I don’t don’t doubt that it might depress salaries but that is excel example is a good one in that suddenly every company could start to do basic financial analysis in a manner that only the largest ones could afford previously.

Yet another instance of Jevon's paradox ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.

Accountants still make plenty of money. Expertise in Excel also pays well independently of that.

Yeah, but if the number of them has shrunk 100 times even if they make 10 times more money still raises the question is it wise to become one?

The increased work capacity of an accountant means that nowadays even small businesses can do financial analysis that would not have scaled decades ago.

Many are offshoring now, PwC just had a massive layoff announcement yesterday as well

lol, my accountant is pretty darn expensive.

A whole lot of automation is limited not by what could be automated, but what one can automate within a given budget.

When I was coding in the 90s, I was in a team that replaced function calls into new and exciting interactions with other computers which, using a queuing system, would do the computation and return the answer back. We'd have a project of having someone serialize the C data structures that were used on both sides into something that would be compatible, and could be inspected in the middle.

Today we call all of that a web service, the serialization would take a minute to code, and be doable by anyone. My entire team would be out of work! And yet, today we have more people writing code than ever.

When one accountant can do the work of 10 accountants, the price of the task lowers, but a lot of people that before couldn't afford accounting now can. And the same 10 accountaings from before can just do more work, and get paid about the same.

As far as software, we are getting paid A LOT more than in the early 90s. We are just doing things that back then would be impossible to pay for, our just outright impossible to do due to lack of compute capacity.

The pay being larger, is caused (I think) by VC money and the illegality of non-compete contracts. If your competitor can do something you can't, hire someone away from the competitor to show you how to do it. Hence developers can demand more pay for retention, and more pay to move.

>But excel eliminated need in multiple accountants. One accountant with excel replaced ten with paper.

From NPR: <https://www.npr.org/2015/02/27/389585340/how-the-electronic-...>

>GOLDSTEIN: When the software hit the market under the name VisiCalc, Sneider became the first registered owner, spreadsheet user number one. The program could do in seconds what it used to take a person an entire day to do. This of course, poses a certain risk if your job is doing those calculations. And in fact, lots of bookkeepers and accounting clerks were replaced by spreadsheet software. But the number of jobs for accountants? Surprisingly, that actually increased. Here's why - people started asking accountants like Sneider to do more.