The accountants of the 1960s and those of the 2020s

My grandfathers were both accountants. They worked for both corporates and non-profits throughout the 1960s and up to the 1990s. I too work as an accountant. I wasn't influenced by them in anyway though. I don't recall details about what working as an accountant was like for them or what they really did at work. I don't even recall seeing them at work. The little memory I do have is of them having lots registers, notebooks, notepads and pens. There was no pressure on me to be in accounting or have their working lives. It was largely due to other reasons that I ended up in accounting.

While I don't recall much, there are somethings that I do and some that I can infer -

1. The MNCs - They mostly worked for non-multinationals. The large corporates and multinationals did not arrive well until they were late in their careers. And getting a job there would probably have been hard. You did not really have General Electric, Ford Motors, Gulf Oil or other multinationals with offices in India. Now you do. Being able to work for large multinational now brings in more wealth and knowledge. Access to the world through globalisation, enabled this. (we are now going in the opposite direction, protectionist and backward to a poorer past)
2. The rise of the remote worker - Back in their time, you had to be in office close to your boss and have the necessary social and cultural context along with language skills. With the internet and a laptop, the physical distance was no longer as important. While they knew English, their social and cultural understanding of the world was lesser and more focused on the local. With the rise of globalisation and internet, culture and social barriers reduced which is now leading to another problem of cultural homogeneity. If you picked a random adult in the 1960s, majority of them wouldn't know English, they wouldn't know what's happening in the world apart from the news headlines. Today, in 2020s, a random adult in India wouldn't still know English but the % has increased and there is more social and cultural context about the world with YouTube and the internet. (Although, this % is still small relative to the population). The widespread education and use of English also led to more communication.
3. Better tools - They used pen and paper to keep accounts, to reconcile, to journal and manual calculators to calculate. Today, we used spreadsheets and software to do most. What they might take a month to do (like creating financial statements or reconciling all accounts) can be done hours or a day. They had numerous physical files and papers.
4. Specialisations and Educational Qualifications - Today, you have professional certifications and masters degrees that you would need to work in the field but back then you did not. Being a Chartered Accountant meant a lot and had a lot of weight because there were a very few that actually had such qualifications. Being a high school graduate or having a bachelor's was very good.
5. Other points - Career progressions were slower, opportunities were lesser, the work culture was more rigid and hierarchical with a strict 9-6 job in office, more regulatory and standard complexity now, more money now.

"In short, the core principles of double‑entry bookkeeping remain unchanged—but everything around it (technology, regulations, roles, and work culture) has transformed" - o4-mini on my post.

We aren't grateful enough for the western canon that brought about the change but more importantly to San Francisco for making our lives richer, safer and freer. The progress of change has for the most part led to much better lives. (The environment, communities and cultural homogeneity needs to be looked at). Yet most look at it with resentment that stems from insecurity ignoring that most of it is actually better. Imitation may not always be bad and you want the idea, the principle or the value to outweigh the nationality. Whether this positive trend of change from the west will continue is open to debate and its not increasingly clear to me.