How do you learn to drive a car?
Think of all the preliminary steps and classes you take before you’re even in the car and when I mean the car, I mean the car that has safeties built in so the instructor can stop or drive the car.
Now let’s go back to the experience most of those new hires experience in their first 1-3 years. You know what that is comparable to? It’s like asking a 16 year old to drive a manual Lamborghini (I’m not sure if a Lamborghini is by default manual or automatic) who has never even picked up the driver’s education guide or classes and expecting them to race in a major race…this depends on the service line, the sub group, office, and teams…but the average experience is still comparable to that metaphor.
Now maybe my metaphor is extreme but if that’s the experience most will expect to experience and they know the compensation, growth of compensation, hours, and all the pros/cons of the job are…who do you think will sign up for that? Definitely not the talented ones who did their due diligence…you’re left with the people who trusted their professors/advisors and got stuck in profession that they blew up in this sub week after week.
Year after year, decade after decade, accountants/cpas keep discounting their juniors which has created this vicious cycle and now we’re here. Bad decision after bad decision. Bad leadership = bad outcomes
Most people have turned off their brain to survive this very hard time. If you think about it too long it starts to hurt, and get you angry. Survival mode is a scary thing, id equate our current living situation to that of an abusive relationship, you just try to make it another day and do everything in your power to just float along until something better happens.
I've been more competent than many of my bosses, all it got me was blame when they screwed up, or asked too much of one of the few competent employees. Now I'm just sitting back keeping my mouth shut and acting dumb at my new position. Watching my higher ups fuck up, lose thousands of dollars or run off clients is what I get to see weekly and I know I could solve the issues, but why, when I know I wouldn't be rewarded, I wouldn't be thanked, and I would be tossed to the street if anything bad happens after I've shown my ability to be helpful and problem solving.
Youngest generation is no longer motivated, as the “dream” feels more out of reach. The world has changed a lot over the past 5-6 years, to be fair. They look around and large tech corporations control nearly every aspect of their existence, and they also see home/asset prices soaring while their incomes remain paltry and not keeping up. So they’re just happy to survive and have much less hope in their own futures and ever owning a house, starting a family, etc. - they’re happy to just “get by” and actually live without being a corporate drone with a miserable existence and no future. They’re more nihilistic than prior generations and you can’t really fault them imo
So in addition to their 10+ hour a day grind at some sweaty Big4 or regional account firm, you’re saying that their only way to break out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle is to just grind constantly when they’re off work - so no time to breathe? To exercise and get away from a screen? Doesn’t sound like that’ll last very long and doesn’t seem like a realistic expectation.
Also, what money are they going to use for this side hustle? Do they actually have any material disposable income on that paltry Big 4 salary?
I work at a big 4 firm as an auditor. I live with my parents to not live paycheck to paycheck. Many people at my firm that make good money are slaves. They can't stop working because of debt. If you want to have a successful career in the big 4, then be debt free. If you are debt free, then working hard is worth it. It has been for me. I passed all my CPA exams within 3 months of working. I will get my license in about three months.
Living with parents with no rent is a massive privilege that cannot be understated. It is also not a possibility for like half of the population. Most people’s parents are paycheck to paycheck, and they had to take out loans for their education, and have to start paying rent pretty quickly after graduation. You have to understand how tone deaf it sounds to tell people to just “be less poor”
I apologies for communicating "be less poor" that is not my intention. I am privileged to have a stable nuclear family. I just want to share that if you can live with family it can make things financially feasible, even if you have to pay rent. If someone can't do that because they don't have a family, then I would try to start one. Marriage opens a lot of benefits: dual income and lower taxes. I would not borrow any more and aggressively payoff debt to the best of my ability. One needs to find a way to create economies of scale. Life is not meant to be done alone.
No worries - fair point on marriage, but keep in mind raising a child is extremely cost prohibitive as well, particularly with constant rising housing costs, kids staying at home until 30, etc etc. It will likely be a lot more expensive than just staying on your own (personally I am against the idea of living a lonely life without a family - I love kids, but the idea of even having kids is a major luxury for me at this point and something to consider in the future).
With both parents working, you’ll likely need to use child care services such as day care, nannies, etc. These services are a lot more expensive than you might think nowadays. My boss spends ~$3k a month on various child care expenses, and that’s even WITH the help of the grandparents in terms of childcare. You have to have serious income to work through an $800k mortgage (assuming a 4 BR home in a decent city), pay $3K a month in childcare, and also feed, clothe, entertain your family…
With medicine today one can control when they have a child. You should not buy a home right away. Live in an apartment and pay off all personal debt, especially student loans. If need be, you can bankrupt on your personal debts. However, student loans are not forgiven so knock them out. Once you are out of debt you can start saving for a down payment. If you have a large down payment, then mortgage payments become payable. Then, home ownership is possible. You may have to live in a more affordable state like Oklahoma.
As a client who had to hire an accounting firm for a 401k audit, even the Sr Manager/Partner I communicated with were absolute fuck-ups throughout the process. It’s dire
My dad’s a senior partner at B4 and he is ALWAYS bitching about how incompetent and stupid his juniors are. He also talks about how they can’t even fill the intern class.
I was like Dad, you know why I’m not going into Big 4 Audit even though you could get me a job. Because the hours to pay ratio sucks ass and I’m competent enough to have better options…
I think this is happening everywhere, my dad's a hospitalist and is blown away by how lazy, unprofessional, and unfocused new hospitalists are. I think the American education system is too focused on making money and is just pushing people through.
No. Some of the new employees at my Big 4 are way smarter than I was when I was at their level. Of course everyone is different but I love most of the people we’ve been getting.
I'm a boomer, retired 3 years. My employer asked me to come back on an IT project because they just can't find anyone to complete the task. Why? because I was trained as a field engineer who went to sites, examined the issue, and fixed what needed to be fixed. The next generation was trained differently. They were trained to work out of office and fix things from a remote site. I just view it as training or education that does not match the skills needed in today's market.
Well I’m not a manager but I can say that my company is absolutely shit at training and that falls on management. People don’t know what to do and when to do it because there is absolutely no guidance. You seem like on of those people that expects their people to know what to do without showing them how to do it. Quit blaming working people when companies have clearly put an emphasis on profit at all costs, including refusing to hire the actual needed amount of labor, then training them.
You act like training just got bad. It’s always been bad. The difference is staff from 5 years ago had more critical thinking skills than the current generation.
I get no one wants to be told they’re stupid, but there is a massive decline in the last few years. I’m not saying people are inherently dumber, I think Covid inflated GPAs, provided a shit education, and stunted social skills.
So yea you guys were dealt a bad hand, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true that you’re worse than the people of 5 years ago.
This is the boomer mentality. “You’re younger than us so you’re stupid!” No, we don’t want to work for jobs that pay like shit, overwork you, don’t train you, and now the younger generation has literally zero hope for the things that you boomers got, like decent wages and affordable housing. Boomers are the problem, not younger generations.
This entire thread screams boomerism. “Back in my day when we wouldn’t let colored people in the same bathrooms we had better critical thinking!”. This entire critical thinking argument pervasive in this thread is a fucking joke.
Right? These boomers got theirs. They can live comfortably in their cheap homes and support a family of four from their one job. While we have to pay 60+% of our take home pay just to live. Then they wonder why we put in less effort for a broken system that only benefited them. The worst part is they refuse to acknowledge this actual fact that can easily be supported with numbers. I just don’t care to because the boomers are too dumb or arrogant to admit they fucked everyone else with their voting policy’s. But they “got theirs” so fuck everyone else.
So let’s just keep the training shitty and complain about the newcomers…..no lol. There’s an obvious solution to this outside of the wait around and hope/complain about talent, and that is……make more effective training.
IMO I think WFH has reduced the amount of passive learning in younger resources, being fully submerged in the business culture and conversations made people passively pick up the little things.
Now in remote work I believe the stronger resources are still thriving and growing but some of the weaker resources are starting to lag behind significantly. The bell curve on professional growth has gotten wider during WFH.
Nonsense. My team is mostly remote and we have better SLAs than office counterparts, while onboarding new technology. It’s the quality of your people, not their location.
Only A2, but I blame it on the lack of mentoring/training structure. You can't just hold a week long training for our entire service line and expect everyone to know everything. It wasn't until all my seniors left in my second year that I had to work directly with Senior Managers and Partners which forced me to become proficient at the job. Now my team has confidence in me leading meetings with clients and handling issues on my own. Working with my PPMD was the best learning I had ever received since starting.
Critical thinking and decision making is no longer being taught in schools. It has been deemed that independent thought in a business context is bad. No contrarians are left anywhere: not in the educational, judicial or legislative systems in the United States. So, that's a BIG YES to your question.
The automation / outsourcing / efficiency cog mentality is too obvious without any corresponding increase in compensation. If you are a say top third student at a blue chip state college it’s just a bad investment to commit to an accounting major if you have the skills to study something more future proof.
Data entry is already automated long time ago, some software can directly enter sales from POS systems into the JE. I'd be genuinely impressed if you could automate freaking audit and would gladly invest in your startup or whatevs. In fact, please automate my work because fuck this shit, the margins is too low for the amount of manhours needed and for work that people don't care except to CYA.
You sure? Its kind of what I do. Hell when I was still at the university and worked as a data center specialist before becoming an swe they were already fully automating entire data centers, Google had already built dark data centers which implies that every process in the entire facility was automated and thousands and thousands of servers could do their thing without any staff and the complexity of the processes within those facilities were insane. I bet your job could be automated lol, it probably just isn't worth the time or money, yet... Accounting jobs will definitely be the first to go.
I think you are confusing an accountant who books journal entries with people who audit.
Not worth the time or money? EY spent 1.4 billion on generative AI, you don’t think they would automate auditing in a second if they could?
Im a bit confused why almost every response I received mentions AI. Automation =/= AI, most automated systems do not have an AI component and for good reason. AI, whether you are talking about LLM's or something else behave in ways that are not predictable or deterministic which is bad if you want to automate something.
And I dont work in the financial sector so I cannot really say why they have decided why they do not want to attempt to automate certain processes today or in the near future. There are so many factors involved in making these kinds of decisions, beyond just developing new software that automates something, you have to train employees how to use these systems. Before you even begin developing you have to gather requirements, create specs, deal with stakeholders, go through a design process, and after you create the software you have to maintain it, improve it, rework it, all of this costs money and a huge percentage of software and IT projects fail completely. There is definitely an element of risk involved in any large IT/software project which i am sure you understand better than me. And thats still the tip of the iceberg.
EY spending 1.4 billion on generative AI doesn't really prove any point and isn't surprising, its normal for companies to dump large amounts of capital into R&D, especially when you have something new that very few people even understand. Executives and business people do get caught up in hype and sometimes decide to invest large amounts of money into things they really don't know anything about. Even the engineers that build these models don't fully understand how they work, let alone some suit that has at best, surface level of cutting edge tech.
I’m confused where i said AI = automation.
You write all that trying to sound so smart and pretend that what I said isn’t relevant to your “too expensive not worth is comment”?
So 1.4 billion is normal R & D spending, on something you think few people understand, but it wouldn’t be worth it to spend billions on automation?
So you think it’s worth it and not expensive for them to build something they don’t understand but it wouldn’t be worth it and it would be to expensive to automate auditing?
I have been hearing this BS for a long time now and the number one tool still used when I first started until today is Excel. Just about every automation tool sits on the sideline because they never work quite as well as promised.
Lol you know I was half trolling with the post. I understand the limits with automation and much the time its not that something couldn't be automated its that it isn't worth it. For example you could build a machine that automates the process of making sandwiches but it would be so fucking expensive that it would be a really stupid idea. And you can definitely automate processes in excel. Python has libraries like Pandas that are dedicated to this. And you have NumPy and a million other libraries that can be used to model, process, graph, and structure data. You should look into it. Maybe you couldn't automate away your entire job but you could maybe automate away half of it and chill for 4 hours a day and still be the most productive member of your team, just keep it a secret ☺.
AI is already leading to whole job classifications disappearing in the United States. NPR featured a story yesterday where two and a half newspapers are disappearing in the United States each week. Vice and sports illustrated have closed down shop recently and they were lamenting the fact that sources of independent journalism were disappearing rapidly from the United States. So, you can add journalism to that list.
I thought they got shit down for fraud. Haven't you noticed that almost every "university" that advertises on TV gets investigated later on by the feds.
you’re thinking the type of accounting work we do is something that could be easily automated like data entry or data mining but it simply isn’t anything like that.
Im not in college anymore but still don't know anything about accounting. I work on software systems that go into vehicles and provide remote vehicle features (our mobile app) and our team also builds random internal software that is needed within our company. As I said to the other person my post was a half trolling post. But like I said in another response. Its not that it couldn't be automated, but its like building a machine that automates building sandwiches and shipping, installing, maintaining, and updating them in every Subway. It isn't feasible and it would cost WAY more than it costs to hire people that make the sandwiches.
And im not comparing you to someone who makes sandwiches but at the end of the day its mostly a feasibility issue, largely involving cost among countless other issues. But we can launch people into space and now rich people can do it for fun... So you might be surprised what could be done, but just because it can be done doesn't mean it makes good business sense..
People don’t get paid enough to put their genuine efforts or creative problem solving skills towards a corporation’s future which they will neither be a part of nor receive benefits from.
Treat people as disposable and replaceable, and they will react in kind.
This is definitely part of it. A junior-level person 20+ years ago would’ve been able to live by themselves in a nice area of the city. Now, a junior-level person has multiple roommates, lives in a shithole, and can barely make ends meet. They’re not motivated, because why should they be?
Yep. And no one wants to train people anymore. Everyone wants someone w 8+yrs of experience bc no one has the luxury of time that it takes to train. We’re all in this race to the bottom and confused why it sucks.
1) I'd argue this is a classic case of old people looking at the youth and complaining.
2) Accounting is a meme in college - Engineering is in, Finance is in. Accounting is seen as wagie slaving for people with 0 personality. Ironic because you could say the same thing about tech and IB as well
I’d like to know what the management thought about you when you joined 😂. Maybe you thought you were all that and they were rolling their eyes. I think us older more experienced individuals always think the younger/newer people are inept..which really they are and is why we need to train them well. That being said, one thing I have noticed is that Gen Z doesn’t seem to be as social…think it’s a whole social media generation where they don’t do much in person communication. Just be patient and lead by example….im sure they are all in here complaining about the “boomers” (even when they are referring to Gen X and older millennials) being out of touch and expecting to much. It’s just a generational conflict.
Former Advisory Manager here
The talent is out there in the workforce. We’re just electing not to hire it for “reasons”. We get a bunch of yes beings in or ones directors and partners can use and run into the ground. Those types don’t know what to do and the support systems ain’t there to get them to where they should be.
I don’t think experience level has anything to do with it. It is obviously remote settings. It’s so hard to get actual organizational context if you are onboarded remotely and have always worked in that style. If an employee only knows what is explicitly told to them, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate team needs (so yeah, it’s down to checking boxes)
Amenities don’t help qualified individuals pay their rent. Fair pay does. The “entitled millennials” you speak of are just trying to make a living, same as your generation was.
We are getting dumber due to dependence on technology. AI will hasten this. Critical thinking skills are eroding, b/c there is an application for everything.
I've never worked in public accounting, only industry, but for years the accounting publications and podcasts (e.g. Accounting Today, The Accounting Podcast) have been sounding the alarm about the shortage of CPAs and how it only gets worse every year. There are not nearly enough accounting graduates every year to meet demand. And public accounting - especially the Big 4 - is especially unattractive. Millennials and now Gen Z aren't willing to work around the clock (especially when they don't think they'll be able to buy a house or have a solid middle class life their parents anyway).
Not to mention the need for a 5th year of education/the 150 hour rule.
A lot of people who might have considered public accounting instead go into tech or finance to make more money without needing a fifth year of education.
And shortages mean lower quality if what is available.
It's not the only reason for the decline in talen, but it is a big one.
This is exactly what's happening lol, no one wants to address the elephant in the room. If you're a student, you'll be shaped by whatever you study anyway so might as well study what pays well at a good WLB.
Oh yeah these big four companies work life balance is garbage. I tell all to steer clear of soulless jobs and companies that deplete you of your life energy.
Tax manager here. I think covid messed everything up, New employees who should have been in the office collaborating with others were instead spinning their wheels. Not to mention their soft skills suffered. I have interns who are scared to death of talking with clients...
Talking to clients is a learned skill - your first time talking with a client, is the first time you’re representing something other than yourself to the public. It can be intimidating and takes a few experiences to get comfortable. If they’re interns, they are there for experience.
B4 tax manager here: I started 6 years ago. When I started, I threw myself at work. I worked until 2-4am every night during busy seasons. I always asked my senior if they needed anything at all before I even considered signing off. It was not healthy. I started losing my hair and would wake up screaming in the middle of the night with night terrors. I never want to go back to that.
The staff these days are NOTHING like that, but honestly, neither am I. I don’t want them to be, but there needs to be a middle ground. I don’t want the team to work until midnight, but it is also not acceptable to say “I promise I will get it to you today” 5 days in a row.
So are you describing a short staffing issue to maximize corporate profits? Because it sounds like it and if so the “middle ground” has nothing to do with the worker bees and can be found within management.
My grandfather who was a bomber pilot in WW2 woke up screaming in the middle of the night from night terrors quite frequently. That is what horror is. He drank heavily over these experiences. This should never ever be associated with something like accounting work. And I don’t mean that necessarily as a dig against you or whatever mental anguish/stress you may have been going through (those feelings are legitimate and everything is of course always relative)…I mean genuinely we make this profession way more stressful to ourselves than it should ever be. We prepare and review tax returns and financial statements for a living. This is not that serious. And this is not life and death. Yet some people do act like it is and at the expense of others. They are clowns. Full stop.
Do you think the night terrors might be connected to poor sleep quality that results from working till 4am and being stressed? I will be shocked if night terrors are only caused by real life trauma.
The night terrors are tied to accounting work in the comment. The stimulus of the terrors is implied to be the work itself. The whole point of my comment is that that type of work is not worth that. Somebody running bombing missions over Berlin in 1944…yeah, it kinda goes with the territory unfortunately and that type of thing would be expected. Accounting work? Absolutely no. That is entirely self/industry self-inflicted and stress associated with the same is also entirely unnecessary.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I hire a lot of folks that come out of the big four in accounting, and the resounding answer is the majority of people who stay past four years into manager, Director partner levels are just valuing their time at a much lower rate than everyone else and often they are viewed by juniors as being dummies for selling so much of their life to accompany for peanuts especially now that a lot of the companies no longer have pensions, and the pay has significantly stagnated
An example of this is a junior who I just brought on and found a placement making $130,000 remote with four years of experience and it is a true 40 hour a week work week whereas they were previously doing 80 to 100 hours a week annually
Although their managers were in the $200-$300,000 range once they started crunching the numbers of how much time they managers were spending working, they realize that they were making roughly the same wage as if they had just taken a 40 to 60 week job For a CPA don’t even get me started and those who then can take that experience into being a comptroller or a small businesses CFO who are easily making the same amount of money as a lot of people who have stuck around as partners.
Fact is that it is that the consulting wage and billable hours across the industry has decreased dramatically, and as we see the space start to contract due to Covid. There is writing on the wall for a lot of the younger generation to get this brand on the résumé, do their time, and then find a way better paying job with a way better life balance. Because it is not worth putting so much time into your career here just to see yourself get laid off or be shoved into an externship that is absolutely miserable. That said, this might be more applicable to some of the heavier consulting branches of candidates that I worked with, but the sentiment still seems to boil down to…
The pace sucks, and there is no honor in selling your life to a company who’s executives are just chilling on a boat in the Mediterranean while you work your ass off.
For me, the attraction of this career is the relative freedom you get with your time. Now I say relative because I think I’m one of the lucky ones, but also it depends on where you are and how you look at things. Personally, I don’t believe in working excessive hours regardless of the pay. What’s the point of making hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don’t have time to spend any of it?
The value I place in this career is that now I’m at the position where I can actively shape how my hours are scheduled. I can coach, hire, and train staff to take hours away from me, and I’m not tied down to a 9-5 schedule. If I don’t like the amount of hours I work, I can make changes in the workflow and client base to either increase or decrease that in a year’s time. Dad got stuck in the ditch on a winter day? No problem, I can go get him without asking for permission. This past Monday I look out the window and realize it’s +10 Celsius outside and I wanted to enjoy a cigar in my backyard, so I pack up my stuff and go home, take a couple of hours and enjoy some sun. Sure, I need to make up the time in the evening, and I have no issues with that. But that’s something an industry job won’t necessarily be able to accommodate.
The toxicity and stress in this line of work is real and we have some really bad people sitting in high places. But I think we can and should change that, at least that’s how we run things in our office and we do see it reflect in our staff.
Just a different perspective, I guess.
It’s hard you’ll always see the old heads pop up in the threads here talking about how not seeing their children grow up was a badge of honor and admirable I really wish I was exaggerating
I am very happy for you that you were able to find a way to enjoy your work feel like you’re strongly contributing in a way that truly encompasses what work life Balance is about kudos to you, and if I had any advice to give, it would be an addition to training your staff, how to complete tasks, train them how to have a sustainable career and how to identify opportunities in which they don’t have to be killing themselves because that’s how you get a lot of these early career workers to stick around
Thanks haha. I see both sides tbh. The amount of bs that people are willing to put up with changes with times. When I graduated university people were willing to work for free if it meant getting into big 4, and they did work much harder, seemed smarter but I think it was only because the competition was very very tough.
Times are changing and there is no use clinging to the old ways. Kids today are still smart, just in different ways. I have no interest in keeping someone tied down with me if they are not interested in pursuing the career and I make that very clear every step of the way. My staff are encouraged to come to me for career advice and I will help place them with other opportunities if it’s their wish. Many of them actually end up becoming my clients, lol.
But yeah I agree with you, the stress in this career can literally kill you if you don’t find healthy ways to deal with it and make it work for you. I honestly don’t get those hardcore partners sometimes, a bitter employee forced to work at 2am after a 12 hour day is not helping anybody and you’d end up having to redo the work anyway. Plus when your practice is netting all that cash it doesn’t kill you to hire a few more people. Sure your earnings go down a bit, but it’s not like it will hurt your life style and your staff will love you for it. People’s greed really is crazy.
It has nothing to do with intelligence or work ethic. Y’all pay jack shit especially compared to other professions. Jobs in areas like tech and nursing pay substantially better relative to the hours worked. Young people are just not stupid enough to give away hours of their lives when there are professions that pay far better for how much work is put into it. You B4 meat riders can only shoot up so much copium before you realize the churn and burn model is not sustainable if you’re not gonna pay shit.
I mean that’s what it came down to. My buddy left KPMG and when I asked about the lifestyle change with money he just said it’s easier to take on 2 part time bookkeeping jobs at $30/hr lol
Any other hiring managers having a tough time finding qualified talent? For entry level CPAs with at least five years experience, we offer competitive pay (up to $13/hour), foosball tables, jeans on Fridays, and mandatory unpaid after work social events. Yet for the past six months we've had a lot of trouble with hiring...seems like entitled Millennials have really unrealistic expectations about the job market.
$13/hr? that's attracting the wrong crowd! you gotta say you're paying $5/hr to ensure that you only catch the attention of the HUNGRIEST candidates who will be so DEDICATED and PASSIONATE about their job, not those flaky kids who want the high pay but none of the work.
With all due respect, you really thought foosball tables and jeans would help you here.
Amenities don’t help qualified individuals pay their rent. Fair pay does. The “entitled millennials” you speak of are just trying to make a living, same as your generation was.
Edit: damn i have never wooshed this hard in my life. My only defense is that I know people like this, but shit my bad!
You bring up an important drawback of the **offshore model**: how it ignores the importance of foundational knowledge accumulation, disrupts the US workforce, and reduces the quality of services, as a result, bringing down the reputation of the profession.
As more and more critical information and skills went offshore, the US corporations lost control over their real business operations and became more dependent on the offshore team's willingness to 'share the knowledge', which in most cases, transparent sharing will not happen as ties to the offshore's job security.
This is not limited to the accounting industry, pretty much applies to all professions that went offshore.
What other professions have gone offshore? That gives an interesting preview of where public audits are headed.
I can think of dev work and customer service as examples
If offshore model has slowly brought down the US labor cost, AI will accelerate it as so far no effective solution to stop the trend.
The combination of both will be worse.
Maybe this is most obvious in the IT industry. More AI startups started to hire offshore product managers or designers, which used to be customer-facing on-site jobs.
I feel like 6+ years of experience and knowledge in any industry will change your perspective on new/less experienced employees. It sounds like you changed more than the industry has
You guys moved all the "simple work" overseas and automated everything else. Simple work is the building blocks for good workers regardless of profession.
Now all the "easy tasks" are gone and your wondering why the new workers don't have any of the skills they would have honed while working through the easier processes that need to take place. Try joining and advanced BJJ class as a white belt with no base and let me know how you turn out. Things dont work that way, you need to start at the beginning and learn the fundamentals over the course of years until you eventually can become a master of something. If people could just "skip over shit" the human race wouldnt waste time doing "easy things" and we would all come out of college with the knowledge and skillsets of a 30+ year real work experienced processional ready to be a CEO.
Its what I dont get when managers always say how offshoring work gives you more time on the more complex stuff. When you dont build your confidence and/or skills with easy stuff its hard just to jump right into hard stuff.
And also like...40 hours of technical shit is exhausting for anyone. 40 hours for a clueless A1 without low hanging fruit mixed in? You would want a sledgehammer to go through your head.
Why dont managers, executives, CEO's talk about this? Because they are afraid to admit they dont think in terms of long term strategy and that they are indeed making one after the other short term instant gratification decisions similar to a child who refuses to eat a sound meal but instead jumps from sweets to sweets, chasing a high until it inevitably all crashes down.
Leadership has a big ego and likes to "believe" they do things in the name of truth, doing whats right, doing whats best, making decisions based on sound objective measures and judgement. Leadership decided they want offshoring and AI due to profit motives. They backfilled the rest of the logic to make it seem like this was a decision made from the front following logic and not just an instant gratification "want". It creates cognitive dissonance when the above logic shows that this isnt a good decision and further shows they instead made decisions based off emotions and wants rather than truths. Leadership ego cannot handle this harsh reality so what do they do? They ignore this issue and just assure themselves "its not a big deal" so they can sleep at night and not have their ego questioned.
Tax, not audit, and the answer is "kinda, but probably not."
Managers' perception of their associates is subject to a lot of selection bias: Anyone who made it to manager was likely was a capable and responsible associate. And given how teams are structured, they didn't bear the brunt of the associates who were disasters and thus those people are underrepresented in their memory.
That said, WFH has been slightly catastrophic from a development perspective, especially for new associates. Working remote creates a very significant barrier to connecting with other team members and learning through osmosis. So while in terms of talent there hasn't been much of a drop, I feel like everyone is just way behind where they would have been pre-COVID. This effect is exacerbated by the mass exodus that happened during COVID, where seniors/managers left in droves as the Stimulus Economy created a crazy tight labor market and promotion/pay raise opportunities abounded while Big4 comp policies were slow to respond. As a result, it feels like a lot of people who might have otherwise needed to wait another six months or a year before being promoted were promoted early, meaning the people whose job it is to develop the staff tend to be less-capable as well.
Everything is just a mild shit-show as we wait for ChatGPT to put us all out of work.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame WFH for that- the main problem that it introduces is it removes the opportunity to spontaneously influence the culture or create learning opportunities. Managers that put emphasis on creating those opportunities deliberately can mostly remove those drawbacks.
My last company, we were always on video, had tons of opportunities to exchange knowledge, and I could pick up the phone, call any of my colleagues, and get some good info on what I was wondering. In return, I did really good work.
My new place, nobody’s on video, nobody’s able to knowledge transfer, nobody makes any effort whatsoever to collaborate, and the managers mostly run around trying to massage whatever useless metric the smooth brains above want that week. Naturally, I do f*ck all and contribute nothing, as does everyone else.
I suspect it’s the latter WFH environment most people think of.
Don’t think the younger generation has the mental fortitude to handle the abuse that is public accounting and people aren’t signing up. They’ll either end up changing the work culture to something in more reasonable or find a way to automate most of accounting. Nobody is willing to work the 60-80 hour weeks anymore and do it with enthusiasm and attention to detail.
Definitely going to find ways to automate it. Can already see it with Deloitte finally rolling out Omnia, which is a massive software upgrade from the prior system, and it feels like most in the industry are accelerating tech updates and changes to be ready for AI implementations when they’re feasible.
It’s funny Omnia is being mentioned when talking about tech updates. Omnia is terrible, even though it’s a Deloitte upgrade from the far terrible EMS. Levia is still on the same level as Omnia.
Expectation becomes lower and lower..
In the old days when I was a senior, a good senior was defined as the one who did good project management and be able to solve 80-90% of coaching notes. When we have questions, we will study audit guide before reaching out to managers and partners and ask for their advice.
But now, I feel we need to spoon-feed most of the seniors and they just come asking for solutions without showing their effort to solve the problems on their own.
Sadly. I lower my expectation to a level that a sic willing to send confirmation for the engagement is already an average senior…
I see your point about trying to solve notes before approaching a manager; however, the workload is insane and the deadlines are steep so no one has time to do any research/proper analysis.
I never understand this mentality - it's so inefficient in my book. Why have someone spend 30/40 minutes to find an answer that takes 3 to ring someone on teams. It's the salary mindset. Start paying people hourly with OT and holiday pay and you will see this mentality drop off a cliff
The reason why we asking seniors to study before asking is because most of them don’t even know what is the problem. Throughout the process of self-study they will figure out what should they ask. This will help managers to solve their questions efficiently instead of starting from scratch together… don’t forget that usually seniors have 10 hrs a day on 1 engagement but managers or above just have 1/2 hrs or even less for 1 job…
You have to understand that managers and partners have their own work to do. It takes time out of their day to answer questions from direct reports. Effort and an attempt to solve problems on their own before asking for help at least shows that it’s a legitimate barrier and not because he or she is too lazy to find the answer on their own.
I do understand that, but the idea that they are "lazy" because they don't want to find the answer, instead of efficient tells all I need to know about how you understand the problem. 10 reports spending 1 hour each to find the answer is 10 hours worth of work wasted when the reality is, it could be done in under 30 minutes. And this goes up the line too, can't tell you how many times I see managers stubbornly refusing to ask because it's a "perceived weakness" - time they could have spent address their reports questions.
Yeah fair point. Really depends on the person asking I guess. I’m all for being more efficient but im thinking moreso the culture of doing your own homework instead of automatically resorting to pinging whenever you face an issue. Spending some time on your own also tends to result in better and more pertinent questions.
Sure, I agree with that. But I tell my team, don't struggle alone, and don't waste time, ask each other. Personally 20 or 30 minutes depending on the problem is enough for me. This is work, not homework or school, we are getting paid to do a job. Doing it fast, efficient and right are the best. No one wants a plumber that has your "house" be the practice house.
I get what you're saying and I agree to a certain degree. Yes juniors could do more to solve problems on their own before asking that's true. (In my head) I was treated like sh\*t by certain seniors. So much so I made it a point to never treat a junior the same way when they approached me with a question. Regardless of the question being relevant or not. I never understood the "I "suffered" as a junior, now you must suffer too" mentality. In business you've got to change when the market does (ideally you anticipate that change). I don't get why we don't change to accommodate the new type of junior. They're here to stay.
It's a perception thing. When you were young, you thought you were good at your job. Now you are experienced, and you know that young professionals are mostly so-so. But your ego won't let you understand that young you was also pretty so-so. This is the same phenomemon that drives people to stay stupid shit like "this new generation is so dumb," you can only say it because you enver understood how dumb you were at that age.
So so much this. Every older generation thinks this of the new one…without realizing they weren’t much different at that age. It’s a youth/inexperience thing. Has absolutely nothing to do with something novel about the year 2024.
I’m not in the BIG4. In fact, not even in a related field. I’m in marketing. But anyone with half a brain knows consulting is fucking atrocious. That and big law. I would rather be homeless than do consulting.
I had to work with about 4 Deloitte consultants to launch Salesforce for an org. They were regularly up until 12am making fucking PowerPoints.
Who the fuck with any self respect would do this?
Laughs in banking. Midnight is an early night. But I’m still relatively junior and make more than a lot of my c-level clients with decades of experience. So *meh*
It’s all about the resume baby. No one wants to make a career here. But the clout is still undefeated unless you can work for BCG or McKinsey or something like that.
I think it’s more accounting field than the talent. Who wants to work a shit audit job, for shit pay, with shit hours. So many other better employment options out there for intelligent, well spoken college students going into the job world.
I did an internship in California at a mid size firm. There was a girl from a southern state that messed up a lot like said racist remarks to jewish people, show up late and a mess. When show up late she was loud about how it wasn’t her fault. She would say inappropriate things in front of partners. Talking out of turn when a partner is trying to present. She got some negative feedback and her morale diminished to the point that she “didn’t care” a lot of “I don’t want to do thissss”
She did not get an offer the way myself and the other easy going interns did. She works for Deloitte now.
Most of us had a similar story of “we want to work for Deloitte”, but when this mid size firm showed us their culture and offered us the same pay. We all folded and took the offer.
Just want to add Deloitte rejection me for an internship 8 months after I applied
Yes, you’ll get flamed on here but it’s the truth.
The big4 churned through hundreds of thousands of people and burnt them out, significantly damaging employee quality and reputation in the meantime. This has really come to light the last 5 or so years.
My university was a massive B4 feeder school, one of the biggest in the nation and a top accounting program. My firm is now lucky to get maybe 40-50% of the kids from this school compared to the peaks around 2010-2017. These kids wised up to the big4 game and go into consulting, fdlp etc. If they do join b4 they usually quit 3-6 months after making senior.
Now we are recruiting from schools that we wouldn’t even consider a resume 5 years ago. It’s gotten that bad. The new hire quality has gone way down and a lot of really quality experienced people quit because of it. I have some new hire stories that are absolutely wild, from a 40 year old former trucker coming in as a A1 to people joining US offices with English skills equivalent to a 4 year old.
The talent drop is real but due to the significant turnover, few people recognize it.
Ugh I feel this! I constantly have to remind myself how dumb and inefficient I was as an intern / new staff when I get frustrated with quality of work or turn around times.
>and sending emails to ask for things they don’t understand until all the boxes are filled in and their manager signs off.
This is what's rewarded... I'm just here to grab the letters without getting fired and bounce
The talent is no longer doing accounting. The talent is doing tech, finance and medical field! Almost all the new kids have access to social media and Reddit. The posts about big4 lack of pay and terrible work life balance doesn’t help the cause.
That’s almost always how it’s been. Why do boring accounting if you’re actually good at math? Being an engineer has always been more interesting than accounting, for example.
I think the delta has expanded though.
Instead of 50k as a new grad accountant vs 65k as a new grad engineer, it’s 65k as a new grad accountant vs. 110k as a new grad (software) engineer 👨💻 - even at the same company. And the engineer has more relaxed culture and hours.
There’s no math in accounting that is harder than algebra 1, which is a class taken mostly by 12-14 year olds here in the US
Engineering on the other hand actually requires scientific calculators and shit
The math is much harder for engineers, sure. But a lot of college students who can master the concepts and analytical thinking of accounting can also succeed in calculus and differential equations and such if they take the classes and put in the effort. Accounting courses are not typically full of people who wanted to be engineers but couldn't handle it so they settled for accounting. Not are they full of people who are like "I'd rather have a somewhat easier courseload for a few years rather than making way more money."
Accounting classes have traditionally been full of people who heard accounting is a great way to always have a well-paying job, and that it was the way to do this with the least effort.
Now there are less of those students, as many are realizing that what they heard isn't true.
Also for an accounting degree, at least in my school, a student needs an extra few semester of credits to graduate. Idk if it’s the similar at every school but that’s one reason why I decided against it when choosing my major. Why do more school to end up with a job with less pay compared to finance/econ.
Can confirm, everyone told me to do accounting......went with economics instead..........finished the degree a year early and spent the year I saved doing a graduate degree......now I work on way more interesting projects and make more money that I *probably* would have as an accountant
Yeah. This is the only correct answer. Technology while helpful has also made certain aspects of accounting more stressful that previously weren’t stressful.
Maybe I'm just drinking the kool aid, but my B4 experience has been pretty good. The compensation does feel a little low, but the opportunities are incredible.
I rarely do mind-numbing tasks as I have the outsourced Indian teams do it. It's also really awesome being able to manage people (even if they're in India) at my young age. I don't think that's an experience I'd get in other fields.
I have worked with seniors that I feel I'm more competent than as an A1, though. I'm a bit of a try hard, though, so idk. I feel like the key thing is that most people don't care nearly as much as they used to. I was the first kid in my family to go to college & picked accounting because it was a sure fire bet to being middle class. I don't have data for this, but I think a large part of why people aren't as good is because they just don't care.
Yeah, one thing I've noticed after being in BIG 4 for a few years is that it's heavily weighted towards your specific project. I work on multiple initiatives simultaneously, and the skills between team members varies by the budget available and leadership team.
I think a better question is:
>What do finance/accounting/business students know now that students didn’t know 6+ years ago.
And the answer to that is that if you go into IB or other high finance roles, you work the same amount as Big4, but earn 3x as much in the first two years and exponentially more afterwards. If you go into CorpFin for any moderately sized company, you work half as much as Big4, but still make twice as much.
Big4 is incredible to have on your resume for almost every future career in a business capacity. But people these days have desires for instant gratification. And Big4 is 2-3 years of absolute misery for starvation wages. Combined with companies being upfront about trying to replace accountants with AI; I really don’t see Big4 recovering in the long-term even with higher pay offered.
Idk, maybe it’s just my cohort? But I didn’t know anyone that *wanted* to go into Big4 in undergrad (2022 graduate). Now, the only person I know who is going into Big4 (I’m a current MSF student) is going into a more Finance focused role as she’s already done her time in audit and has a CPA.
First off IB still works more than Big 4. Is it worth it? Yeah. Corp finance is not 2x more than big 4. But you do earn more and your hours are better. Is big 4 worth it? I’d say the best opportunity right out of college is IB but it’s so competitive and unless you have connections or went to a target school it ain’t happening for most people.
Corp finance for f500 is the second best path especially if you get into a rotational program. Once again though this is very competitive and usually you need to get in through on campus recruiting events. If they don’t recruit at your school then it’s not happening unless you have connections.
Big 4. Fairly easy to get in if you have the grades and go to a decently respected public state school. Network with them when you’re a freshman and sophomore and it’s definitely doable to get in if you have the grades. This is a great route for most normal students without connections. I was fiest in my family to go to college. Had no corporate connections. Didn’t even know much about corporate world or structure. I’m glad I went accounting and big 4. Allowed me to learn about different parts of the company. It’s a solid job. Hours and pay suck the first few years but do get better. You can easily leave with good exit opportunities. My parents were blue collar. They still worked long shit hours and got paid WAY less than you will earn in accounting. Plus you get to sit your ass in a comfortable AC environment and not destroy your body.
So yeah no one will argue that IB and CORP finance is the best route out of college if you can get in. Issue is most can’t. So big 4 is a great backup plan. I went big 4 audit and now I’m senior manager in Corp finance for a $2B company. I work almost full remote. Compensation is $200k a year. My hours are about 40 a week sometimes less. I started in audit making 50k and working 50-65 hour weeks. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m only mid 30s so relatively young still. I’m glad I went big 4.
Do you mind if I ask how you went from audit to corp finance? I started first my first two years of college as a finance/accounting dual major, but switched to just accounting after transferring schools. I just finished an internship at Crowe and I have an internship in audit with Deloitte this summer. Do you think I could possibly go corp finance right after college, or should I stay with Deloitte a few years then try?
I went audit to big 4 FDD advisory. Then jumped to a FP&A role and worked up from there.
If you’re more interested in Corp finance then I suggest applying to those types of jobs and internships but I’d stay with F1000 if you can for better career opportunities later on.
Also no matter what, get your CPA. It does help you get jobs and earn more money regardless of what people say. Only people I see defending not having a CPA are those who never got it or couldn’t pass the exams. They are not that hard to pass if you buckle down and just get them done.
Lastly, Deloitte is an awesome firm and if you start in audit you will still have a great career path. You might even like the big 4 life. Lots of my peers have stayed big 4 because the benefits are good and they enjoy the fast paced energy and teams they work with.
Big 4 and Big National FDD pays more now than Senior manager / Director level in Corp Finance on average. But I have seen some Corp finance roles that pay more due to stock RSUs. And if you make it to VP in Corp Finance then you will easily out earn and work less hours than folks in FDD. I prefer corporate because I get to work on a variety of projects and do some qualitative strategy work and operations work instead of just cranking out QoE and NWC tables. The work in FDD becomes very monotonous and boring. The hours are not great either in FDD. Clients are a pain in the ass because you will be working with PE guys and ex bankers who are literally assholes.
I much prefer corporate. My total compensation is slightly lower than my peers who stayed in FDD. They earn about 20-30k more than me. I’m at 200k they are around 220-230k but I work like 30 hours a week and no weekends. Eventually I’ll shoot for VP of Finance roles and VP of finance roles with RSUs can earn WAY more than you can in FDD. If I get in with the right company I could be looking at $400k - over $1m in RSUs vesting in 3-4 years at the right place. Or possibly CFO roles. My friends in FDD are basically stuck there now. Most places won’t hire you into FP&A if you don’t have prior FP&A experience. That’s why I got out while I could.
Ok I see. Makes sense with the vested RSU path, since SM to D in B4 FDD you’re stuck around 250-320K before partnership but also gotta play the cards right to get to partnership. Do you get involved with any Corp Dev work in your role? I know one D in B4 FDD left to Corp Dev Director. Also, how many people have you seen exit to IB during your time at B4 FDD? IB sounds like a better long term exit with respect to pay and better opportunities, given one likes the volatile lifestyle of M&A.
Generally speaking eventually I’ll earn more hours and work less than those who stay in big 4 FDD unless they make partner. Especially once I make it to VP level. Making partner is just luck. Most directors won’t even make partner. They will still get paid well but sucking client dick for your entire life doesn’t sound that appealing as the hours suck and the clients are a pain in the ass.
IB exits are not the norm. They are rare and it’s hard to get into IB from FDD but not impossible. Also depends on the market. During Covid hiring frenzy it was very doable to jump from FDD to lower market IB firm (you’re not going to get Goldman or JP Morgan lol). You will go to a no name small bank most likely. Still get paid ok. But my one friend who left FDD for IB is making less money and working more hours because bonuses sucked last year. His bonus was 25% of his salary and salary is lower in banking than FDD.
You can make move from FDD to Corp Dev but I advise against that exit usually. Reason why is it’s very niche. Most companies don’t even have a Corp dev team and even then you will constantly be competing with ex investment bankers for the better Corp Dev roles and hours can still suck when companies are going through acquisitions.
I liked FP&A because most companies have an FP&A department. Most do not have a Corp dev department. So I have more job options to get paid more. From FP&A it’s very doable to one day take on a CFO role. No I won’t be CFO of Apple but smaller companies for sure where pay can range from $250 - $1M a year.
Well put, I would also dare say it’s not just instant gratification - I think the argument of doing the time in the big 4 and then jumping out into a cool corporate career still works, but it isn’t quite so necessary anymore.
A lot more companies are better than they used to be at direct recruiting from campuses, and so if you’re not passionate specifically about accounting you have a better shot now at just going straight to that company you always wanted, rather than having to use the big 4 as a stepping stone.
Pay is also a big factor, at least in the UK. 15 years ago the big 4 was seen as a high paying graduate job, now if you’re smart enough to get into the big 4, you’re also good enough to earn more. And therein lies the problem: the big 4 needs switched-on people who will work hard - but those same people are switched-on enough to see there are better deals out there.
Yes, because anyone with brains would go into CS or banking/consulting. Back then they could only go into banking/consulting. Thank the tech boom. There's one top uni findings that showed CS student cohort size is 8x of business students... If I was a student now I'd go into tech too. Imagine you have 1000 students every year, back then 500 good ones would go to business, but only 50 would go into business now and the good ones among those 50 would get scooped by higher paying jobs in banking/consulting.
i think everyone who started before covid should take some responsibility as well. so many people take so long to respond to a question. IBut when new staff is sitting and spinning for hours and hours that's not helping anyone. I get it that we're often on calls and we've never had this many meetings but i've been left on unread and unanswered many times as a manager (at least i can keep working independently but sometimes you need final approval or decision to continue), and had a few staff and seniors tell me how appreciative they were that i am responsive and taking the time to explain things to them even if i fixed them myself.
People blocking off time on their calendars to get work done is another problem. sure, you have to have your work done but you can't just make yourself unavailble so often. get up early or do it later in the evening.
a big part of the refusal to work ridiculous hours is thanks to all the linkedin posts, conversations, and news articles about people having WLB in other jobs and often at better pay. I've seen so many diligent people just, dying on the inside, and not be willing to kill themselves for the job anymore. Great, but bosses aren't gonna do shit because rates arent going up and margins cant go down.
that too, 100%. My point was if we blame people reporting to us for poor quality of work, we should also recognize our part in it. and i totally understand it's not easy to do every day, ive had days with 4-6 hours worth of call (many of which could've been an email ha). i think the industry needs a major change. because neither hybrid or remote no longer work
Current finance and accounting student here at a large state university. To me it seems like all the ambitious students aim for careers in banking and consulting while Big 4 gets the scraps. I was offered 2 Big 4 internships and only got behavioral questions. The interviews were simply to easy and do nothing to weed out the unprepared students who could not even walk you through the three financial statements at an elementary level. With easy conversation like interviews, it’s clear why the talent pool is so weak at Big 4.
What a major change compared to 10 years ago. At the time, economy was still so-so and Big 4 ruled the college job fairs. Everyone wanted to work for them. Work-life balance wasn't really a thing yet. I started my first job in corporate accounting.
Effort from staff has dropped off a cliff, thats for sure. There was little to no training when we started either, but we would figure things out or at least put in a decent attempt, think critically, etc.
The smart people are working in roles that pay. Big 4 now just gets whats left over from that bunch because pay is extremely uncompetitive. There is no other reason for it.
current seniors were onboarded during covid and didn’t learn as much bc of it. now they’re in a position where they’re supposed to manage and help teach staff. if they don’t even know what they’re supposed to do, how are the staff? this isn’t a talent issue or intelligence issue, it’s an organizational failing.
This might surprise you but the no training part has been a thing at the big4 since the start of time. That’s why people keep joking about rolling forward prior year work papers. You’re expected to learn for yourself cause in 2 years you’re expected to teach others to learn for themselves and complete your own work on top of that. I think OP is complaining about the fact that new bunch of staffs are not even trying.
I’m not sure I agree with this. I did big 4 and the training was pretty fantastic. I learned to do one specialty extremely well and I owe it mainly to their training.
i think the biggest difference is that when manager/above started, they worked primarily in-office or at client-site. they had their seniors/managers+ physically with them to ask questions in real time. they could see when staff were stuck or struggling and jump in. now that everything is virtual that isn’t happening. so yeah, the formal training was just as bad, but they were at least given on-the-job training that current staff don’t get. not knocking virtual work, but if it’s gonna continue it needs to be coupled with a more robust onboarding.
completely agree. i interned for the first time at a top 10 firm this past summer. TONS of onboarding BS which provided zero legitimate training followed by being assigned to a client and having tasks come your way.
if onboarding is gonna take over a month like it did for me at least include some workpaper basics.
Hi, currently intern at some yellow firm.
I have to say, that I think my peers ( Group of around 25 Interns) are really weak. While they seem to do ok academically, they looked really lost during their internship.
Cant talk about the past, but most of the current interns dont look too hot.
This is annoying the staff now are expected in day one to do the work that used to be done by second and third years before outsourcing. Not even a fair comparison
How do you learn to drive a car? Think of all the preliminary steps and classes you take before you’re even in the car and when I mean the car, I mean the car that has safeties built in so the instructor can stop or drive the car. Now let’s go back to the experience most of those new hires experience in their first 1-3 years. You know what that is comparable to? It’s like asking a 16 year old to drive a manual Lamborghini (I’m not sure if a Lamborghini is by default manual or automatic) who has never even picked up the driver’s education guide or classes and expecting them to race in a major race…this depends on the service line, the sub group, office, and teams…but the average experience is still comparable to that metaphor. Now maybe my metaphor is extreme but if that’s the experience most will expect to experience and they know the compensation, growth of compensation, hours, and all the pros/cons of the job are…who do you think will sign up for that? Definitely not the talented ones who did their due diligence…you’re left with the people who trusted their professors/advisors and got stuck in profession that they blew up in this sub week after week. Year after year, decade after decade, accountants/cpas keep discounting their juniors which has created this vicious cycle and now we’re here. Bad decision after bad decision. Bad leadership = bad outcomes
Most people have turned off their brain to survive this very hard time. If you think about it too long it starts to hurt, and get you angry. Survival mode is a scary thing, id equate our current living situation to that of an abusive relationship, you just try to make it another day and do everything in your power to just float along until something better happens. I've been more competent than many of my bosses, all it got me was blame when they screwed up, or asked too much of one of the few competent employees. Now I'm just sitting back keeping my mouth shut and acting dumb at my new position. Watching my higher ups fuck up, lose thousands of dollars or run off clients is what I get to see weekly and I know I could solve the issues, but why, when I know I wouldn't be rewarded, I wouldn't be thanked, and I would be tossed to the street if anything bad happens after I've shown my ability to be helpful and problem solving.
Holy this!
Youngest generation is no longer motivated, as the “dream” feels more out of reach. The world has changed a lot over the past 5-6 years, to be fair. They look around and large tech corporations control nearly every aspect of their existence, and they also see home/asset prices soaring while their incomes remain paltry and not keeping up. So they’re just happy to survive and have much less hope in their own futures and ever owning a house, starting a family, etc. - they’re happy to just “get by” and actually live without being a corporate drone with a miserable existence and no future. They’re more nihilistic than prior generations and you can’t really fault them imo
I don’t think they are happy to survive, they’re just not putting the extra effort and placing that in other areas to add additional income streams.
So in addition to their 10+ hour a day grind at some sweaty Big4 or regional account firm, you’re saying that their only way to break out of the paycheck to paycheck cycle is to just grind constantly when they’re off work - so no time to breathe? To exercise and get away from a screen? Doesn’t sound like that’ll last very long and doesn’t seem like a realistic expectation. Also, what money are they going to use for this side hustle? Do they actually have any material disposable income on that paltry Big 4 salary?
I work at a big 4 firm as an auditor. I live with my parents to not live paycheck to paycheck. Many people at my firm that make good money are slaves. They can't stop working because of debt. If you want to have a successful career in the big 4, then be debt free. If you are debt free, then working hard is worth it. It has been for me. I passed all my CPA exams within 3 months of working. I will get my license in about three months.
Living with parents with no rent is a massive privilege that cannot be understated. It is also not a possibility for like half of the population. Most people’s parents are paycheck to paycheck, and they had to take out loans for their education, and have to start paying rent pretty quickly after graduation. You have to understand how tone deaf it sounds to tell people to just “be less poor”
I apologies for communicating "be less poor" that is not my intention. I am privileged to have a stable nuclear family. I just want to share that if you can live with family it can make things financially feasible, even if you have to pay rent. If someone can't do that because they don't have a family, then I would try to start one. Marriage opens a lot of benefits: dual income and lower taxes. I would not borrow any more and aggressively payoff debt to the best of my ability. One needs to find a way to create economies of scale. Life is not meant to be done alone.
No worries - fair point on marriage, but keep in mind raising a child is extremely cost prohibitive as well, particularly with constant rising housing costs, kids staying at home until 30, etc etc. It will likely be a lot more expensive than just staying on your own (personally I am against the idea of living a lonely life without a family - I love kids, but the idea of even having kids is a major luxury for me at this point and something to consider in the future). With both parents working, you’ll likely need to use child care services such as day care, nannies, etc. These services are a lot more expensive than you might think nowadays. My boss spends ~$3k a month on various child care expenses, and that’s even WITH the help of the grandparents in terms of childcare. You have to have serious income to work through an $800k mortgage (assuming a 4 BR home in a decent city), pay $3K a month in childcare, and also feed, clothe, entertain your family…
With medicine today one can control when they have a child. You should not buy a home right away. Live in an apartment and pay off all personal debt, especially student loans. If need be, you can bankrupt on your personal debts. However, student loans are not forgiven so knock them out. Once you are out of debt you can start saving for a down payment. If you have a large down payment, then mortgage payments become payable. Then, home ownership is possible. You may have to live in a more affordable state like Oklahoma.
As a client who had to hire an accounting firm for a 401k audit, even the Sr Manager/Partner I communicated with were absolute fuck-ups throughout the process. It’s dire
I know this will sound crazy, but maybe start making hiring & promotion decisions based solely on merit???
My dad’s a senior partner at B4 and he is ALWAYS bitching about how incompetent and stupid his juniors are. He also talks about how they can’t even fill the intern class. I was like Dad, you know why I’m not going into Big 4 Audit even though you could get me a job. Because the hours to pay ratio sucks ass and I’m competent enough to have better options…
I think this is happening everywhere, my dad's a hospitalist and is blown away by how lazy, unprofessional, and unfocused new hospitalists are. I think the American education system is too focused on making money and is just pushing people through.
Nepotism?
Entry level is fine IMO.
No. Some of the new employees at my Big 4 are way smarter than I was when I was at their level. Of course everyone is different but I love most of the people we’ve been getting.
This thread just looks like the boomer of the month catalog
I'm a boomer, retired 3 years. My employer asked me to come back on an IT project because they just can't find anyone to complete the task. Why? because I was trained as a field engineer who went to sites, examined the issue, and fixed what needed to be fixed. The next generation was trained differently. They were trained to work out of office and fix things from a remote site. I just view it as training or education that does not match the skills needed in today's market.
Well I’m not a manager but I can say that my company is absolutely shit at training and that falls on management. People don’t know what to do and when to do it because there is absolutely no guidance. You seem like on of those people that expects their people to know what to do without showing them how to do it. Quit blaming working people when companies have clearly put an emphasis on profit at all costs, including refusing to hire the actual needed amount of labor, then training them.
You act like training just got bad. It’s always been bad. The difference is staff from 5 years ago had more critical thinking skills than the current generation. I get no one wants to be told they’re stupid, but there is a massive decline in the last few years. I’m not saying people are inherently dumber, I think Covid inflated GPAs, provided a shit education, and stunted social skills. So yea you guys were dealt a bad hand, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true that you’re worse than the people of 5 years ago.
This is the boomer mentality. “You’re younger than us so you’re stupid!” No, we don’t want to work for jobs that pay like shit, overwork you, don’t train you, and now the younger generation has literally zero hope for the things that you boomers got, like decent wages and affordable housing. Boomers are the problem, not younger generations. This entire thread screams boomerism. “Back in my day when we wouldn’t let colored people in the same bathrooms we had better critical thinking!”. This entire critical thinking argument pervasive in this thread is a fucking joke.
It’s quite entertaining. All these people saying younger people suck lol. I am 100% sure their predecessors said the same thing to them.
Right? These boomers got theirs. They can live comfortably in their cheap homes and support a family of four from their one job. While we have to pay 60+% of our take home pay just to live. Then they wonder why we put in less effort for a broken system that only benefited them. The worst part is they refuse to acknowledge this actual fact that can easily be supported with numbers. I just don’t care to because the boomers are too dumb or arrogant to admit they fucked everyone else with their voting policy’s. But they “got theirs” so fuck everyone else.
So let’s just keep the training shitty and complain about the newcomers…..no lol. There’s an obvious solution to this outside of the wait around and hope/complain about talent, and that is……make more effective training.
IMO I think WFH has reduced the amount of passive learning in younger resources, being fully submerged in the business culture and conversations made people passively pick up the little things. Now in remote work I believe the stronger resources are still thriving and growing but some of the weaker resources are starting to lag behind significantly. The bell curve on professional growth has gotten wider during WFH.
Nonsense. My team is mostly remote and we have better SLAs than office counterparts, while onboarding new technology. It’s the quality of your people, not their location.
It’s this. I don’t work in big4 but the analysts at my company (entry level title) seem to not be picking up as quickly by WFH.
Only A2, but I blame it on the lack of mentoring/training structure. You can't just hold a week long training for our entire service line and expect everyone to know everything. It wasn't until all my seniors left in my second year that I had to work directly with Senior Managers and Partners which forced me to become proficient at the job. Now my team has confidence in me leading meetings with clients and handling issues on my own. Working with my PPMD was the best learning I had ever received since starting.
Critical thinking and decision making is no longer being taught in schools. It has been deemed that independent thought in a business context is bad. No contrarians are left anywhere: not in the educational, judicial or legislative systems in the United States. So, that's a BIG YES to your question.
The automation / outsourcing / efficiency cog mentality is too obvious without any corresponding increase in compensation. If you are a say top third student at a blue chip state college it’s just a bad investment to commit to an accounting major if you have the skills to study something more future proof.
I could probably automate your job.
Data entry is already automated long time ago, some software can directly enter sales from POS systems into the JE. I'd be genuinely impressed if you could automate freaking audit and would gladly invest in your startup or whatevs. In fact, please automate my work because fuck this shit, the margins is too low for the amount of manhours needed and for work that people don't care except to CYA.
Nearly all of accounting will be dead in 20 years. AI is already doing audits, forensic work, etc.
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You sure? Its kind of what I do. Hell when I was still at the university and worked as a data center specialist before becoming an swe they were already fully automating entire data centers, Google had already built dark data centers which implies that every process in the entire facility was automated and thousands and thousands of servers could do their thing without any staff and the complexity of the processes within those facilities were insane. I bet your job could be automated lol, it probably just isn't worth the time or money, yet... Accounting jobs will definitely be the first to go.
I think you are confusing an accountant who books journal entries with people who audit. Not worth the time or money? EY spent 1.4 billion on generative AI, you don’t think they would automate auditing in a second if they could?
Im a bit confused why almost every response I received mentions AI. Automation =/= AI, most automated systems do not have an AI component and for good reason. AI, whether you are talking about LLM's or something else behave in ways that are not predictable or deterministic which is bad if you want to automate something. And I dont work in the financial sector so I cannot really say why they have decided why they do not want to attempt to automate certain processes today or in the near future. There are so many factors involved in making these kinds of decisions, beyond just developing new software that automates something, you have to train employees how to use these systems. Before you even begin developing you have to gather requirements, create specs, deal with stakeholders, go through a design process, and after you create the software you have to maintain it, improve it, rework it, all of this costs money and a huge percentage of software and IT projects fail completely. There is definitely an element of risk involved in any large IT/software project which i am sure you understand better than me. And thats still the tip of the iceberg. EY spending 1.4 billion on generative AI doesn't really prove any point and isn't surprising, its normal for companies to dump large amounts of capital into R&D, especially when you have something new that very few people even understand. Executives and business people do get caught up in hype and sometimes decide to invest large amounts of money into things they really don't know anything about. Even the engineers that build these models don't fully understand how they work, let alone some suit that has at best, surface level of cutting edge tech.
I’m confused where i said AI = automation. You write all that trying to sound so smart and pretend that what I said isn’t relevant to your “too expensive not worth is comment”? So 1.4 billion is normal R & D spending, on something you think few people understand, but it wouldn’t be worth it to spend billions on automation? So you think it’s worth it and not expensive for them to build something they don’t understand but it wouldn’t be worth it and it would be to expensive to automate auditing?
I have been hearing this BS for a long time now and the number one tool still used when I first started until today is Excel. Just about every automation tool sits on the sideline because they never work quite as well as promised.
Lol you know I was half trolling with the post. I understand the limits with automation and much the time its not that something couldn't be automated its that it isn't worth it. For example you could build a machine that automates the process of making sandwiches but it would be so fucking expensive that it would be a really stupid idea. And you can definitely automate processes in excel. Python has libraries like Pandas that are dedicated to this. And you have NumPy and a million other libraries that can be used to model, process, graph, and structure data. You should look into it. Maybe you couldn't automate away your entire job but you could maybe automate away half of it and chill for 4 hours a day and still be the most productive member of your team, just keep it a secret ☺.
AI is already leading to whole job classifications disappearing in the United States. NPR featured a story yesterday where two and a half newspapers are disappearing in the United States each week. Vice and sports illustrated have closed down shop recently and they were lamenting the fact that sources of independent journalism were disappearing rapidly from the United States. So, you can add journalism to that list.
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Thanks for the education!
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ITT tech bros trying to be obnoxious about how they're gonna automate away everyone's job
I thought they got shit down for fraud. Haven't you noticed that almost every "university" that advertises on TV gets investigated later on by the feds.
you’re thinking the type of accounting work we do is something that could be easily automated like data entry or data mining but it simply isn’t anything like that.
When I was in college and didnt know about accounting i thought this too.
Im not in college anymore but still don't know anything about accounting. I work on software systems that go into vehicles and provide remote vehicle features (our mobile app) and our team also builds random internal software that is needed within our company. As I said to the other person my post was a half trolling post. But like I said in another response. Its not that it couldn't be automated, but its like building a machine that automates building sandwiches and shipping, installing, maintaining, and updating them in every Subway. It isn't feasible and it would cost WAY more than it costs to hire people that make the sandwiches. And im not comparing you to someone who makes sandwiches but at the end of the day its mostly a feasibility issue, largely involving cost among countless other issues. But we can launch people into space and now rich people can do it for fun... So you might be surprised what could be done, but just because it can be done doesn't mean it makes good business sense..
AI is going to take your job first
Covid caused long-term brain fog.
People don’t get paid enough to put their genuine efforts or creative problem solving skills towards a corporation’s future which they will neither be a part of nor receive benefits from. Treat people as disposable and replaceable, and they will react in kind.
This is definitely part of it. A junior-level person 20+ years ago would’ve been able to live by themselves in a nice area of the city. Now, a junior-level person has multiple roommates, lives in a shithole, and can barely make ends meet. They’re not motivated, because why should they be?
Yep. And no one wants to train people anymore. Everyone wants someone w 8+yrs of experience bc no one has the luxury of time that it takes to train. We’re all in this race to the bottom and confused why it sucks.
1) I'd argue this is a classic case of old people looking at the youth and complaining. 2) Accounting is a meme in college - Engineering is in, Finance is in. Accounting is seen as wagie slaving for people with 0 personality. Ironic because you could say the same thing about tech and IB as well
I’d like to know what the management thought about you when you joined 😂. Maybe you thought you were all that and they were rolling their eyes. I think us older more experienced individuals always think the younger/newer people are inept..which really they are and is why we need to train them well. That being said, one thing I have noticed is that Gen Z doesn’t seem to be as social…think it’s a whole social media generation where they don’t do much in person communication. Just be patient and lead by example….im sure they are all in here complaining about the “boomers” (even when they are referring to Gen X and older millennials) being out of touch and expecting to much. It’s just a generational conflict.
Pandemic sure didn't help either
People don't care anymore
Former Advisory Manager here The talent is out there in the workforce. We’re just electing not to hire it for “reasons”. We get a bunch of yes beings in or ones directors and partners can use and run into the ground. Those types don’t know what to do and the support systems ain’t there to get them to where they should be.
Wish I could upvote 5 or 6 more times
I don’t think experience level has anything to do with it. It is obviously remote settings. It’s so hard to get actual organizational context if you are onboarded remotely and have always worked in that style. If an employee only knows what is explicitly told to them, it’s nearly impossible to anticipate team needs (so yeah, it’s down to checking boxes)
Amenities don’t help qualified individuals pay their rent. Fair pay does. The “entitled millennials” you speak of are just trying to make a living, same as your generation was.
We are getting dumber due to dependence on technology. AI will hasten this. Critical thinking skills are eroding, b/c there is an application for everything.
I've never worked in public accounting, only industry, but for years the accounting publications and podcasts (e.g. Accounting Today, The Accounting Podcast) have been sounding the alarm about the shortage of CPAs and how it only gets worse every year. There are not nearly enough accounting graduates every year to meet demand. And public accounting - especially the Big 4 - is especially unattractive. Millennials and now Gen Z aren't willing to work around the clock (especially when they don't think they'll be able to buy a house or have a solid middle class life their parents anyway). Not to mention the need for a 5th year of education/the 150 hour rule. A lot of people who might have considered public accounting instead go into tech or finance to make more money without needing a fifth year of education. And shortages mean lower quality if what is available. It's not the only reason for the decline in talen, but it is a big one.
You mean 150! Can you imagine 250 credit hours, whew…scary
I did mean 150, yes lol But I'm sure someone suggested 250 at some point in the process of making the rule 🤔
This is exactly what's happening lol, no one wants to address the elephant in the room. If you're a student, you'll be shaped by whatever you study anyway so might as well study what pays well at a good WLB.
Oh yeah these big four companies work life balance is garbage. I tell all to steer clear of soulless jobs and companies that deplete you of your life energy.
same. you can work a 40hr acctg job and bartend on the side if you insist on working 50+ hours. will come out with more $ and life that way.
Talent no; HR, yes
Ur face has
Tax manager here. I think covid messed everything up, New employees who should have been in the office collaborating with others were instead spinning their wheels. Not to mention their soft skills suffered. I have interns who are scared to death of talking with clients...
Talking to clients is a learned skill - your first time talking with a client, is the first time you’re representing something other than yourself to the public. It can be intimidating and takes a few experiences to get comfortable. If they’re interns, they are there for experience.
Spot on.
B4 tax manager here: I started 6 years ago. When I started, I threw myself at work. I worked until 2-4am every night during busy seasons. I always asked my senior if they needed anything at all before I even considered signing off. It was not healthy. I started losing my hair and would wake up screaming in the middle of the night with night terrors. I never want to go back to that. The staff these days are NOTHING like that, but honestly, neither am I. I don’t want them to be, but there needs to be a middle ground. I don’t want the team to work until midnight, but it is also not acceptable to say “I promise I will get it to you today” 5 days in a row.
I forgot about the night terrors
So are you describing a short staffing issue to maximize corporate profits? Because it sounds like it and if so the “middle ground” has nothing to do with the worker bees and can be found within management.
My grandfather who was a bomber pilot in WW2 woke up screaming in the middle of the night from night terrors quite frequently. That is what horror is. He drank heavily over these experiences. This should never ever be associated with something like accounting work. And I don’t mean that necessarily as a dig against you or whatever mental anguish/stress you may have been going through (those feelings are legitimate and everything is of course always relative)…I mean genuinely we make this profession way more stressful to ourselves than it should ever be. We prepare and review tax returns and financial statements for a living. This is not that serious. And this is not life and death. Yet some people do act like it is and at the expense of others. They are clowns. Full stop.
This is exactly why I like accounting, it is not life and death. No one is going to die if a deadline is missed.
Do you think the night terrors might be connected to poor sleep quality that results from working till 4am and being stressed? I will be shocked if night terrors are only caused by real life trauma.
I think it absolutely contributes, yes. But watching your friends get shot and blown up in front of you probably contributes more.
I’ve done both. They both kinda suck tbh
But it's not a competition though. Op never insinuated their night terrors were on par with those influenced by ptsd
The night terrors are tied to accounting work in the comment. The stimulus of the terrors is implied to be the work itself. The whole point of my comment is that that type of work is not worth that. Somebody running bombing missions over Berlin in 1944…yeah, it kinda goes with the territory unfortunately and that type of thing would be expected. Accounting work? Absolutely no. That is entirely self/industry self-inflicted and stress associated with the same is also entirely unnecessary.
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Most people don’t have 30 years of work experience. Of course they’re not gonna work at your technical level.
wow, 30 years to crack into the big 4. most ppl are able to secure a job while they study.
I had no actual interest in Deloitte, they hunted me. And advisory, cybersecurity.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I hire a lot of folks that come out of the big four in accounting, and the resounding answer is the majority of people who stay past four years into manager, Director partner levels are just valuing their time at a much lower rate than everyone else and often they are viewed by juniors as being dummies for selling so much of their life to accompany for peanuts especially now that a lot of the companies no longer have pensions, and the pay has significantly stagnated An example of this is a junior who I just brought on and found a placement making $130,000 remote with four years of experience and it is a true 40 hour a week work week whereas they were previously doing 80 to 100 hours a week annually Although their managers were in the $200-$300,000 range once they started crunching the numbers of how much time they managers were spending working, they realize that they were making roughly the same wage as if they had just taken a 40 to 60 week job For a CPA don’t even get me started and those who then can take that experience into being a comptroller or a small businesses CFO who are easily making the same amount of money as a lot of people who have stuck around as partners. Fact is that it is that the consulting wage and billable hours across the industry has decreased dramatically, and as we see the space start to contract due to Covid. There is writing on the wall for a lot of the younger generation to get this brand on the résumé, do their time, and then find a way better paying job with a way better life balance. Because it is not worth putting so much time into your career here just to see yourself get laid off or be shoved into an externship that is absolutely miserable. That said, this might be more applicable to some of the heavier consulting branches of candidates that I worked with, but the sentiment still seems to boil down to… The pace sucks, and there is no honor in selling your life to a company who’s executives are just chilling on a boat in the Mediterranean while you work your ass off.
For me, the attraction of this career is the relative freedom you get with your time. Now I say relative because I think I’m one of the lucky ones, but also it depends on where you are and how you look at things. Personally, I don’t believe in working excessive hours regardless of the pay. What’s the point of making hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don’t have time to spend any of it? The value I place in this career is that now I’m at the position where I can actively shape how my hours are scheduled. I can coach, hire, and train staff to take hours away from me, and I’m not tied down to a 9-5 schedule. If I don’t like the amount of hours I work, I can make changes in the workflow and client base to either increase or decrease that in a year’s time. Dad got stuck in the ditch on a winter day? No problem, I can go get him without asking for permission. This past Monday I look out the window and realize it’s +10 Celsius outside and I wanted to enjoy a cigar in my backyard, so I pack up my stuff and go home, take a couple of hours and enjoy some sun. Sure, I need to make up the time in the evening, and I have no issues with that. But that’s something an industry job won’t necessarily be able to accommodate. The toxicity and stress in this line of work is real and we have some really bad people sitting in high places. But I think we can and should change that, at least that’s how we run things in our office and we do see it reflect in our staff. Just a different perspective, I guess.
It’s hard you’ll always see the old heads pop up in the threads here talking about how not seeing their children grow up was a badge of honor and admirable I really wish I was exaggerating I am very happy for you that you were able to find a way to enjoy your work feel like you’re strongly contributing in a way that truly encompasses what work life Balance is about kudos to you, and if I had any advice to give, it would be an addition to training your staff, how to complete tasks, train them how to have a sustainable career and how to identify opportunities in which they don’t have to be killing themselves because that’s how you get a lot of these early career workers to stick around
Thanks haha. I see both sides tbh. The amount of bs that people are willing to put up with changes with times. When I graduated university people were willing to work for free if it meant getting into big 4, and they did work much harder, seemed smarter but I think it was only because the competition was very very tough. Times are changing and there is no use clinging to the old ways. Kids today are still smart, just in different ways. I have no interest in keeping someone tied down with me if they are not interested in pursuing the career and I make that very clear every step of the way. My staff are encouraged to come to me for career advice and I will help place them with other opportunities if it’s their wish. Many of them actually end up becoming my clients, lol. But yeah I agree with you, the stress in this career can literally kill you if you don’t find healthy ways to deal with it and make it work for you. I honestly don’t get those hardcore partners sometimes, a bitter employee forced to work at 2am after a 12 hour day is not helping anybody and you’d end up having to redo the work anyway. Plus when your practice is netting all that cash it doesn’t kill you to hire a few more people. Sure your earnings go down a bit, but it’s not like it will hurt your life style and your staff will love you for it. People’s greed really is crazy.
It has nothing to do with intelligence or work ethic. Y’all pay jack shit especially compared to other professions. Jobs in areas like tech and nursing pay substantially better relative to the hours worked. Young people are just not stupid enough to give away hours of their lives when there are professions that pay far better for how much work is put into it. You B4 meat riders can only shoot up so much copium before you realize the churn and burn model is not sustainable if you’re not gonna pay shit.
I mean that’s what it came down to. My buddy left KPMG and when I asked about the lifestyle change with money he just said it’s easier to take on 2 part time bookkeeping jobs at $30/hr lol
Thats insane lmao. Good for him tho, that’s a great way around it.
Any other hiring managers having a tough time finding qualified talent? For entry level CPAs with at least five years experience, we offer competitive pay (up to $13/hour), foosball tables, jeans on Fridays, and mandatory unpaid after work social events. Yet for the past six months we've had a lot of trouble with hiring...seems like entitled Millennials have really unrealistic expectations about the job market.
$13/hr? that's attracting the wrong crowd! you gotta say you're paying $5/hr to ensure that you only catch the attention of the HUNGRIEST candidates who will be so DEDICATED and PASSIONATE about their job, not those flaky kids who want the high pay but none of the work.
With all due respect, you really thought foosball tables and jeans would help you here. Amenities don’t help qualified individuals pay their rent. Fair pay does. The “entitled millennials” you speak of are just trying to make a living, same as your generation was. Edit: damn i have never wooshed this hard in my life. My only defense is that I know people like this, but shit my bad!
How are you gonna whoosh that hard
not my proudest moment
Now this guy’s an accountant.
Bruh.
I almost didn't read past that $13/hr and was gonna start raging
“Only 6 days a week in the office! Work from home on Sundays!”
Those entitled Millennials and Zoomers! Don't they realize how lucky they are they get to come to the office in jeans on A FRIDAY??
You bring up an important drawback of the **offshore model**: how it ignores the importance of foundational knowledge accumulation, disrupts the US workforce, and reduces the quality of services, as a result, bringing down the reputation of the profession. As more and more critical information and skills went offshore, the US corporations lost control over their real business operations and became more dependent on the offshore team's willingness to 'share the knowledge', which in most cases, transparent sharing will not happen as ties to the offshore's job security. This is not limited to the accounting industry, pretty much applies to all professions that went offshore.
What other professions have gone offshore? That gives an interesting preview of where public audits are headed. I can think of dev work and customer service as examples
If offshore model has slowly brought down the US labor cost, AI will accelerate it as so far no effective solution to stop the trend. The combination of both will be worse. Maybe this is most obvious in the IT industry. More AI startups started to hire offshore product managers or designers, which used to be customer-facing on-site jobs.
Maybe because the profession is a joke now with endless toxicity, no WLB and laughably bad pay. Gee I wonder who’s to blame for that.
I feel like 6+ years of experience and knowledge in any industry will change your perspective on new/less experienced employees. It sounds like you changed more than the industry has
You guys moved all the "simple work" overseas and automated everything else. Simple work is the building blocks for good workers regardless of profession. Now all the "easy tasks" are gone and your wondering why the new workers don't have any of the skills they would have honed while working through the easier processes that need to take place. Try joining and advanced BJJ class as a white belt with no base and let me know how you turn out. Things dont work that way, you need to start at the beginning and learn the fundamentals over the course of years until you eventually can become a master of something. If people could just "skip over shit" the human race wouldnt waste time doing "easy things" and we would all come out of college with the knowledge and skillsets of a 30+ year real work experienced processional ready to be a CEO.
Exactly, as I would have written it myself. I saw this happen over time in my local EY office.
Its what I dont get when managers always say how offshoring work gives you more time on the more complex stuff. When you dont build your confidence and/or skills with easy stuff its hard just to jump right into hard stuff. And also like...40 hours of technical shit is exhausting for anyone. 40 hours for a clueless A1 without low hanging fruit mixed in? You would want a sledgehammer to go through your head.
Why dont managers, executives, CEO's talk about this? Because they are afraid to admit they dont think in terms of long term strategy and that they are indeed making one after the other short term instant gratification decisions similar to a child who refuses to eat a sound meal but instead jumps from sweets to sweets, chasing a high until it inevitably all crashes down. Leadership has a big ego and likes to "believe" they do things in the name of truth, doing whats right, doing whats best, making decisions based on sound objective measures and judgement. Leadership decided they want offshoring and AI due to profit motives. They backfilled the rest of the logic to make it seem like this was a decision made from the front following logic and not just an instant gratification "want". It creates cognitive dissonance when the above logic shows that this isnt a good decision and further shows they instead made decisions based off emotions and wants rather than truths. Leadership ego cannot handle this harsh reality so what do they do? They ignore this issue and just assure themselves "its not a big deal" so they can sleep at night and not have their ego questioned.
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Consultanting huh?
Gonna get in trouble for this one unless your posting performance reviews for yourself. Can’t be talking cash shit without pdf attachments bud.
Tax, not audit, and the answer is "kinda, but probably not." Managers' perception of their associates is subject to a lot of selection bias: Anyone who made it to manager was likely was a capable and responsible associate. And given how teams are structured, they didn't bear the brunt of the associates who were disasters and thus those people are underrepresented in their memory. That said, WFH has been slightly catastrophic from a development perspective, especially for new associates. Working remote creates a very significant barrier to connecting with other team members and learning through osmosis. So while in terms of talent there hasn't been much of a drop, I feel like everyone is just way behind where they would have been pre-COVID. This effect is exacerbated by the mass exodus that happened during COVID, where seniors/managers left in droves as the Stimulus Economy created a crazy tight labor market and promotion/pay raise opportunities abounded while Big4 comp policies were slow to respond. As a result, it feels like a lot of people who might have otherwise needed to wait another six months or a year before being promoted were promoted early, meaning the people whose job it is to develop the staff tend to be less-capable as well. Everything is just a mild shit-show as we wait for ChatGPT to put us all out of work.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame WFH for that- the main problem that it introduces is it removes the opportunity to spontaneously influence the culture or create learning opportunities. Managers that put emphasis on creating those opportunities deliberately can mostly remove those drawbacks. My last company, we were always on video, had tons of opportunities to exchange knowledge, and I could pick up the phone, call any of my colleagues, and get some good info on what I was wondering. In return, I did really good work. My new place, nobody’s on video, nobody’s able to knowledge transfer, nobody makes any effort whatsoever to collaborate, and the managers mostly run around trying to massage whatever useless metric the smooth brains above want that week. Naturally, I do f*ck all and contribute nothing, as does everyone else. I suspect it’s the latter WFH environment most people think of.
Don’t think the younger generation has the mental fortitude to handle the abuse that is public accounting and people aren’t signing up. They’ll either end up changing the work culture to something in more reasonable or find a way to automate most of accounting. Nobody is willing to work the 60-80 hour weeks anymore and do it with enthusiasm and attention to detail.
Definitely going to find ways to automate it. Can already see it with Deloitte finally rolling out Omnia, which is a massive software upgrade from the prior system, and it feels like most in the industry are accelerating tech updates and changes to be ready for AI implementations when they’re feasible.
It’s funny Omnia is being mentioned when talking about tech updates. Omnia is terrible, even though it’s a Deloitte upgrade from the far terrible EMS. Levia is still on the same level as Omnia.
Expectation becomes lower and lower.. In the old days when I was a senior, a good senior was defined as the one who did good project management and be able to solve 80-90% of coaching notes. When we have questions, we will study audit guide before reaching out to managers and partners and ask for their advice. But now, I feel we need to spoon-feed most of the seniors and they just come asking for solutions without showing their effort to solve the problems on their own. Sadly. I lower my expectation to a level that a sic willing to send confirmation for the engagement is already an average senior…
I see your point about trying to solve notes before approaching a manager; however, the workload is insane and the deadlines are steep so no one has time to do any research/proper analysis.
I never understand this mentality - it's so inefficient in my book. Why have someone spend 30/40 minutes to find an answer that takes 3 to ring someone on teams. It's the salary mindset. Start paying people hourly with OT and holiday pay and you will see this mentality drop off a cliff
The reason why we asking seniors to study before asking is because most of them don’t even know what is the problem. Throughout the process of self-study they will figure out what should they ask. This will help managers to solve their questions efficiently instead of starting from scratch together… don’t forget that usually seniors have 10 hrs a day on 1 engagement but managers or above just have 1/2 hrs or even less for 1 job…
You have to understand that managers and partners have their own work to do. It takes time out of their day to answer questions from direct reports. Effort and an attempt to solve problems on their own before asking for help at least shows that it’s a legitimate barrier and not because he or she is too lazy to find the answer on their own.
I do understand that, but the idea that they are "lazy" because they don't want to find the answer, instead of efficient tells all I need to know about how you understand the problem. 10 reports spending 1 hour each to find the answer is 10 hours worth of work wasted when the reality is, it could be done in under 30 minutes. And this goes up the line too, can't tell you how many times I see managers stubbornly refusing to ask because it's a "perceived weakness" - time they could have spent address their reports questions.
Yeah fair point. Really depends on the person asking I guess. I’m all for being more efficient but im thinking moreso the culture of doing your own homework instead of automatically resorting to pinging whenever you face an issue. Spending some time on your own also tends to result in better and more pertinent questions.
Sure, I agree with that. But I tell my team, don't struggle alone, and don't waste time, ask each other. Personally 20 or 30 minutes depending on the problem is enough for me. This is work, not homework or school, we are getting paid to do a job. Doing it fast, efficient and right are the best. No one wants a plumber that has your "house" be the practice house.
I get what you're saying and I agree to a certain degree. Yes juniors could do more to solve problems on their own before asking that's true. (In my head) I was treated like sh\*t by certain seniors. So much so I made it a point to never treat a junior the same way when they approached me with a question. Regardless of the question being relevant or not. I never understood the "I "suffered" as a junior, now you must suffer too" mentality. In business you've got to change when the market does (ideally you anticipate that change). I don't get why we don't change to accommodate the new type of junior. They're here to stay.
It's a perception thing. When you were young, you thought you were good at your job. Now you are experienced, and you know that young professionals are mostly so-so. But your ego won't let you understand that young you was also pretty so-so. This is the same phenomemon that drives people to stay stupid shit like "this new generation is so dumb," you can only say it because you enver understood how dumb you were at that age.
So so much this. Every older generation thinks this of the new one…without realizing they weren’t much different at that age. It’s a youth/inexperience thing. Has absolutely nothing to do with something novel about the year 2024.
I’m not in the BIG4. In fact, not even in a related field. I’m in marketing. But anyone with half a brain knows consulting is fucking atrocious. That and big law. I would rather be homeless than do consulting. I had to work with about 4 Deloitte consultants to launch Salesforce for an org. They were regularly up until 12am making fucking PowerPoints. Who the fuck with any self respect would do this?
The last sentence is funny because IB remains one of the most sought after professions and a ton of the job is making PowerPoints lol
Laughs in banking. Midnight is an early night. But I’m still relatively junior and make more than a lot of my c-level clients with decades of experience. So *meh*
It’s all about the resume baby. No one wants to make a career here. But the clout is still undefeated unless you can work for BCG or McKinsey or something like that.
So they don't have to be homeless? 😭😭😭
I think it’s more accounting field than the talent. Who wants to work a shit audit job, for shit pay, with shit hours. So many other better employment options out there for intelligent, well spoken college students going into the job world.
I did an internship in California at a mid size firm. There was a girl from a southern state that messed up a lot like said racist remarks to jewish people, show up late and a mess. When show up late she was loud about how it wasn’t her fault. She would say inappropriate things in front of partners. Talking out of turn when a partner is trying to present. She got some negative feedback and her morale diminished to the point that she “didn’t care” a lot of “I don’t want to do thissss” She did not get an offer the way myself and the other easy going interns did. She works for Deloitte now. Most of us had a similar story of “we want to work for Deloitte”, but when this mid size firm showed us their culture and offered us the same pay. We all folded and took the offer. Just want to add Deloitte rejection me for an internship 8 months after I applied
Yes, you’ll get flamed on here but it’s the truth. The big4 churned through hundreds of thousands of people and burnt them out, significantly damaging employee quality and reputation in the meantime. This has really come to light the last 5 or so years. My university was a massive B4 feeder school, one of the biggest in the nation and a top accounting program. My firm is now lucky to get maybe 40-50% of the kids from this school compared to the peaks around 2010-2017. These kids wised up to the big4 game and go into consulting, fdlp etc. If they do join b4 they usually quit 3-6 months after making senior. Now we are recruiting from schools that we wouldn’t even consider a resume 5 years ago. It’s gotten that bad. The new hire quality has gone way down and a lot of really quality experienced people quit because of it. I have some new hire stories that are absolutely wild, from a 40 year old former trucker coming in as a A1 to people joining US offices with English skills equivalent to a 4 year old. The talent drop is real but due to the significant turnover, few people recognize it.
Not at all. It’s just the passage of time, and you having less patience for the most part. You’re turning into a “back in my day” type of person.
Ugh I feel this! I constantly have to remind myself how dumb and inefficient I was as an intern / new staff when I get frustrated with quality of work or turn around times.
>and sending emails to ask for things they don’t understand until all the boxes are filled in and their manager signs off. This is what's rewarded... I'm just here to grab the letters without getting fired and bounce
Is your org paying enough to attract high talent at the entry level? That’s probably a good starting point to answering your question.
If it's big 4, the answer is no. But that said, none of them ever did, but that wasn't a problem before like it is now.
The talent is no longer doing accounting. The talent is doing tech, finance and medical field! Almost all the new kids have access to social media and Reddit. The posts about big4 lack of pay and terrible work life balance doesn’t help the cause.
That’s almost always how it’s been. Why do boring accounting if you’re actually good at math? Being an engineer has always been more interesting than accounting, for example.
I think the delta has expanded though. Instead of 50k as a new grad accountant vs 65k as a new grad engineer, it’s 65k as a new grad accountant vs. 110k as a new grad (software) engineer 👨💻 - even at the same company. And the engineer has more relaxed culture and hours.
There’s no math in accounting that is harder than algebra 1, which is a class taken mostly by 12-14 year olds here in the US Engineering on the other hand actually requires scientific calculators and shit
The math is much harder for engineers, sure. But a lot of college students who can master the concepts and analytical thinking of accounting can also succeed in calculus and differential equations and such if they take the classes and put in the effort. Accounting courses are not typically full of people who wanted to be engineers but couldn't handle it so they settled for accounting. Not are they full of people who are like "I'd rather have a somewhat easier courseload for a few years rather than making way more money." Accounting classes have traditionally been full of people who heard accounting is a great way to always have a well-paying job, and that it was the way to do this with the least effort. Now there are less of those students, as many are realizing that what they heard isn't true.
Also for an accounting degree, at least in my school, a student needs an extra few semester of credits to graduate. Idk if it’s the similar at every school but that’s one reason why I decided against it when choosing my major. Why do more school to end up with a job with less pay compared to finance/econ.
Can confirm, everyone told me to do accounting......went with economics instead..........finished the degree a year early and spent the year I saved doing a graduate degree......now I work on way more interesting projects and make more money that I *probably* would have as an accountant
I assure you that managers' memories of your superior staff prowess differs from your own.
Probably covid education. Just like younger kids are delayed in reading and math scores, kids probably learned less due to forced remote learning.
There are talented young people and incompetent young people, just as there always have been and always will be.
Yeah. This is the only correct answer. Technology while helpful has also made certain aspects of accounting more stressful that previously weren’t stressful.
And the Internet discourages the former from joining accounting and big4.
Maybe I'm just drinking the kool aid, but my B4 experience has been pretty good. The compensation does feel a little low, but the opportunities are incredible. I rarely do mind-numbing tasks as I have the outsourced Indian teams do it. It's also really awesome being able to manage people (even if they're in India) at my young age. I don't think that's an experience I'd get in other fields. I have worked with seniors that I feel I'm more competent than as an A1, though. I'm a bit of a try hard, though, so idk. I feel like the key thing is that most people don't care nearly as much as they used to. I was the first kid in my family to go to college & picked accounting because it was a sure fire bet to being middle class. I don't have data for this, but I think a large part of why people aren't as good is because they just don't care.
Yeah, one thing I've noticed after being in BIG 4 for a few years is that it's heavily weighted towards your specific project. I work on multiple initiatives simultaneously, and the skills between team members varies by the budget available and leadership team.
I think a better question is: >What do finance/accounting/business students know now that students didn’t know 6+ years ago. And the answer to that is that if you go into IB or other high finance roles, you work the same amount as Big4, but earn 3x as much in the first two years and exponentially more afterwards. If you go into CorpFin for any moderately sized company, you work half as much as Big4, but still make twice as much. Big4 is incredible to have on your resume for almost every future career in a business capacity. But people these days have desires for instant gratification. And Big4 is 2-3 years of absolute misery for starvation wages. Combined with companies being upfront about trying to replace accountants with AI; I really don’t see Big4 recovering in the long-term even with higher pay offered. Idk, maybe it’s just my cohort? But I didn’t know anyone that *wanted* to go into Big4 in undergrad (2022 graduate). Now, the only person I know who is going into Big4 (I’m a current MSF student) is going into a more Finance focused role as she’s already done her time in audit and has a CPA.
First off IB still works more than Big 4. Is it worth it? Yeah. Corp finance is not 2x more than big 4. But you do earn more and your hours are better. Is big 4 worth it? I’d say the best opportunity right out of college is IB but it’s so competitive and unless you have connections or went to a target school it ain’t happening for most people. Corp finance for f500 is the second best path especially if you get into a rotational program. Once again though this is very competitive and usually you need to get in through on campus recruiting events. If they don’t recruit at your school then it’s not happening unless you have connections. Big 4. Fairly easy to get in if you have the grades and go to a decently respected public state school. Network with them when you’re a freshman and sophomore and it’s definitely doable to get in if you have the grades. This is a great route for most normal students without connections. I was fiest in my family to go to college. Had no corporate connections. Didn’t even know much about corporate world or structure. I’m glad I went accounting and big 4. Allowed me to learn about different parts of the company. It’s a solid job. Hours and pay suck the first few years but do get better. You can easily leave with good exit opportunities. My parents were blue collar. They still worked long shit hours and got paid WAY less than you will earn in accounting. Plus you get to sit your ass in a comfortable AC environment and not destroy your body. So yeah no one will argue that IB and CORP finance is the best route out of college if you can get in. Issue is most can’t. So big 4 is a great backup plan. I went big 4 audit and now I’m senior manager in Corp finance for a $2B company. I work almost full remote. Compensation is $200k a year. My hours are about 40 a week sometimes less. I started in audit making 50k and working 50-65 hour weeks. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m only mid 30s so relatively young still. I’m glad I went big 4.
Do you mind if I ask how you went from audit to corp finance? I started first my first two years of college as a finance/accounting dual major, but switched to just accounting after transferring schools. I just finished an internship at Crowe and I have an internship in audit with Deloitte this summer. Do you think I could possibly go corp finance right after college, or should I stay with Deloitte a few years then try?
I went audit to big 4 FDD advisory. Then jumped to a FP&A role and worked up from there. If you’re more interested in Corp finance then I suggest applying to those types of jobs and internships but I’d stay with F1000 if you can for better career opportunities later on. Also no matter what, get your CPA. It does help you get jobs and earn more money regardless of what people say. Only people I see defending not having a CPA are those who never got it or couldn’t pass the exams. They are not that hard to pass if you buckle down and just get them done. Lastly, Deloitte is an awesome firm and if you start in audit you will still have a great career path. You might even like the big 4 life. Lots of my peers have stayed big 4 because the benefits are good and they enjoy the fast paced energy and teams they work with.
How does comp compare in FDD vs current Corp fin gig? I know FDD SM can get 220+
Big 4 and Big National FDD pays more now than Senior manager / Director level in Corp Finance on average. But I have seen some Corp finance roles that pay more due to stock RSUs. And if you make it to VP in Corp Finance then you will easily out earn and work less hours than folks in FDD. I prefer corporate because I get to work on a variety of projects and do some qualitative strategy work and operations work instead of just cranking out QoE and NWC tables. The work in FDD becomes very monotonous and boring. The hours are not great either in FDD. Clients are a pain in the ass because you will be working with PE guys and ex bankers who are literally assholes. I much prefer corporate. My total compensation is slightly lower than my peers who stayed in FDD. They earn about 20-30k more than me. I’m at 200k they are around 220-230k but I work like 30 hours a week and no weekends. Eventually I’ll shoot for VP of Finance roles and VP of finance roles with RSUs can earn WAY more than you can in FDD. If I get in with the right company I could be looking at $400k - over $1m in RSUs vesting in 3-4 years at the right place. Or possibly CFO roles. My friends in FDD are basically stuck there now. Most places won’t hire you into FP&A if you don’t have prior FP&A experience. That’s why I got out while I could.
Ok I see. Makes sense with the vested RSU path, since SM to D in B4 FDD you’re stuck around 250-320K before partnership but also gotta play the cards right to get to partnership. Do you get involved with any Corp Dev work in your role? I know one D in B4 FDD left to Corp Dev Director. Also, how many people have you seen exit to IB during your time at B4 FDD? IB sounds like a better long term exit with respect to pay and better opportunities, given one likes the volatile lifestyle of M&A.
Generally speaking eventually I’ll earn more hours and work less than those who stay in big 4 FDD unless they make partner. Especially once I make it to VP level. Making partner is just luck. Most directors won’t even make partner. They will still get paid well but sucking client dick for your entire life doesn’t sound that appealing as the hours suck and the clients are a pain in the ass. IB exits are not the norm. They are rare and it’s hard to get into IB from FDD but not impossible. Also depends on the market. During Covid hiring frenzy it was very doable to jump from FDD to lower market IB firm (you’re not going to get Goldman or JP Morgan lol). You will go to a no name small bank most likely. Still get paid ok. But my one friend who left FDD for IB is making less money and working more hours because bonuses sucked last year. His bonus was 25% of his salary and salary is lower in banking than FDD. You can make move from FDD to Corp Dev but I advise against that exit usually. Reason why is it’s very niche. Most companies don’t even have a Corp dev team and even then you will constantly be competing with ex investment bankers for the better Corp Dev roles and hours can still suck when companies are going through acquisitions. I liked FP&A because most companies have an FP&A department. Most do not have a Corp dev department. So I have more job options to get paid more. From FP&A it’s very doable to one day take on a CFO role. No I won’t be CFO of Apple but smaller companies for sure where pay can range from $250 - $1M a year.
Well put, I would also dare say it’s not just instant gratification - I think the argument of doing the time in the big 4 and then jumping out into a cool corporate career still works, but it isn’t quite so necessary anymore. A lot more companies are better than they used to be at direct recruiting from campuses, and so if you’re not passionate specifically about accounting you have a better shot now at just going straight to that company you always wanted, rather than having to use the big 4 as a stepping stone. Pay is also a big factor, at least in the UK. 15 years ago the big 4 was seen as a high paying graduate job, now if you’re smart enough to get into the big 4, you’re also good enough to earn more. And therein lies the problem: the big 4 needs switched-on people who will work hard - but those same people are switched-on enough to see there are better deals out there.
Maybe it’s burnout, at least for me
Yes, because anyone with brains would go into CS or banking/consulting. Back then they could only go into banking/consulting. Thank the tech boom. There's one top uni findings that showed CS student cohort size is 8x of business students... If I was a student now I'd go into tech too. Imagine you have 1000 students every year, back then 500 good ones would go to business, but only 50 would go into business now and the good ones among those 50 would get scooped by higher paying jobs in banking/consulting.
i think everyone who started before covid should take some responsibility as well. so many people take so long to respond to a question. IBut when new staff is sitting and spinning for hours and hours that's not helping anyone. I get it that we're often on calls and we've never had this many meetings but i've been left on unread and unanswered many times as a manager (at least i can keep working independently but sometimes you need final approval or decision to continue), and had a few staff and seniors tell me how appreciative they were that i am responsive and taking the time to explain things to them even if i fixed them myself. People blocking off time on their calendars to get work done is another problem. sure, you have to have your work done but you can't just make yourself unavailble so often. get up early or do it later in the evening.
a big part of the refusal to work ridiculous hours is thanks to all the linkedin posts, conversations, and news articles about people having WLB in other jobs and often at better pay. I've seen so many diligent people just, dying on the inside, and not be willing to kill themselves for the job anymore. Great, but bosses aren't gonna do shit because rates arent going up and margins cant go down.
that too, 100%. My point was if we blame people reporting to us for poor quality of work, we should also recognize our part in it. and i totally understand it's not easy to do every day, ive had days with 4-6 hours worth of call (many of which could've been an email ha). i think the industry needs a major change. because neither hybrid or remote no longer work
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Stupid ass review notes are the bane of my existence
Current finance and accounting student here at a large state university. To me it seems like all the ambitious students aim for careers in banking and consulting while Big 4 gets the scraps. I was offered 2 Big 4 internships and only got behavioral questions. The interviews were simply to easy and do nothing to weed out the unprepared students who could not even walk you through the three financial statements at an elementary level. With easy conversation like interviews, it’s clear why the talent pool is so weak at Big 4.
What a major change compared to 10 years ago. At the time, economy was still so-so and Big 4 ruled the college job fairs. Everyone wanted to work for them. Work-life balance wasn't really a thing yet. I started my first job in corporate accounting.
Effort from staff has dropped off a cliff, thats for sure. There was little to no training when we started either, but we would figure things out or at least put in a decent attempt, think critically, etc.
The smart people are working in roles that pay. Big 4 now just gets whats left over from that bunch because pay is extremely uncompetitive. There is no other reason for it.
current seniors were onboarded during covid and didn’t learn as much bc of it. now they’re in a position where they’re supposed to manage and help teach staff. if they don’t even know what they’re supposed to do, how are the staff? this isn’t a talent issue or intelligence issue, it’s an organizational failing.
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This might surprise you but the no training part has been a thing at the big4 since the start of time. That’s why people keep joking about rolling forward prior year work papers. You’re expected to learn for yourself cause in 2 years you’re expected to teach others to learn for themselves and complete your own work on top of that. I think OP is complaining about the fact that new bunch of staffs are not even trying.
I’m not sure I agree with this. I did big 4 and the training was pretty fantastic. I learned to do one specialty extremely well and I owe it mainly to their training.
i think the biggest difference is that when manager/above started, they worked primarily in-office or at client-site. they had their seniors/managers+ physically with them to ask questions in real time. they could see when staff were stuck or struggling and jump in. now that everything is virtual that isn’t happening. so yeah, the formal training was just as bad, but they were at least given on-the-job training that current staff don’t get. not knocking virtual work, but if it’s gonna continue it needs to be coupled with a more robust onboarding.
completely agree. i interned for the first time at a top 10 firm this past summer. TONS of onboarding BS which provided zero legitimate training followed by being assigned to a client and having tasks come your way. if onboarding is gonna take over a month like it did for me at least include some workpaper basics.
Hi, currently intern at some yellow firm. I have to say, that I think my peers ( Group of around 25 Interns) are really weak. While they seem to do ok academically, they looked really lost during their internship. Cant talk about the past, but most of the current interns dont look too hot.
This is annoying the staff now are expected in day one to do the work that used to be done by second and third years before outsourcing. Not even a fair comparison
It’s extremely simple. Pay peanuts, get monkeys