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A complete tangent, but I didn’t hear a single mention of accounting. Not on the financial side nor more importantly, the managerial side. This industry is lit

A complete tangent, but I didn’t hear a single mention of accounting. Not on the financial side nor more importantly, the managerial side. This industry is literally just throwing darts at a wall. Capitalization is just one kind of account. What does it have to do with employee effectiveness? The very services offered here are not giving good information to administrators about how a company is actually functioning. Everyone is focused on looking at the rear view mirror when they focus on financial accounting. EBITDA is a nonsensical metric for internal accounting. Managerial accounting is forward looking and must be done in order to make proper financial projections. Take a look at the financial projections from 2021 and 2022. They are completely detached from reality. This is obviously why the entire industry had layoffs. The chickens came back to the roosts as investor realized the projections were bogus. Yes, cash flow is king, but again, that’s historical information. You cannot make meaningful predictions in this manner! Productivity plummets when you take half your engineers and make them part of the interview and hiring process. Then it takes at least 6 months for a new hire to be productive, to understand the code base, to understand the domain of the product and how it fits into the market. Like, either go back to waterfall if you want administrators to handle all of the non-engineering because you absolutely need engineers who are aware of the domain. Have you ever seen a spec that was fully fleshed out and didn’t require developers to fill in a lot of blanks? What kind of employee is better at filling in those blanks than those that have been around for awhile and understand why the product exists?

mlyle 3y ago
This feels like too far of a tangent. > Capitalization is just one kind of account. What does it have to do with employee effectiveness? If you want to have a company with shares, and sell them to investors, you need to keep track of who owns your company. As you get bigger, it becomes painful to keep track of in Excel. And there's a lot of regulatory requirements to meet, too. Keeping track of your cap table is useful and required. I'm not sure why a vendor of cap table software stumbling opens a discussion of why accounting today is (allegedly) not very useful.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  We can use cap table data to help us improve the software or customer experience. You’re right! For example in the above I interpreted it as a service they offered, not as a means of improving their own product. There were a few more instances where I misread it as a service being offered and not for internal means. So yes, too far of a tangent. I was acting as if they were offering services meant to improve the internal processes of other companies and that cap tables have basically nothing to do with that. As for managerial accounting, have you ever seen it in practice at a tech company? Has a manager ever tried to measure the cost of rapidly expanding a workforce? Or the cost of excessive meetings? Or the cost of poor architectural decisions? Or the cost of moving from one perfectly acceptable programming language or frame to another, more trendy option? Or the cost of having multiple programming languages across the organization? If you read financial reportings you will consistently find internal accounting practice based completely on financial accounting. And EBITDA is a very questionable metric for financial reporting over GAAP. There’s a trade off with accounting. Is there a level of detail where it cost more than it saves? I’d say the tech industry as a whole is very far from that point. There’s basically no detail and no understanding from administration about the actual state of the business. Berkshire Hathaway has been so successful because they don't give a shit about Wall Street projections and actually go and talk to management and walk the floors of the factory. The tech industry relies completely on moon shots. Massive digressions! But yes, I completely mistook parts of the article and was clearly more interested in standing on a soap box! But I’m not wrong, either! :)

mlyle 3y ago

This feels like too far of a tangent. > Capitalization is just one kind of account. What does it have to do with employee effectiveness? If you want to have a company with shares, and sell them to investors, you need to keep track of who owns your company. As you get bigger, it becomes painful to keep track of in Excel. And there's a lot of regulatory requirements to meet, too. Keeping track of your cap table is useful and required. I'm not sure why a vendor of cap table software stumbling opens a discussion of why accounting today is (allegedly) not very useful.

williamcotton 3y ago
We can use cap table data to help us improve the software or customer experience. You’re right! For example in the above I interpreted it as a service they offered, not as a means of improving their own product. There were a few more instances where I misread it as a service being offered and not for internal means. So yes, too far of a tangent. I was acting as if they were offering services meant to improve the internal processes of other companies and that cap tables have basically nothing to do with that. As for managerial accounting, have you ever seen it in practice at a tech company? Has a manager ever tried to measure the cost of rapidly expanding a workforce? Or the cost of excessive meetings? Or the cost of poor architectural decisions? Or the cost of moving from one perfectly acceptable programming language or frame to another, more trendy option? Or the cost of having multiple programming languages across the organization? If you read financial reportings you will consistently find internal accounting practice based completely on financial accounting. And EBITDA is a very questionable metric for financial reporting over GAAP. There’s a trade off with accounting. Is there a level of detail where it cost more than it saves? I’d say the tech industry as a whole is very far from that point. There’s basically no detail and no understanding from administration about the actual state of the business. Berkshire Hathaway has been so successful because they don't give a shit about Wall Street projections and actually go and talk to management and walk the floors of the factory. The tech industry relies completely on moon shots. Massive digressions! But yes, I completely mistook parts of the article and was clearly more interested in standing on a soap box! But I’m not wrong, either! :)