Study show that people think that data analysts and accountants are boring

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672221079104

by taubek • 4 years ago

56 77 4 years ago

journals.sagepub.com

taubek2• 4 years ago

Stereotypes suck. Why would data analytics be boring?

grenoire• 4 years ago

Read the abstract: Data analysts, not data analytics. The persons interested in these seem to have boring traits.

taubek2• 4 years ago

Yeah, my mistake. But how can such person be considered boring? In my mind the are the persons that tackle the data, find connections where others don't see it, good at observing patterns...

jjgreen• 4 years ago

Well yes. Yes. Of course, it's a bit of a jump isn't it? I mean, er, data analyst to lion taming in one go. You don't think it might be better if you worked your way towards lion taming, say, via machine learning?

zwischenzug• 4 years ago

For those that don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAOQH4xEyhM

circlefavshape• 4 years ago

"Unfortunately, some people are perceived as boring."

Some people just are crashing bores.

dusted• 4 years ago

I find it mildly entertaining that someone had to do a study to come to this conclusion

badrabbit• 4 years ago

Indeed. What was their objective?

Studies show that I too am boring.

s0teri0s• 4 years ago

There are vastly worse things to be than boring.

spacemanmatt3• 4 years ago

Young people definitely make decisions about things based on perceived social appeal. It's kind of a thing.

technobabbler4• 4 years ago

Can you blame them? Social appeal has significant mating and survival consequences.

I think the whole lonely geek thing has gotten better in the last decade, but it used to be really bad. Like the Lone Gunmen in the X-Files (really dating myself now).

If you're in that stereotype, either you end up finding a lucky niche that appreciates your talent (easier these days) or you can easily end up ostracized and terribly lonely, with fewer friends, mates, opportunities, etc., which can in turn lead to severe depression and other mental health consequences.

"I'm smart, I'm nice, why doesn't anyone like me"... used to be a common complaint of the geeky types. Thankfully it's a bit better these days.

treeman79• 4 years ago

For someone with full blown ADHD. There isn’t much worse then being bored. It feels like a physical pain so much so that I’ll take a considerable amount of physical pain over being bored.

technobabbler4• 4 years ago

Self-flagellation isn't boring. If you can do it on a unicycle, even better!

FinanceAnon• 4 years ago

I think for many people the definition of boring is:

- anything that I don't understand

- anything that forces me to think

hef198985• 4 years ago

Plus: I never saw a drama series about it

ad404b8a372f2b9• 4 years ago

What about that documentary starring Ben Affleck?

louis___• 4 years ago

This is the kind of comment a very boring person would make

AussieWog93• 4 years ago

You're two thirds of the way there. The final, most important piece of the puzzle is of course "anything that, having put in the thought required to understand it, would be considered a waste of time an energy".

Talk about the analytics of, say, how and why spouses cheat, and you'll be able to get anyone's attention easily.

technobabbler4• 4 years ago

And:

- even if I learned it, nobody in my social circle would care

culopatin• 4 years ago

Although the study says the among the most boring hobbies is watching tv, which everyone understands and evokes almost no thought at all.

llampx• 4 years ago

What people think is extremely influenced by pop culture. Programming was boring, coding is cool. Investing is boring, VC is cool. Being a lawyer was boring, being a lawyer is cool.

antattack• 4 years ago

People comfortable with numbers are also not average in their soft skills.

mgh2• 4 years ago

The impact factor of the journal is 5/10

frankbreetz• 4 years ago

This comment reminds me of how the Simpsons potentially influence public opinion on nuclear power being unsafe.

swayvil• 4 years ago

Seriously. Society is an airtight room made of mirrors.

tailspin20194• 4 years ago

I couldn't help chuckle at this one.

I've known quite a few accountants over the years. Some fit this typical stereotype rather well, and others have been a bit more "dynamic".

However, they are notable in that nearly all of them have been some of the nicest people I've ever met, with very high levels of integrity and authenticity. Very level headed, high attention to detail, professional, knowledgeable and kind.

Obviously the profession does attract a certain type, but despite any negative stereotypes, in my experience their traits overall seem to be overwhelmingly positive.

I cannot say the same however for software developers (of which I'm one). Far more variability there!

I guess this is partly because there is perhaps a higher barrier to entry to become even a "junior" accountant, whereas any random blundering idiot who dropped out of school can become a software developer (n=1 proof: me)

:-p

jqpabc1239• 4 years ago

a higher barrier to entry to become even a "junior" accountant

I couldn't help chuckle at this one.

When I was in college, engineering was known as "pre-accounting" --- those who couldn't handle the math went into accounting.

This is not to say accountants aren't nice people but the math involved is what my engineering professors disparaging referred to as "kindergarten" algebra so the barrier to entry is really not very high.

ss1083• 4 years ago

He didn't mean in terms of skill or difficulty; he was referring to the bullshit one has to go through to actually be an accountant (certifications, etc).

toyg4• 4 years ago

I think there is a bit of confusion between topics here.

Software Engineering as an academic topic can be very difficult; as a career, because of various factors over the last 30 years, it's anything but.

Accounting as an academic topic is fundamentally very simple (it's mostly about giving precise names to money movements); as a career, because of rigorous qualification paths in most countries, it's anything but.

scandox• 4 years ago

I've known a lot of engineers I wouldn't trust to do my books though!

tailspin20194• 4 years ago

And yet all the accountants I’ve worked with have had to be able to prove their ability by way of recognised qualifications. Ie legally they have to have certain qualifications in order to do their job.

Whereas I dropped out of school at 17 after being on track to fail my A Level in Maths and yet I recently built an ERP system for a $100m revenue company. No one checked my (lack of) qualifications! (Nor did my lacking certain bits of paper impede my ability to do a good job)

I’m not as bad at maths as that failed A Level would have indicated, but I doubt I would have easily sailed through accountancy training/qualifications. Not for lack of intelligence but for lacking in other areas.

So raw “math ability” is only one element here and just focussing on that could risk minimising all the other skills required to be a good accountant (including organisation and people skills).

hef198985• 4 years ago

Nobody said accounting math is particularly hard so. Everything around it is. Once you fail to be able to publish SEC required balance sheets because those mathematically highly skilled engineers screwed up your books by ignoring every single accounting standard, you might come to realize the value of good accountants. Well, after those good accountants left, that is..

LudwigNagasena3• 4 years ago

I cannot say the same however for software developers (of which I'm one). Far more variability there!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

tailspin20194• 4 years ago

Interesting!

However I’m not affected by cognitive biases, so this probably doesn’t apply to me. /s

moss2• 4 years ago

Shocking!

sn41• 4 years ago

Time to consider becoming a lion tamer [1].

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqQlCOmXuHM

jimhefferon• 4 years ago

I was a math major in college. Now, math is not exactly stock car racing, or lion taming, but I never would have conceived of doing business with my life. It was obviously way dull and the only people I knew around the dorm who majored in it were dopes who were coasting through college and didn't know what else to do. (Everybody sees, right, that I am setting up to be proved wrong?)

Twenty years later I got a subscription to the New Yorker and they ran a regular business column (https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/james-surowiecki) . Almost every one was super interesting. Decision making under uncertainty, leveraged buyouts, and all kinds of stuff that was worth thinking about.

These days, someone here turned me on to Matt Levine's newsletter (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...). I never thought that finance could regularly be laugh out loud fun. Who knew?

I'm a college professor. I sometimes tell the Business folks that they could do with a lesson in marketing. They smile, a little, and change the subject. I think they are so flooded with folks that it is not really of interest. Too bad.

toyg4• 4 years ago

I think they are so flooded with folks that it is not really of interest

I think they actually want to actively discourage people. They understand supply and demand.

montebicyclelo• 4 years ago

A possible limitation that jumps out to me about the study is that the participants were all from crowd-sourcing services (mainly Amazon's Mechanical Turk, residing in the USA; but also Prolific.co, residing in the UK). Are people who work for crowd-sourcing services representitive of the wider population?

I found their definition of boredom interesting:

Boredom is often conceptualized as the adverse experience of wanting but being unable to pursue satisfactory activity. It is an unpleasant emotion characterized by low or mixed arousal, a lack of interest in the situation, the perception that time is passing slowly, failure to sustain attention, and a lack of perceived purpose. Boredom, an affective experience, signals that current (in)activity fails to offer a sense of meaningfulness and propels the pursuit of actions that, for example, offer a sense of purpose, novelty, or might temporarily distract from one’s immediate predicament.

And what might make people boring:

[prior] results indicated that stereotypically boring people are characterized by negative egocentrism in interactions (e.g., lack of interest in the other person’s contributions and constant complaining) and banality (e.g., interest in a single topic only; repeating jokes); they talked less and shared relatively little subjective information.
Our research shows that being perceived as boring likely conveys low competence and low warmth, being a social burden, thus causing avoidance by others.

Their table of stereotypical characteristics of boring people: https://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/...

Their table of boring jobs: https://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/...

Their table of boring hobbies: https://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/...

Razengan• 4 years ago

Study shows that studies are boring

hkt• 4 years ago

_People_ are boring.

ianai• 4 years ago

Title reads like every one of my public school bullies.

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

I would love to know what people think about software engineers.

Havoc• 4 years ago

As an accountant - Not surprised. Part of the issue is that you’d spend 8 hours a day doing stuff that is quite arcane and the average person has literally no reference point that would make it relatable.

eg I mostly do large private equity stuff - mostly offshore. Confidentiality aside the average person has zero chance of following any sort of cross jurisdiction finance stuff. Or worse they read some clickbait write up on Panama paper or whatever by a journalist that also doesn’t know anything about the topic aside from outrage sells newspapers.

So I mostly just don’t say anything. Add 8 hours of sleep and you don’t have many hours of interesting left

nickd2001• 4 years ago

Guardian did an amusing take on it here : https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/mar/19/if-you-find-...

MiddleEndian• 4 years ago

Clearly they have not seen The Accountant (2016), starring Ben Affleck.

Study show that people think that data analysts and accountants are boring

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