In practice, forensic accounting is roughly as interesting as archaeology. It makes for some great headlines in the end, but there is an enormous amount of detail and bureaucracy you have to dig through to get there.
> In practice, forensic accounting is roughly as interesting as archaeology. It makes for some great headlines in the end, but there is an enormous amount of detail and bureaucracy you have to dig through to get there.
Perhaps accountants and archeologists would say the same about coding.
Coding is a creative endeavor. In contrast, forensic accounting is more similar to reading code someone else wrote and trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking when they wrote it.
That's basically what I'm doing today. I'm trying to figure out what the hell that guy that originally wrote this codebase was thinking. (Probably something like "Oh hey, Ruby has this feature Java didn't have, let's use it in exactly the wrong way!")
Every creative endeavor is 1% of inspiration, followed by 99% or perspiration. That's the only way to manifest the pretty pictures inside your head onto a tangible medium that can reach others.
Creativity without hard, and often dull, work is called "Day dreaming".
There is also just weeding through to prove very blatant frauds, which can be forensic in nature, if payments are hidden in group company loans or sale and buy back deals, or discounting tax rebate incomes. I mean starting with a very obvious con, you still have to prove it. Currently a project if mine, in this way. Not huge, but close to twenty million dollar property fraud.
I suspect that's pretty well captured in the comparison to "spelunking through git commits on a 10 MLOC project". (I say "suspect" because I haven't actually done either, thank God)
