Figure out how to put your industry knowledge to work and you'll reap massive rewards. At most early-stage startups, programming & industry knowledge is generally split between two or more people, which slows things down tremendously.
If you're both of those people, you can build something that you know people will want, and likely faster, because you were the customer, and you will know exactly what will—and won't—matter. If that's not a startup superpower, I don't know what is.
The main problem is that selling to accounting firms is difficult because procurement usually goes through partners. At the firms I worked for, our procurement process required buy-in from a majority of the partners and the product would require serious security features that are beyond my current abilities, so those two facts deterred me from pursuing that route.
The real future is integrating audit software with financial bookkeeping. This is one area where I think blockchain/smart contracts actually could be utilized to ensure audit quality. Auditors essentially look at a small portion of the transactions made by a company during a year, so software could monitor it in parallel. You’d still need an audit team to review the findings and ensure the software was working properly, but the cost would be a fraction of what it takes to audit a company by hand today.
Thank you for asking — it’s been a while since I’ve been able to geek out like this! One day I’d like to build those tools, but in the meantime I’m working on a personal finance product. It’s almost done, so hopefully you’ll see it when I submit it to HN to get dragged across the coals.
I totally agree with your premise, although in practice I’ve found that the phrase “review the findings and ensure the software was working properly” snuggles in a lot of complexity. It implies that working properly is well-defined and formally verifiable, when it usually isn’t.
I’ve had very frank meetings where I’ve explained that, ultimately, log statements can be totally fictional, and we can technically pay out amounts that diverge from the amounts in a report. The amount of trust you have in the developer and your dependencies are the weakest links in the chain, and, if you’re honest in explaining to that level of detail, most compliance minded people come away uneasy. But this is how every company operates?
There’s definitely a need for verifiable money transfer infrastructure, but I think most companies that roll their own payment infrastructure would rather pretend that the problem is a boogeyman.
Looking back, my code was absolutely atrocious and I was on a team of 1 (just me) but this book and that 4 month co-op is essentially what got me to transition from applying to network admin roles after graduation to applying and getting a platform engineering focused role and focus on software development. It's what I've been doing ever since!
I had no prior experience with programming, and at the time I only wanted to learn how to write enough code to help me with my job. This book was perfect for that goal.
It took me a couple of weeks to get through it all and write the program I needed to write, but when it worked, I was amazed. I remember going to grab coffee to celebrate and on my walk I started thinking about other job tasks I could automate. Most of public accounting deals with comparing PDF reports and Excel data, so I genuinely believed I could write programs to automate the majority of tasks at my job.
I started to learn on my own with some common online resources. I would get so excited to come home from work so I could dive further into my studies, and the more I learned, the more opportunities I saw: what if there was a way for a computer to perform all the analysis and statistical processing for an audit? What if a program could monitor financial transactions and automatically complete taxes for clients?
Flash forward a few months and I went all-in on software development. Quit my job as a public accountant, finished a boot camp, and started working as a developer.
It was the best decision of my life and this book was the catalyst. I’m so grateful that Al wrote this, and I highly recommend it for people whose jobs have a lot of boring stuff —- especially public accountants :).