Re:If you want to transform IT, start with finance
by webmaven on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @05:07PM
(#27838457)
> Or, percentiles of the sum of two Normals do not correspond to the sum of the percentiles etc.
I once had to spend a day convincing a CFO that consecutive months of ~X% increases of MRR wasn't the same as
((($MONTHS * X) +1) * MRR)
eg. two months of 10% = +20% increase, 5 months = +50%, etc.
... which is how his spreadsheet was calculating revenue projections.
How does a CFO not understand compound interest?
In my experience, it is hard to find people in the finance department who understand there are other distributions than Normal. E.g., the time I had to spend trying to convince finance people that the product of two Normals is not necessarily Normal. Or, percentiles of the sum of two Normals do not correspond to the sum of the percentiles etc.
Yet, they do end up guiding the company because money drives everything.