Comment by 2mol
1 year ago
Great article. I have an observation to the "engineers should know this and do good engineering" though: I work for a payments company and there is a fundamental career problem with becoming the ledger ninja: It's not enough work, and it's eventually done!
I've seen the following major phases of this work: 1) Build the ledger (correctly), and it will work well for a while. 2) Add convenience code for the callers, assist finance in doing reports/journaling, fix some minor bugs, take care of the operational bits (keep the database up). 3) Reach the scaling limits of your initial approach, but there are some obvious (not trivial) things to do: re-implement the transaction creation directly in the database (10x perf gain), maybe sharding, maybe putting old tx into colder storage, etc.
This is spread out over a while, so I haven't seen it be a full-time job, even at real startup-level (+10% MoM) growth. Even if it was, that's one person, not a whole team. I understand engineers that instead are pulled towards projects where they are in higher demand.
In another comment somebody said ledger systems are trivial when done right and super hard when done wrong - so if you did a good job it kinda looks like you just created 3 tables and some code. That seems thankless, and job searching as this type of specialist is harder than just being a generalist.
I suspect this is a "small company" problem which don't sell too many different things. A larger enterprise might have a platform for connecting businesses with businesses and businesses with customers. They might sell services (subscriptions) but also one-time purchases which require different forms of revenue recognition. Those might even be split up across different revenue streams. You end up building sub-ledgers for each one of them because the ERP can't handle the scale. Oh, and you're a public company so make sure everything is SOX compliant and easy to audit. Ah, and you operate on a global scale so do all those things in different currencies for different legal entities.
There's a reason Stripe is as successful as it is. And then there's a world where a company outgrows Stripe.
There are worse career choices ("prompt engineer" LOL) than financial engineering.
Stripe isn't a bookkeeper/accountant. Something like http://Pilot.com is though.
stripe on bookkeeping: https://stripe.com/guides/atlas/bookkeeping-and-accounting
I’ve built my career on cleaning up should-have-used-a-ledger messes. it’s hard but there’s always another company that needs it, and I get bored staying in one place.
recently I discovered that in a medical billing context the system is way, way weirder than I had seen before. I shipped the three tables, but getting everything into it seems like it might be an endless battle