The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies.
You need to refactor those tribes. Because, in fact, every engineer should know something about accounting. One of the things I regret is that nobody in my youth ever found a way to make accounting seem compelling enough that I was convinced to learn it. It turns out, though, that modern economic life is a big game played according to complicated rules, and accountants are the referees.
Most engineering decisions cannot be made without an accountant. If money were no object we could solve many website scaling problems by buying one server for every anticipated visitor -- or, alternatively, by only allowing one visitor at a time into our sites. (Let them stand in line!) These are not silly ideas: People used to have to stand in line at major universities to use scientific calculators, but now we've made them cheap enough that we can just give one to every math student. The thing which makes many obvious solutions silly is: They cost too much, or they don't make enough money. And to answer the questions "how much is too much? how much is enough?" requires accountants.
Finally, please don't call this thing I've just written "a hypothesis". That makes me wince. I'm having fun with the metaphor, but it would be a mistake to reify it:
The metaphor is fun because I really am related to monkeys (well, chimps, technically), and because many human behaviors really do make sense in chimp terms as well, and because it's quite possible that this is not entirely a coincidence, or a case of convergent evolution. But let's not go too far. It is only a metaphor. I'm built out of chimp parts, but I'm also built out of distinctly human parts.
For example, it would be bad to argue like this: Early humans lived as free-ranging nomads, so a better office design would be one that forces us to live like free-ranging nomads. That idea has been tried. And it turns out that one of the hacks that make the modern world possible is personal collections of artifacts: piles of papers (with the most relevant ones on top) and post-it notes to cue your memory, photos of your family to regulate your mood, egg timers to remind you to take breaks, vastly complex, expensive, and personalized suites of hardware and software to help you write code, the custom-adjusted chair that keeps your back in working order, etc. In other words: Having your own office makes you more productive.
One: Glad you liked the writing.
Two: Please do not think like this:
The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies.
You need to refactor those tribes. Because, in fact, every engineer should know something about accounting. One of the things I regret is that nobody in my youth ever found a way to make accounting seem compelling enough that I was convinced to learn it. It turns out, though, that modern economic life is a big game played according to complicated rules, and accountants are the referees.
Most engineering decisions cannot be made without an accountant. If money were no object we could solve many website scaling problems by buying one server for every anticipated visitor -- or, alternatively, by only allowing one visitor at a time into our sites. (Let them stand in line!) These are not silly ideas: People used to have to stand in line at major universities to use scientific calculators, but now we've made them cheap enough that we can just give one to every math student. The thing which makes many obvious solutions silly is: They cost too much, or they don't make enough money. And to answer the questions "how much is too much? how much is enough?" requires accountants.
Finally, please don't call this thing I've just written "a hypothesis". That makes me wince. I'm having fun with the metaphor, but it would be a mistake to reify it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
The metaphor is fun because I really am related to monkeys (well, chimps, technically), and because many human behaviors really do make sense in chimp terms as well, and because it's quite possible that this is not entirely a coincidence, or a case of convergent evolution. But let's not go too far. It is only a metaphor. I'm built out of chimp parts, but I'm also built out of distinctly human parts.
For example, it would be bad to argue like this: Early humans lived as free-ranging nomads, so a better office design would be one that forces us to live like free-ranging nomads. That idea has been tried. And it turns out that one of the hacks that make the modern world possible is personal collections of artifacts: piles of papers (with the most relevant ones on top) and post-it notes to cue your memory, photos of your family to regulate your mood, egg timers to remind you to take breaks, vastly complex, expensive, and personalized suites of hardware and software to help you write code, the custom-adjusted chair that keeps your back in working order, etc. In other words: Having your own office makes you more productive.