Teaching Programming To Accountants

When I was in college in the late 70's, I had the opportunity to attend the national meeting of DEC minicomputer users. At lunch one day I sat at the same table as the president of a small accounting software vendor. When I asked him about what kind of background he looked for in a developer, he said "I hire accountants; it's easier to teach programming to accountants than to teach accounting to programmers."

I was reminded of that while reading a Forrester report ("Complex Event Processing in a Quant World"). In it, Charles Brett interviews Robert Almgren, a pioneer in using Complex Event Processing to build algorithmic trading strategies. Regarding the skills he looked for, Almgren says "I wanted quants — not IT or technology people. This was because creating the algorithms determines the event processing. If you do not know what you want to do with the events available, no amount of CEP will help."

It seems like IT is splitting into two pieces: commoditized & standardized (but complex) data processing, and domain-specific business-focused capabilities that are becoming deeply woven into the non-IT fabric of the business.

It's not clear to me that IT-trained personnel will ultimately perform much of the work in the latter category...at least where the related business knowledge is largely Knowable (the domain of experts) or Complex (the domain of pattern management). Then again, maybe it's always been that way...