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You'd think that but nope. Well, not as quickly or as strongly as one would anticipate. Large banks, automated trading shops and assimilated have automation, b

You'd think that but nope. Well, not as quickly or as strongly as one would anticipate. Large banks, automated trading shops and assimilated have automation, because it's their jobs. Other things don't. Recruiting chartered accountant is easy and cheap. Recruiting developers that can deliver is not as easy or as cheap. Bear in mind that it's not a tech environment so no source control in place, no servers to deploy to, won't be easy to execute.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Okay. I'm still going to take a crack at it, working in tech within finance. Worst case scenario, I fail and have a story to tell.
- user5994461 7y ago
  I worked in finance too, trading platforms in investment banks and prop trading shops. There hasn't been accountants there for a long time. Places that still rely on manual labor are a very different kind.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Agreed. In those cases, where the business is stubborn, you might have to consume the entire business [1] [2] to be able to enact automation in the underlying functions. That's also the question, right? What tools can you develop (Similar to Brex and Stripe) that make it exceedingly more simple for upstarts to compete against the entrenched? If I can't sell to your internal divisions, maybe I go get some VC and compete against your whole business. Lots of margin hiding as inefficiencies in the economy still, just have to go get it. Give me a lever long enough. [1] https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/software-is-eating-the-world-5-years-later/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/software-is-eating-the-wor...
    - user5994461 7y ago
      Remind me, saw a fintech company with almost a billion in VC funding earlier this year. Basically a bank doing loans. The whole business was based low cost labor taking whole days to evaluate stuff manually and write risk reports. Crazy thing is they were hiring loads of developers and data scientists, but the core of the business is all manual.
- kirubakaran 7y ago
  I think, just because of this attitude, you won't fail. All the best!
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
As someone who passed the cpa exams, worked at a large bank, and now does data science elsewhere, I strongly disagree. Many large banks are stagnant with legacy tech and processes. Many people do pointless excel work and will defend pointless excel work to the death. There were multiple people, of varying skill, willing and able to automate significant chunks of this with introductory R/Python/VBA skills. It’s not a cool shiny front end app, but a few scripts here and there could save an FTE easily. But politics prevents these things from being adopted. Cost and scarcity of tech talent is not a real issue for light officework. Servers, Source Control, etc. are missing the picture. You just need people with light programming capability and a little bit more agency and voila they’ll be 10x as productive as everyone else.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

Okay. I'm still going to take a crack at it, working in tech within finance. Worst case scenario, I fail and have a story to tell.

user5994461 7y ago
I worked in finance too, trading platforms in investment banks and prop trading shops. There hasn't been accountants there for a long time. Places that still rely on manual labor are a very different kind.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Agreed. In those cases, where the business is stubborn, you might have to consume the entire business [1] [2] to be able to enact automation in the underlying functions. That's also the question, right? What tools can you develop (Similar to Brex and Stripe) that make it exceedingly more simple for upstarts to compete against the entrenched? If I can't sell to your internal divisions, maybe I go get some VC and compete against your whole business. Lots of margin hiding as inefficiencies in the economy still, just have to go get it. Give me a lever long enough. [1] https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/ https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/software-is-eating-the-world-5-years-later/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/software-is-eating-the-wor...
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Remind me, saw a fintech company with almost a billion in VC funding earlier this year. Basically a bank doing loans. The whole business was based low cost labor taking whole days to evaluate stuff manually and write risk reports. Crazy thing is they were hiring loads of developers and data scientists, but the core of the business is all manual.
kirubakaran 7y ago
I think, just because of this attitude, you won't fail. All the best!

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago

As someone who passed the cpa exams, worked at a large bank, and now does data science elsewhere, I strongly disagree. Many large banks are stagnant with legacy tech and processes. Many people do pointless excel work and will defend pointless excel work to the death. There were multiple people, of varying skill, willing and able to automate significant chunks of this with introductory R/Python/VBA skills. It’s not a cool shiny front end app, but a few scripts here and there could save an FTE easily. But politics prevents these things from being adopted. Cost and scarcity of tech talent is not a real issue for light officework. Servers, Source Control, etc. are missing the picture. You just need people with light programming capability and a little bit more agency and voila they’ll be 10x as productive as everyone else.