Reply #91: I found your reply surprising.

[ieoeja]

As an application developer I use algebra extensively. But I do work almost exclusively on financial systems.

On the other hand, most financial analysts with whom I work know shockingly little algebra. So they have to explain the finances to me, then I have to translate that into algebra for the computer program. Then if numbers don't match up, they have to ask me to explain it.

Which makes me wonder, if they are just going by what the computer spits out, why do we even have accountants?

Actually, I tossed a similar idea out at a meeting once. We were sending some of our IT work overseas (natch) and talking about the difficulty getting overseas labor up to speed. I pointed out that accounting principals have been pretty much stable for a thousand years and univeral across the world. So why are we sending IT overseas when we could more easily send accounting since they must already have fully functional accountants?

You'd have thought I'd tossed a stink bomb into the room. Their visceral reaction left me with the distinct impression that they had already thought of this, but since the financial people are making the decisions of what jobs are going overseas, they were not about to send their own jobs overseas, and they didn't need an smart ass computer programmer pointing out this fact.