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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

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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

VLM 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.