Not in my experience, those have patience to study a phd or a masters are those who are really passionate about the subject. Those who move on to them tend to be the hardcore kids who started programming from 13 years old.
They may not be good in work environment doing some random UI work, it would turn their brains to mash.
Well you can live without profits for sometime, if you run out of working cash, your stuffed. This is why loans, and factoring come in and is why even profitable business require loans because of bad cashflow.
One easy way to try avoid this, is to always try to get in flow payments coming in faster, and outgoings slower. Even if the net total is the same in end, it allows more flexibility with cash flow.
Accounting is obvious to me, but we probably haven't encountered the hard problems yet.
Yep. When you're out of cash, the game is up, no matter what the P&L says.
A different way to look at it is this: cashflow tells you the health of the company right now, P&L in the long run. You need to watch both.
For example, you've booked $100 million of sales for the period. According to the P&L you're profitable by $20 million. A bill arrives from a supplier for $10 million.
But supposing you only had $5 million cash on hand. Unless those customers begin paying you money for the booked sales, you are in trouble. Time to take corrective action.
Likewise. Consider that you're in a business where customers pay on purchase (most retail industries). Your cashflow might be excellent in that you have plenty moving across your books. However costs are rising and you are making a loss on the P&L. Eventually this will deplete your cash and you will be out of business. Time to take corrective action.
Used properly, P&Ls and cashflows are a monitoring tool, a kind of standard Nagios/munin/zenoss for your business.
Most of the hard problems are to do with depreciation, and the legalities of how you classify them.
For example, Police departments have dogs. Dogs are assets. If all government departments are told to use accrual (rather than cashflow), they need to depreciate assets.
So the account needs to figure out how dogs depreciate. Should you assume that a dog has a useful life of 10 years, and loses 10% of its initial value every year? Or that it exponentially decays, as it gets older and less able to sniff bad guys? Or should it only be 5 years? What do you do if a dog ends up working long past its expiry date?
It can be tricky to come up with sensible numbers. Especially when accountants don't have domain knowledge, and people who do don't like speaking to them.
> Most of the hard problems are to do with depreciation, and the legalities of how you classify them.
I would generalise that to say that all the hard problems in accounting are ones of classification.
Does sale X fall in 2010 or 2011?
Do we book the inventory when we order it, when it is delivered to our warehouse, when it is delivered to our shop, or all three? And if we use some combo, how do we combine them in LIFO calculations?
We've just donated $100,000 to Fashionable Cause, a charitable foundation founded by Irish rockstar Nobo and in exchange he will wear our platform shoes exclusively. Do we book this under philanthropy or marketing? If philanthropy, do we consider it part of the overhead cost for the shoes sold?
And so on and so on.
Most of the big bucks in accounting comes from coming up for clever excuses as to why something should be categorised in a certain way.
I am british, and I could not stop laughing at the accent. You can tell its how someone not britain thinks how a british person speaks. Waaay to exaggerated.
English curriculum in Soviet schools was meant to be based on British English, but of course precious few teachers ever traveled to the UK or interacted with Britons.
Did you cheat and use a regex library in your lexer, or did you build a regex engine aswell?
I built recursive descent parser, and a lexer using the posix regex libary in 2 days first attempt and extra 14 days for semantic analysis and x86 code generation which operated by walking the ast. Most of those days were mostly learning x86 assembly. I can't understand 6 months, unless you did everything from scratch like the regex engine I.E Constructing NFA's, converting to DFA's etc etc.
I think I cheated and used an existing regex library - it's been a while.
As far as the 6 months, it was my first major, major project and required so much learning and research on just how to structure code that it took a long time to craft.
It didn't help that the design was so complex that debugging it was a chore. :)
I don't understand how someone can not understand pointers and recursion. There are very intuitive, you have to probably have to study bits of math which is more unintuitive to get on computer science in the first place.
This is precisely why "q" is defined only to accept three digits after the decimal. It's actually not a floating point number, and anyone who parses it as such is just being lazy.
"q" is more properly represented natively as an integer between 0 and 1000.
I'd think i'd have the courage to go talk to the president of the united states or prime minister in the uk. However I'd don't think have the courage to talk to jobs.
They may not be good in work environment doing some random UI work, it would turn their brains to mash.