4 ms·

if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pa

if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pay at the high end, still applicable if you change job later, generally respected culturally.

mseebach 13y ago
What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?
- VLM 13y ago
  Strange as it sounds, fraud prosecution. If a software dev lies or the product is buggy nothing really happens to anyone, but at least in theory a fraudulent or incompetent accountant could go to jail, and that's not happening in Outsourceland, so fundamentally at least some of it has to be done locally. Most of the lowest level of data entry and paper shuffling has long since been disposed of via automation, so already mostly only decision makers remain. Its not a bad idea.
  - gnoway 13y ago
    Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs. Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
    - VLM 13y ago
      I would disagree with the first paragraph in that a large number of .gov, .biz, and .edu personnel have a unified voice encouraging kids out of all other fields and into STEM. So the pool of grads is smaller in accounting therefore its a better job market for them to enter. My two kids are not going to tip the demographics such that accounting is now flooded. I do agree with the second paragraph in that accounting is more employable. If there's a web 2.0 crash or something, a tax accountant at a dotcom can more or less transfer into tax accountant job at an oil company. On the other hand a NAS storage engineer is pretty screwed via pigeonholing if he wants to get hired as a petroleum engineer. Much larger job pool in accounting.
  - lmickh 13y ago
    When I was in school for a B.S., I settled on accounting for this very reason. There was already talk about massive outsourcing of IT and tech jobs in the late 90's. I was already working in the tech field before I graduated so experience was not an issue. Today it is easy to contribute to open source as well. I figured worst case is I got laid off and picked up a job as an account. If someone was going to outsource accounting, they would have done it by now. On the plus side, I've never had anyone complain about my lack of an CS or MIT degree and I'm not stumped by "business decisions" like other engineers are. Somethings actually make sense when you understand the difference between capital expense and normal expense.
ef4 13y ago
I think it's likely that me or my programmer children are going to obsolete your accountant children long before they reach retirement age. Not entirely, of course. But enough that one software-equipped accountant will do the work of 100 of today's accountants, utterly destroying the bulk of the industry.
- VLM 13y ago
  LOL all that happened in my grandpa and dads generation. My grandpa actually made the cut, although many of his coworkers didn't. Everyone who was doin it by hand got downsized a long time ago. Now a days its all "strong AI" work, like how do I reconcile my GAAP training and accounting industry practice and that new federal tax code and the SEC report and this companies industry practices WRT how to account for (insert weirdness here) and/or my boss told me not to lie or break the law but to make the numbers "look" like such and such WRT a zillion more or less acceptable ways to record and report this situation ... When the lawyers, stock analysts/journalists, and politicians and political system are all replaced by strong AI, then accountants will be next to go. Could happen, maybe, but it'll be our grandkids problem at worst. Also from what I've heard from coworkers they already spend most of their time doing what amounts to financial systems analysis to find the bugs in existing code... more code would just mean even more debugging time and more work, not less. Better code, not more, might help, but...

mseebach 13y ago

What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?

VLM 13y ago
Strange as it sounds, fraud prosecution. If a software dev lies or the product is buggy nothing really happens to anyone, but at least in theory a fraudulent or incompetent accountant could go to jail, and that's not happening in Outsourceland, so fundamentally at least some of it has to be done locally. Most of the lowest level of data entry and paper shuffling has long since been disposed of via automation, so already mostly only decision makers remain. Its not a bad idea.
- gnoway 13y ago
  Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs. Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
  - VLM 13y ago
    I would disagree with the first paragraph in that a large number of .gov, .biz, and .edu personnel have a unified voice encouraging kids out of all other fields and into STEM. So the pool of grads is smaller in accounting therefore its a better job market for them to enter. My two kids are not going to tip the demographics such that accounting is now flooded. I do agree with the second paragraph in that accounting is more employable. If there's a web 2.0 crash or something, a tax accountant at a dotcom can more or less transfer into tax accountant job at an oil company. On the other hand a NAS storage engineer is pretty screwed via pigeonholing if he wants to get hired as a petroleum engineer. Much larger job pool in accounting.
- lmickh 13y ago
  When I was in school for a B.S., I settled on accounting for this very reason. There was already talk about massive outsourcing of IT and tech jobs in the late 90's. I was already working in the tech field before I graduated so experience was not an issue. Today it is easy to contribute to open source as well. I figured worst case is I got laid off and picked up a job as an account. If someone was going to outsource accounting, they would have done it by now. On the plus side, I've never had anyone complain about my lack of an CS or MIT degree and I'm not stumped by "business decisions" like other engineers are. Somethings actually make sense when you understand the difference between capital expense and normal expense.

ef4 13y ago

I think it's likely that me or my programmer children are going to obsolete your accountant children long before they reach retirement age. Not entirely, of course. But enough that one software-equipped accountant will do the work of 100 of today's accountants, utterly destroying the bulk of the industry.

VLM 13y ago
LOL all that happened in my grandpa and dads generation. My grandpa actually made the cut, although many of his coworkers didn't. Everyone who was doin it by hand got downsized a long time ago. Now a days its all "strong AI" work, like how do I reconcile my GAAP training and accounting industry practice and that new federal tax code and the SEC report and this companies industry practices WRT how to account for (insert weirdness here) and/or my boss told me not to lie or break the law but to make the numbers "look" like such and such WRT a zillion more or less acceptable ways to record and report this situation ... When the lawyers, stock analysts/journalists, and politicians and political system are all replaced by strong AI, then accountants will be next to go. Could happen, maybe, but it'll be our grandkids problem at worst. Also from what I've heard from coworkers they already spend most of their time doing what amounts to financial systems analysis to find the bugs in existing code... more code would just mean even more debugging time and more work, not less. Better code, not more, might help, but...