Learn accounting for free

Only after discussing with my brother, who went to business school, did I realize I was gradually discovering my own half-assed version of accounting. Then I started reading Wikipedia and Investopedia about accounting topics, and it seemed a lot less dry.

But let me share what makes the field thrilling for me:

Accounting is a universal language for valuing time. Clocks allow us to measure time, but accounting allows us to assign time value. It, quite literally, allows us to compare apples to oranges (or Apple to Amazon).

This is important because time is the single most valuable resource any of us have. It's both the scarcest resource and the most liquid, but it's only liquid in one direction. Time can be exchanged for anything: food, drink, entertainment, love, death. But nothing can be exchanged for more time in my life.

We can, however, exchange our time for the time of others. Without being able to do this, our quality of lives would be terrible. But how many of my programming-hours is worth a T-shirt? How many chai-latte-making-hours is worth a heart transplant? It's not enough to count the hours, we have to assign value to the hours. Accounting is the system and language we use to value different units of time. It's a universally applicable language that is consistent in its application. It applies to a child running a lemonade stand and trillion dollar multinationals. Whether you're a charity or a bank, a government or a revolutionary, the rules of accounting are applicable to whatever it is that you're doing, whatever is it that you've done in the past, and whatever it is that you'll do in the future.

Currently, I work as a software engineer for a fintech company, and I find that the most fun I have at work is engineering something from scratch. Thinking of the architecture, mocking up the algorithms, and implementing a new solution to a problem is vastly more thrilling than maintaining existing systems or hotfixing minor bugs. Yet, the bulk of my job is maintaining systems that other people built. And, if I'm being honest, sometimes boring.

Similarly, the thrill of accounting is in learning how to more appropriately account for transactions, new goods, or new services. How should we account for someone who mines a crypto currency? How should we account for someone who trades a crypto but doesn't mine it? How do we account for auto insurance for self-driving cars? These are the thrilling aspects of accounting.

But for the bulk of the job, it's probably a bit boring. Working on a team to fix other people's technical mistakes. Reviewing documentation, getting access to various systems. Sounds a bit like software engineering!

Accounting (in its various forms (financial, cost, mgmt, tax)) should help you answer questions like: what is our most profitable product? how much does it cost to make that product? was that acquisition/investment successful? sales are going up and net income is positive, why don't we have any cash?

But when you get under the hood, there is a lot of subjectivity around how to make accruals, allocate revenue and expenses, or capitalization policies.

Furthermore, many people in different organizations are incented on financial metrics (sales, EBITDA, EPS, equity value, etc) and as such have are keenly focused on gamesmanship around the calculation of those numbers.