[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn busine...
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Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business
administration/finance?
As a software engineer, I want to learn more about business
administration and finance. I want to able to level with CEOs, CFos
or other managerial positions.
Author : dattl
Score : 43 points
Date : 2020-07-25 09:19 UTC (13 hours ago)
| jonahbenton wrote:
| The onramp for finance is accounting. There is no other right
| answer. This is also essential for general business
| administration.
|
| Accounting is a huge topic; being able to read financial
| statements is a good, first tangible exercise.
|
| Best book I have found for this is Thomas Ittelson, Financial
| Statements.
|
| Using double-entry accounting methods for your own financials
| with a tool like Beancount is super helpful from a practice
| perspective, and appealing to an engineering mind:
|
| http://furius.ca/beancount/
|
| "Being able to level with CEOs and CFOs" is less about
| administering a business and more about being able to communicate
| with executives. This is essential for all technical people,
| whether or not they have management or executive ambitions
| themselves.
|
| This also is a huge topic, I would suggest starting with concise
| definitions of what managing is, and what being an executive is
| about. When you understand the concerns of the people you are
| communicating with, you can do so more efficiently and
| effectively.
|
| From a mindset perspective I would start with Peter Drucker, The
| Effective Executive, and since everyone is their own CEO, his
| book Managing Oneself is very valuable.
|
| These are all classic texts, still valuable and relevant, as
| these topics are as old as the hills.
|
| Good luck.
| cdbyr wrote:
| I can't recommend How Finance Works by Mihir Desai enough.
|
| There are a few cool things about it:
|
| 1. You get the feeling that the author has developed a deep sense
| of how learning works, and is using the same teaching methods in
| the book that have been honed over a lot of in-person classes.
| For example, having you puzzle out which balance sheet belongs to
| which company early on in the book, and it being surprisingly
| doable.
|
| 2. There are different levels of abstraction discussed in close
| proximity - the math, then the account from a cfo.
|
| 3. It's concise. That lets it cover a pretty wide range without
| feeling like a textbook, and I think that helps a lot for
| developing an early understanding.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| One of the most effective ways I know to do that is to read books
| written by people who have run technology companies, or about
| technology companies by insiders, or by venture capitalists, or
| biographies of important figures, or about the history of
| technology world, or books recommended or mentioned by any of the
| above. You get examples on a canvas you're familiar with.
|
| I'll read books mentioned in interviews of people who have a
| track record. Even watching a video like this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U (check out the first
| comment and replies). It only lasted a few seconds, but we got
| the books in the background figured out. We recognized some by
| the spine.
|
| There are a _lot_ of things that are the way they are because
| someone did something at some point, and it 's only reading a
| book where the author mentions an anecdote that you piece things
| together. There are entire deals that didn't happen because
| someone was a jerk to another years before that. These books also
| expose a situation, and the decisions made in a certain context,
| the tradeoffs, etc. How people went about the product, which
| strategies they used to find a market, how conflicts arose and
| were handled with.
|
| But, back to your ask:
|
| Wharton has a "Business Foundations"[0] series on Coursera which
| includes entire courses on marketing, accounting, finance.
|
| Microeconomics (two or three books you find in every course: the
| ones by Pindyck, Perloff, and Mankiw. Either named
| "Microeconomics" and "Principles of Microeconomics").
|
| You can checkout the MIT OCW courses on these.
|
| [0]: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/wharton-business-
| fo...
| ernbllg wrote:
| Reading books written by people who have run tech companies
| definitely helped me. I recommend books by Basecamp.
| dunce2020 wrote:
| https://openstax.org/subjects/business
|
| Look up the curriculum/reading lists of MBA programs.
| colonelanguz wrote:
| Inb4 "Subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff"[1]
|
| Particularly in terms of generating what another thoughtful user
| dubbed "contextual understanding," this is a gold mine. Also
| occasionally gives very lucid, refreshing descriptions of how
| lots of things that other finance people take for granted work.
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
| Grae wrote:
| Came here to say this. It's entertaining and enjoyable reading
| that happens to be about financial topics. It is to financial
| literacy what "take a long vacation in France" is to learning
| French.
| nknealk wrote:
| I just finished an MBA in June. A few thoughts outside of what's
| been mentioned here already:
|
| If your company is publicly traded, learn about the variety of
| SEC filings that most C-level executives are responsible for. In
| particular, learn how to parse the footnotes of 10K/S1 filings --
| an income statement might be 1-2 pages but the footnotes are
| often 30+ pages. The interesting choices a company makes are
| often in the footnotes. For example, the related party
| transaction for WeWork's "We" trademark that everyone was up in
| arms about appears on page 199 of the filing.
|
| Finance is about cashflows. GAAP accounting is about subjectively
| spreading costs across periods. The two are often at odds.
| Learning to navigate both and knowing which your audience cares
| about is critical. You often need years of context about a
| business to be able to make contributions on this front.
| inopinatus wrote:
| People rag on MBAs but a smart and thoughtful person will take
| away three superpowers from a typical core curriculum:
|
| 1. Understanding the domain language and key processes of all
| the business units that you didn't already, which is by the way
| all of them. The heightened ability to engage in their own
| domain terms with everyone in a standard company is a social
| and cognitive upgrade.
|
| 2. Finding actionable insights (sometimes dramatically so)
| within your customers, partners, and competitors financial
| statements.
|
| 3. Recognising your own decision biases. (Whether you bother
| correcting for them is another matter)
|
| Interestingly I feel the most under-rated of these is #1, to
| the extent that many of us in tech carry the mistaken
| assumption that we already know all the machinery of firms,
| having learned it "on the job" or by deriving the existence of
| tax accounting from first principles. Unless you've been a
| general manager or founder already this is almost certainly a
| self-delusion. I can say it was for me, I am a mathematics
| major who appended the MBA twenty years later and despite
| directing many successful enterprise-scale projects and lurking
| around Day 1 startups for aeons still had scales removed from
| my eyes.
|
| Never under-rate the value of understanding other people
| better; there is no diminishing return, quite the opposite, it
| is compounding.
| Havoc wrote:
| Just don't call them footnotes if anyone finance-y is around ;)
| pottertheotter wrote:
| Why do you say that?
| bberenberg wrote:
| I would say that the skills really break down into 2 areas:
|
| - Fundamentals that can be learned and quickly applied. This
| means taking an Accounting 101 and 102 course. Then applying
| those accounting principles to your own personal finances.
| They're not that different from a small business. I would also
| encourage you to take a couple of intro to law courses, they have
| been very helpful to me.
|
| - Contextual understanding. This is the ability to take what you
| have learned in the fundamentals, and understand how it applies
| to a current set of data. This is significantly harder, and there
| isn't a general solution here. For example, cash flow seems like
| a fairly simple concept. But once you take into account enough
| variables, it gets very complex. Those variables are specific to
| one organization.
|
| Finally, while not directly tied to your skills, I can tell you
| that as a founder, having an excellent accountant who I can trust
| to understand the minutia of all of this is super helpful. I
| focus on the high level and making sure that it's driving in the
| direction I need, he focuses on the guts. My understanding of the
| fundamentals means I can understand what is going on when he
| explains why something happened that I may not have understood
| initially. All of what I wrote here applies to our lawyer as
| well.
| user5994461 wrote:
| Yep, I'd say it's all about learning some accounting. Get a
| beginner accounting course, not sure where to go. Lots of terms
| to understand, assets, cash, capital, depreciation, revenues,
| taxes, cost of goods, expenses.
|
| In layman terms, it's all sorts of revenues and expenses, short
| term or in the future, interacting together. Ask yourself, how
| much do you pay for salary? for office? for equipment? for
| materials? when? and a hundred more questions...
|
| A good chunk of it is rather straightforward really, yet it
| takes a course or a discussion with an accountant to learn the
| proper terms and the broader concepts formally. Seen all of
| that in university long ago, to be able to make our own
| companies when we graduate.
|
| That being said, I am not sure this would help to talk to the
| CEO. I'm not sure CEO generally care or understand about this
| sort of this. Just outsource accounting.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2020-07-25 23:00 UTC)