I am not an accountant, but I wrote accounting software for some time. There are two basic parts to accounting: one is very much following an algorithm. Okay,

I am not an accountant, but I wrote accounting software for some time. There are two basic parts to accounting: one is very much following an algorithm. Okay, this real transaction occurred in the real world. Now you have to update your books to account for that transaction. If it's a routine transaction, there is pretty much a straightforward way to record it in your books, and you just do that until the transaction is fully recorded, and you're done. That part is at this point in our lives fairly quickly being automated away. It's what was to a large degree responsible for the super-boring old-style image of an accountant being this person bent over mouldering books carefully noting down numbers. You guys are all programmers, I imagine you understand pretty quickly how that used to be necessary and used to involve a great deal of very routine work that none the less had to be done with great attention to detail. The other part of accounting is essentially deciding HOW you are going to record certain kinds of transactions. Setting up the algorithm, basically, that you will then follow a thousand or ten million times each time you do a sale or a purchase or get new investment or buy more office furniture. This is definitely high-talent work! A lot of it has already been done -- if you just want to do a sale, then well, there are a few different algorithms that you more or less take off the shelf and use them. Kind of like how sorting algorithms work in our field. You don't start from scratch and reinvent sorting when you want to sort an array, you just grab quicksort or mergesort or whatever -- choose the one that's most convenient or works best for you. What's left to do, then, is decide how to account for novel situations, or stuff that's unique to your business, and to mind the machines -- make sure that data gets fed properly into the routine algorithms. I think that there's room for a very talented accountant, though in many businesses the accounting might be routine enough that there's not much use for a very talented accountant.