (Oracle, NetSuite, Workday, Xero, etc.) or to launch your own targeting a specific need.
I’m a general backend dev. I’ve used python, rust, and TypeScript to varying degrees along with SQL and noSQL databases. I’m pretty comfortable learning new stacks I haven’t used before.
