Will You Sit With Me?

Shanthi,

thanks for accepting my invitation. I am happy to learn that your dad and your DH belong to my profession.

Yes I do remember the days when FA packages were written in COBOL. It was a tedious task. But you know, Shanthi, those programs are quite robust and once you have them right, they do not have glitches as the modern day packages do.

For my office I wrote my billing and FA package in Foxpro. It's an 8000 line code I wrote in 1995 and by God's grace it's still working well. We isolated that system, made that to run on DOS so that it is beyond the reach of viruses.

I am saying this because when I wrote the code I understood the difficulties of a computer man. I also found out what we accountants lack. Many times we are not very definitive about what we want. Our specs are ambiguous which normally irritates the software person. Now I am in demand as an interface between accountants and computer programmers.

You are right, Shanthi. No profession will ever become extinct, if it has a substance which should not be change and forms, which it should be able to change frequently.

Yes, I am also eagerly waiting for Veda's opinion. I have made it clear in my reply to his fb for HE Final episode.

regards,

 

Thanks Nandhu. You are right. computers, software etc are just tools. This is so even for the computer professional. For him the real skill is being able to think logically and connect the clients needs with the capabilities of his tools. Tools may change over time. But the basic skillsets will remain the same.

As you know "kadivalam kattina mathiri" developers, I also know "kadivalam kattina mathiri" accountants who will insist that the computer program should deliver exactly in the same way they did in manual accounts. Now that's ridiculous. We can do wonders with computers which we can't think of in manual system.

Domain knowledge is a must for the person in that domain. For the computer man, understanding the domain knowledge of others and the ability to relate to persons of the other domain is a must.

Thanks for the fb, Nandhu.
regards,

 

Dear Chithra,
Your teasing was quite enjoyable. I will tell you what my next thread is :
Will You -- ---- with me?
I first wrote the words in the blanks. But then I thought that would be stretching it too far.
You will be curious to know why I have topics like these. The inspiration came from the posters for Malayalam Films being screened in Madurai. The posters will be very provocative. Many people who are lured by the posters to the movie find the movie quite horrible.
But the important fact is that the posters drive the people to the theatres. That is my strategy here.

In this I am doing the reverse of what is being done in the Tamil movie world. As there is a Government Grant for pure Tamil names, they have a chaste Tamil name for the film. But the movie is quite awful with a lot of sexy scenes and vulgar dialogues. In my case only the poster is sexy/provocative. The content is chaste.

I can get away with anything not because of my "standing" but because I am a kind of "chella pillai" of this site. And more than my moderators and the leaders of this site, I know my limits and stay with that. But I being I would love to play in the border areas.

I wanted to ask you one thing. If you give a "thuni pottu vartha idli" and our modern pressure-cooker idli to, let's say, a cookery expert like you, can they spot the difference?

If they cant then their cry for the olden ways is only hypocrisy.

Thanks for accepting my invitation to sit with me. Don't worry the chair is quite heavy. Another identical chair has borne me with all my 90 kgs (200 pounds) weight. So you should not be a problem.
Love,

 

Dear Aruna,
You might find the title harmless. But there was one ILite who was really concerned with the title. "Sridhar, at this rate what is going to be the next title?"

Since she was on phone and I was sure that our lines were not tapped, I told her boldly what was in my mind. There was a minute-long silence on the other end. I could see her blushing dark red.

I know Aruna, I am not very straight when it comes to having titles. But there is a reason for that. Please go through my reply to Chithra on this issue.

People always confuse between "trade" and "tricks of trade". Everybody wants to learn the tricks of trade without knowing the trade itself. There lies all the problem. If your grounding in your trade is strong, you can never be displaced by technology.

Your observation about labour saving devices is right. I have an uncle who is 80 plus. He worked for the Railways. Those were the pre-computer days. He worked for six hours a day. For 41 years he sat on the same seat. (They did not even change his chair) He will spend 2 hours every day for buying vegetables afresh. At home they had only a kerosene stove. Mami used to cook for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening.
But everybody had loads of leisure time and we used to talk at least for 3 hours in the night. Uncle used to teach his children for 2 hours in the morning.
You can call this sridhar's maxim, "The leisure-time available is inversely proportional to the number and power of labour saving devices."
Don't you agree, Aruna?

It will be my privilege to share the dais with a wonderful person like you.
regards,

 

Shanthi,
If all the users are intelligent, I feel excel is excellent for accounting. But the thing is security.
Cobol,they say is very robust though it takes a lot of time to do the coding

Do you know what language they use for railway reservation system when it first started?

Well, the major requirement was that the system should respond within 4 seconds (given the speed that was available in those days) and there should be a record level lock so that if one clerk has started allotting the berth S1 45 then no one in the country should be able to access it.

Finally they decided that Fortran was the best for that kind of an application.

I personally love Foxpro though it's weak on network connectivity and security issues.

My suggestion now is that every accountant should learn programming for at least two years. And every programmer should have done some Accounting 101 to know the difficulties of an accountant.

Thanks for sharing your experiences.
regards,