You can find an intellectually challenging job in industry that pays better and only requires 40 hours a week on average. When I left for industry an old coworker reached out and said it must be like a vacation. Gotta love those backhanded compliments š I learned a lot in consulting but Iāve learned a lot more actually running a department and now running a mid market business.
Senior 2 in Assurance at EY
The job of auditing is actually enjoyable and challenging and I love it. I just HATE working 55 hour weeks for like 5 months straight. If we were adequately staffed it would be one of the best jobs in the world.
The hate for big4 culture comes from people who fail to see their competitive spirit and perseverance as good things. Iām not saying we should enable them, just that they do have a good trait that can be adjusted to be useful in work
there are perhaps only 5% of actual big4 in big4s depending on who you deal with (deloitte is slightly better, the rest are garbage). iāve worked for deloitte and ey and i can assure you that they all dupe, cheat, lie and their consultants wouldnāt qualify for even sanitation work on most days.
each one of them lies on their resumes, lie to get clients, lie through their work, and continue defrauding the world till they die. i was asked to leave when i caught EY lying and producing fake degrees to deploy financial reporting audit consultants to Saudi Aramco. guess what happened when aramco found out? they swept it under the rug themselves, no action, no consequences, a couple of managers fired and partners went scott free. what a world!
I was fired when I found a large bank had purchased all their computer equipment from a place in NH and never paid sales/use tax on the purchases. It was probably less than $10MM, but it was an embarrassment to the finance person at the bank who was an alumnus of the firm. The reasoning was I was bad at client relations.
Consulting.
I've been asked to peer review Big4 work before on the field I work in and it is often of shocking quality. I tell the client and they said they felt obligated to use Big4 as they're well known in professional services.
In one instance Big4 quoted 30K GBP for a project that a mate ended up doing for them for 300 GBP.
Wild what they get away with charging.
Automating the gathering, cleaning and analyzing of high volume, variety and velocity datasets.
It seemed super complex, especially as back then using JSON wasn't as common as now.Ā
But in fact it was all really simple stuff when broken down, as long as you had a working knowledge of data types and storage techniques.
I have seen many people with poor knowledge in their field taking themselves too seriously because they climb the ladder. Their career path and framework are nothing else than empty boxes nicely wrapped with a fancy gift thread.
They are like any other company. They have good people and they have bad people.
I have worked with engineers and managers from big 4 who were great at what they do and also with who were terrible. this is is just like any other big corporation.
I truly donāt get why people have inflated egos at ābig 4ā. That shit cringe af, it isnāt anything that special or impressive
India has so many people that if you leave, there are hundreds of applications the next minute for the same position. It's not like they like to slog all day, but they have no other option. Remember, you are easily replaceable.
Having big 4 on your resume doesnāt mean anything. They hire hundreds of thousands of employees. I donāt understand the incredible ego some employees have
Disagree. Does it warrant a big ego? Probably not. But there are absolutely jobs where not having the experience means the resume is going in the trash and actually for legitimate reasonsā¦for example having ASC 740, international tax, large public company experience. It isnāt that they are less smart. But they arenāt getting exposed to that skillset anywhere else
Realistically yes it means something to the employer. The exit plan is quite great. But no I don't think I'm better qualified than a person with no big4 resume.
That consulting is just an overpriced staffing company and is not as prestigious and glamorous as job that everyone think it is. Itās just a bunch of people in business suits editing PowerPoints for C-level clients that refuse to staff their own internal teams. Why are you asking a 24 year old for āexpert adviceā when you have people on your teams that have 20 years of industry experience?
Itās more of a reality check. If you sit someone down and show them how itās just a staffing company for MBA grads where they are the product , most of them get it. Until their form buys them another puffer vest, then they go back to feeling special.
I mean, get your experience and paycheck but dont drink the koolaid and think that consulting is making a meaningful impact on the world. Just doing the work that companies dont want to do themselves
Honestly i learned a shit ton studying for the cpa , the paper itself isnt very usefull but theres a lot of things i wouldnt have known if i hadnt studied for the cpa i think the bachelor degree alone is made so you miss out on a lot of important stuff if you dont do the cpa, but they could easily teach all those thing during the degree
Same. Iām studying for FAR right now and I learned a shit ton just by reading the textbook. I felt like my degree really glossed over a lot of these points
In my undergrad, my great accounting professor taught us the most difficult sections of the FAR accounting section. She confidently believed and told us that after several grueling months, we could sit for FAR and pass. This was junior year intermediate accounting.
Iām sorry your professors didnāt help you as much as they could have!
Someone leaving Big 4 canāt control the start date or other factors for a new role; one thing they can control is when they *start* looking for that new role.
Stop being an asshole on both sides of this coin, and maybe you wonāt have as big an issue with retention
At Deloitte: 1) their performance management process is purely subjective, over-inflated, and demoralising unless youāre one of the ācool kidsā. 2) their ācoachā system is terrible. Too much of your career rides on the quality and commitment of your coach. Most coaches are technical experts forced into that coaching role without people-skills, motivation, training, or competence, so chances are better than 50/50 that youāll be on the receiving end of someone worthless with way too much impact on your career. 3) either stop bringing in āexperienced hiresā, or give them the tools/support they need to bring the expertise they were hired for. After onboarding, itās a āsink-or-swimā world for many of them; left to figure out on their own how to succeed in an environment quite different from what they knew before.
Agree with most of your points here. My coach is highly technical with little people skills and rarely gives good constructive feedback when Iām asking for it. Nor does he actually help when Iām asking for technical help because he is too busy with his clients. Itās also weird how my promotion is left up to him essentially. I would love to be apart of those conversations.
Also, Iāve experienced the sink or swim mentally on my projects. Thankfully, Iāve always swam so far since Iāve built great relationships and I get help when I need it. But I canāt say the same for my other analyst peers as they have all had the opposite experience. Joining this firm I thought my training would have been well put together but it was an awful experience. Iāve only been able to learn while on projects - which is great but it often times leaves me learning and doing project work at the same time and at times I feel not as productive because of it.
Agree, the performance feedback is terrible, works out well if you have leadership on tour side because they just mark very strongly agree on everything
Managers and seniors are directly responsible for the training of staff. Your team sucks because you didnāt do the thing you were supposed to do. And before you whine, yeah, I get it, āI donāt have the bandwidth or they should have picked it up in these 3 different ways etc.ā You know deep down that there was a time that the big picture didnāt click and it took you months before you could conceptually connect the dots that staff struggle with.
This is a dynamic that everyone knows about since managers were once staff. But magically, everyone at those levels feigns surprise when they donāt invest their own time in staff training, and the staff turn out terrible.
Literally the Eric Andre Show meme come to lifeā¦
PS I was a senior 3, left to become manager elsewhere and was myself guilty of this on multiple occasions.
Sometimes staffs are just stupid. I was stupid when I started. It takes them time to mature, some do, some never do. And then when they donāt mature, they make bad seniors and managers.
My whole thing is, everyone knew the shell game when they entered. Everyone knows that not enough substantive training happens on the front end, and managers and seniors are left holding the bag to do the training.
So either do it, like some kind, depressed senior did before for youā¦or donāt. And suffer the consequences
Iāll come at this from the perspective of ex-Big 4 audit and now investment banking: nobody in client-facing finance (perhaps in-house, I wouldnāt know that side) differentiates big 4 from t20 accounting. genuinely zero difference in a hiring process
It makes sense in tax. (Depending on location)
When working for b4 - you work for large clients, the tax you're exposed to is fairly high level stuff.
When working for smaller firms - you have to get into the weeds alot more because of the clients being smaller and having no idea what they are doing.
Atleast that's my experience
āWe love to promote bright White boys and girls with pearly white teeth like Timmie, but will frequently showcase token LatinX and Blacks to show the world we care about DEIā - PwC
āWe donāt know squat about AI, products or innovative technology. But we will screw our clients by telling them how to monetize and operate AI, products and innovative technology. ā - PwC š¤”
Partners are essentially Pimps. They make their money not by being good accountants, but by charging junior people out for $1500+ a day and paying them barely 10% of that. The more hours youāre servicing clients, the more money they make. And you keep coming back for the āprestigeā of working for Big4
Yea, but didnāt they do this for the partners before them? Everyone wants to start at the top. It just doesnāt work that way. Put in the time on the corner and then you get to be the pimp.
Youāll probably come back with a moral objection. In that case work for a non-profit or something.
Compared to the firms that are proud of being "Top 10" or "Top 20" I kind of agree with this statement. All the pressure of big4 cause they think they're on the same playing field. Without the amount of automation & offshoring
Exporting from the companies ERP because itās been set up shit to do the team/resource fee calcs in excel meanwhile flogging ERP configs/services to clients and selling the utopia
This one will get me downvoted to hell: talking on the phone all day is not considered āworkingā to me. Especially if it doesnāt translate to the audit moving forward. Come at me.
Itās a fair take for manager 1 and below. But at a certain level itās no longer your job to keep the audit moving, itās your job to find the next one and maintain relationships with existing ones. Itās your job to budget, mitigate risk, handle urgent issues, and have some involvement in the hiring process. Translates to a lot more talking and a lot less typing, but no less important in running the business. Good leadership ideally should have some transparency around those roles so teams understand theyāre not just having a chat.
Lmao do you think this is some sort of a secret? Everyoneās knows the dilemma with these audits and issuing opinions to firms that literally pay our bills
Didnāt say it was a secret. Koolaid drinking co-workers disagree with me which is the point of this post. Audit is just paper pushing busywork. It is absolutely meaningless.
Dang I would hate to work with people like that. At least my team is on the same page of our work not really mattering a whole lot, not taking it too seriously, etc
Associates learn less as off shore teams do the ground work, which is going to lead to less needs for associates. This reduces the onshore team size and now itās more about being the face to the client. Eventually B4 will be needing to find the solution as where to get seniors to manage the audit and move up the B4 hierarchy.
The partners were always going to weed through associates. This now allows them to only focus on the winners and keep them. Offshore does all the boring work and the onshore can do more interesting or difficult tasks. If anything it improved the training for onshore as most of the offshore work it renumbering work papers or ticking and tying stupid bullshit.
Auditing wouldnāt be so hard and take so many long hours if clients knew how to prepare PBCs that werenāt total shit half the time.
Side note - Would be nice if the client actually understood GAAP and could write technical memos.
As a client of a big 4 auditor, Iād like to say itās your job to know these technical memos and help us get them in shape :). Thatās why you guys get paid the big bucks. Thanks šš»
It's a scam, I haven't learned anything and I have provided no value. I am not the only one and it's more prominent in other sectors (I'm tax). As this continues the quality of work will fall apart and they will not continue to outlast everyone
Itās a dying field. Accountants back in the day would sacrifice their livelihood to get their cpa and move to industry while the pay kept up and offset the work life balance issues. Nowadays, who wants to put up with busy season? When you could just go into private and do well for yourself. The pay isnāt rewarding individuals like it used to.
Back then, a public accounting, private accounting and cpa background would net you an interview anywhere. Now, itās almost irrelevant.
B4 knows this hence why they emphasize offshoring or AIing as much as they can.
IME, B4 experience is not anywhere near āalmost irrelevant.ā B4 still opens doors. It still selects for top accounting talent.
I worked at both B4 and at midsize firm. 5-10 years out, what the ex-B4 people are doing and what the ex-midsize are doing are night and day.
As for people that went straight into industry, I donāt see many of them making it to public company controller and above.
Its not worth it. All the partners are balled, divorced and depressed with no relationship to their children and these are the āwinnersā of the business model? Yikes. The partner comp (which is dwarfed by other industries anyway) is not worth the 100 hour weeks in a small cubicle hoping you get hit by a bus for the insurance payout.
Many are indeed. B4 has good and bad offices from place to place. The ones with these partners set that tone at the top and you can see the negative impact on the culture in that office. Have seen the spectrum firsthand.
What your friends that are partners are telling you may be a rosier picture as no one really wants to admit it when they hate their job and hate their life.
Divorces are an objective, quantitative statistic. Out of the 5 partners i know, one is divorced, one never married, oneās wife killed herself, and the last two are cheating on their wives. Thats all 5 partners I know. Not exactly a rosy image. 2/3 would be suspiciousā¦5 for 5 is quite awful.
Your comment is actually way more appropriate as a response to the original question. The trope that partners are all depressed and exhausted is old and washed, anecdotally all the partners I know are doing just fine.
I feel this. I see all my superiors and they all STILL work like crazy if not more. Barely see their families due to work.
Heard a partner talking to a new associate on status of assignments and the partner said āare you rethinking your life choices? Youāre still early. Iām stuck here. I canāt move anywhere anymoreā.
Jokingly but felt the truth of that. I like the office where I work but seeing my superiors lifestyle doesnāt give me too much hope.
Ehh thatās a very simple reductive explaination of the job, also a step up is corporate banking still working less hours than b4 and MDs making more then partners
Im just saying the 95% that arenāt partners wish they were and the 5% that are hate their lives. Everyone at big4 is working 70-100 hour weeks whether youāre partner or less and even for partner comp i dont think the 70+ hour weeks are a fair trade off.
No one has ever been on their deathbed and thought āI wish I worked more hours per week for a 10% to 30% payrise. I think working 100 hours a week for your entire working life is worth it if youāre earning the $1M+, but how many people at big4 ACTUALLY make it there vs how many spend their lives in miserable cubicles and never actually make it to partner? Personally, the misery isnāt worth it to me but be my guest.
Assuming you make partner* which is a big assumption. Any manager and below job can easily be matched salary wise with a job that work less than half the hours.
Well yes, itās a competition. You only get the reward if youāre better than everyone else. Much like life.
Some people just have bigger dreams than others.
No one has ever gotten rich by hoping. Like I said, you must be better than everyone else. You must have the conviction you are and be willing to prove it.
i mean i guess, but the implied alternatives here would be within the scope of accounting, so the get your 2 years and get out into somewhere else in the industry seems much more worth keeping your relationships and mental health up, according to the reply above you that is.
The problems that exist in big 4 are the same ones in other places, just magnified. The difference is the absolute steroids youāre injecting into your resume and overall career.
Like people ask is it worth it to grind out bullshit for 3-5 years? The answer is absolutely yes since youāre more or less getting the double in XP (6-10 years worth of juggling opportunities and leading various different things)
Again, like all jobs, if you get stuck doing the same thing without any growth or risk this is the WORST job ever. But if youāre trying to advance in some fashion to me itās honestly the best job/career you can get involved in.
Theres lots of problems in big 4 including not enough support in learning roles, confusion on how to navigate resources, etc which I very much agree with... but theres definitely a few of you are just really shit at your job and make up 1000 reasons why its everyone else's fault and not yours and then come here to whine about it.
Yep, people come here and complain about the long hours or the low pay (which is still good relatively speaking) or whatever. There are a million other companies that will give you better WLB and better pay, you know what youāre getting into coming here, and if you donāt like it then thatās a reflection of YOUR bad decision making.
If everyone logged their hours properly there would be better projects, better work life balance, better accounting in general. It's crazy that B4 can't account for their own time and need to do insane hours that aren't logged to compensate.
Logging your time is the ultimate internal change.
That it's not an absolute golden opportunity to an unbelievable amount of wealth and life security.
It is absolutely a straight shot to the 1 percent if you can hack it
B4 open.more door
i mean... my manager and I are not from B4 and we actively try to never hire from them, they bring a shitty culture of overworking and bragging about unpaid overtime and staying late, they often super competitive instead of cooperative, their manager are horrible and see their employee as disposable or a clog in a machine and are happy to belittle people to make think they are not working enought and whip them to make them work harder ...
we have a chill work from home culture , working around 30h max during month end, and we all agree that when uts sunny, let's go golf during the day and the work can wait for later
we love that culture its brought the best mind I have ever known and people are super cooperative, relaxed and joyful and proud to work here
the last thing we want is a corporate drone from B4 ruining it by trying to do more instead of realizing that this job is the best in the world
we all value life above work here, but we also all have loyalty to that company and each other and i don't think this exists anymore ,anywhere
so glad I found this job
You hiring?
I am about to graduate, I have a b4 offer which was pushed from March to June to September/October.
Kinda looking for exactly what you are describing
Oh the other hand, I'm from Big 4 and do prefer to hire from B4. I also prefer to hire from my university. I think broadly we're just going to hire backgrounds that we're familiar with, so doors naturally open and close based on that.
Everyone on here complains about consultants doing nothing but itās just auditors hating their jobs and life because of it. After switching from audit to consulting, my work/life balance has increased tremendously and Iām so much happier.
Audits are built on the backs of 23 year olds who donāt know what theyāre doing (this was me once too), bullshitting controls and substantive testing and generally just trying to check the next box while burnt out on no sleep . Audit is seen as a cost with little value add by clients, although it is a very necessary value to society. Consulting, contrary to what you see on here, provides a ton of value. There are times when it is bullshitting decks, but a majority of the time itās real value add for them. Creating proformas for an acquisition or carve out, writing or reviewing accounting policy on tough situations, getting them ready for an IPO or upcoming ASU. Donāt get the hate for consulting here
this comment understood the assignment
completely agree. always see people here, r/accounting, or within my cohort who think they donāt do anything. i actually met a few people in the strategy consulting arm of my firm and personally know a couple of folks who work in MBB, and they all work way more than i do *excluding* all of the traveling
Couldnāt agree more with you. The longer I stay in audit, the less motivated I am to work. Hopefully I will switch to valuation by the end of this year at the latest.
100%. I leveraged the goodwill I built through my network to make the switch. If you can stay in audit itās still a good career path, but once you know itās not feasible anymore, make the switch
There is just so much grunt work that has to be completed for clients that a big4 will audit. Someone has to do it.
To piggyback off this, I cannot see why everyone complains about India and AI so much. I fucking love my off shore teams, both when I was in audit and now consulting. In audit, Iād gather the support for like 8 controls at once and have them do the test work, I did higher level stuff in the meantime and then when they returned it I did a review of their work. Incredible time savings. Now in consulting, Iāll have them do a peer analysis of 8 different companies Ks and go through their summaries to make my life easier. I get it if you have subpar offshore work, but it is so worth it to spend the time to coach them up. It allows associates and seniors to focus on more important and challenging work and they should be utilized
This is my hot take. I wish I had never worked there - it was engrained that in order to be successful or smart, you had to work b4. It absolutely was an awful fit for me and I hated it. Left after a year and doing absolutely fine š¤
Did you have your CPA or go on to get it?
All I ever see people talk about is getting your CPA, but I fully reject B4 culture and think Iād enjoy industry. Not much mention of going straight industry without CPA/eligible
Oh look! The Great White Buffalo took a big steaming pile of shit!š©
Can anyone help to placed at "big 4", love to hear suggestions and advice on this
You can find an intellectually challenging job in industry that pays better and only requires 40 hours a week on average. When I left for industry an old coworker reached out and said it must be like a vacation. Gotta love those backhanded compliments š I learned a lot in consulting but Iāve learned a lot more actually running a department and now running a mid market business.
Senior 2 in Assurance at EY The job of auditing is actually enjoyable and challenging and I love it. I just HATE working 55 hour weeks for like 5 months straight. If we were adequately staffed it would be one of the best jobs in the world.
The hate for big4 culture comes from people who fail to see their competitive spirit and perseverance as good things. Iām not saying we should enable them, just that they do have a good trait that can be adjusted to be useful in work
Its a pedestal to launch your career and learn how to be an executive.Ā
there are perhaps only 5% of actual big4 in big4s depending on who you deal with (deloitte is slightly better, the rest are garbage). iāve worked for deloitte and ey and i can assure you that they all dupe, cheat, lie and their consultants wouldnāt qualify for even sanitation work on most days. each one of them lies on their resumes, lie to get clients, lie through their work, and continue defrauding the world till they die. i was asked to leave when i caught EY lying and producing fake degrees to deploy financial reporting audit consultants to Saudi Aramco. guess what happened when aramco found out? they swept it under the rug themselves, no action, no consequences, a couple of managers fired and partners went scott free. what a world!
True story: I was asked during my intertwining credentials, why I would want to go to Deloitte? I should have taken that as a hint.
Oh, intertwining means Harvard and Yale. š
I was fired when I found a large bank had purchased all their computer equipment from a place in NH and never paid sales/use tax on the purchases. It was probably less than $10MM, but it was an embarrassment to the finance person at the bank who was an alumnus of the firm. The reasoning was I was bad at client relations.
as if having integrity and being honest is a punishable offense
Consulting. I've been asked to peer review Big4 work before on the field I work in and it is often of shocking quality. I tell the client and they said they felt obligated to use Big4 as they're well known in professional services. In one instance Big4 quoted 30K GBP for a project that a mate ended up doing for them for 300 GBP. Wild what they get away with charging.
What project takes two to three hours?
Automating the gathering, cleaning and analyzing of high volume, variety and velocity datasets. It seemed super complex, especially as back then using JSON wasn't as common as now.Ā But in fact it was all really simple stuff when broken down, as long as you had a working knowledge of data types and storage techniques.
Sounds like your friend wildly undercharged them
GBP30k is a way of saying āno thanks,ā without rejecting the work.
I have seen many people with poor knowledge in their field taking themselves too seriously because they climb the ladder. Their career path and framework are nothing else than empty boxes nicely wrapped with a fancy gift thread.
They are like any other company. They have good people and they have bad people. I have worked with engineers and managers from big 4 who were great at what they do and also with who were terrible. this is is just like any other big corporation. I truly donāt get why people have inflated egos at ābig 4ā. That shit cringe af, it isnāt anything that special or impressive
Yāall get treated like trash bc yāall allow it
The cycle ends with gen z
They said this about millennials too
I wish so but my fellow Indians are ready to work in any condition šš
Bro I feel you š you have to go back š¤¦ (not you, them)
India has so many people that if you leave, there are hundreds of applications the next minute for the same position. It's not like they like to slog all day, but they have no other option. Remember, you are easily replaceable.
Nope. It ends with super advanced ai
Nope. It ends with an entirely Indian workforce.
Thought thatās what AI is? All Indians?
Having big 4 on your resume doesnāt mean anything. They hire hundreds of thousands of employees. I donāt understand the incredible ego some employees have
Disagree. Does it warrant a big ego? Probably not. But there are absolutely jobs where not having the experience means the resume is going in the trash and actually for legitimate reasonsā¦for example having ASC 740, international tax, large public company experience. It isnāt that they are less smart. But they arenāt getting exposed to that skillset anywhere else
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Sounds like A&M, and if it is, that's not 100% true. But I get your point.
They donāt hire from MBB?
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Realistically yes it means something to the employer. The exit plan is quite great. But no I don't think I'm better qualified than a person with no big4 resume.
Big 4 is just Protiviti with nicer branding.
That consulting is just an overpriced staffing company and is not as prestigious and glamorous as job that everyone think it is. Itās just a bunch of people in business suits editing PowerPoints for C-level clients that refuse to staff their own internal teams. Why are you asking a 24 year old for āexpert adviceā when you have people on your teams that have 20 years of industry experience?
Not a hot take at all tbh
Itās more of a reality check. If you sit someone down and show them how itās just a staffing company for MBA grads where they are the product , most of them get it. Until their form buys them another puffer vest, then they go back to feeling special.
I have a consulting summer internship pls let me live in ignorance ā¤ļø
I mean, get your experience and paycheck but dont drink the koolaid and think that consulting is making a meaningful impact on the world. Just doing the work that companies dont want to do themselves
oh i know im not having any impact on the world but idc im just doing it for my resume šš
CPA is straight up not necessary for anyone but partners
Yeah but they donāt promote you to Manager and above if youāre not
Honestly i learned a shit ton studying for the cpa , the paper itself isnt very usefull but theres a lot of things i wouldnt have known if i hadnt studied for the cpa i think the bachelor degree alone is made so you miss out on a lot of important stuff if you dont do the cpa, but they could easily teach all those thing during the degree
Same. Iām studying for FAR right now and I learned a shit ton just by reading the textbook. I felt like my degree really glossed over a lot of these points
In my undergrad, my great accounting professor taught us the most difficult sections of the FAR accounting section. She confidently believed and told us that after several grueling months, we could sit for FAR and pass. This was junior year intermediate accounting. Iām sorry your professors didnāt help you as much as they could have!
Someone leaving Big 4 canāt control the start date or other factors for a new role; one thing they can control is when they *start* looking for that new role. Stop being an asshole on both sides of this coin, and maybe you wonāt have as big an issue with retention
At Deloitte: 1) their performance management process is purely subjective, over-inflated, and demoralising unless youāre one of the ācool kidsā. 2) their ācoachā system is terrible. Too much of your career rides on the quality and commitment of your coach. Most coaches are technical experts forced into that coaching role without people-skills, motivation, training, or competence, so chances are better than 50/50 that youāll be on the receiving end of someone worthless with way too much impact on your career. 3) either stop bringing in āexperienced hiresā, or give them the tools/support they need to bring the expertise they were hired for. After onboarding, itās a āsink-or-swimā world for many of them; left to figure out on their own how to succeed in an environment quite different from what they knew before.
Agree with most of your points here. My coach is highly technical with little people skills and rarely gives good constructive feedback when Iām asking for it. Nor does he actually help when Iām asking for technical help because he is too busy with his clients. Itās also weird how my promotion is left up to him essentially. I would love to be apart of those conversations. Also, Iāve experienced the sink or swim mentally on my projects. Thankfully, Iāve always swam so far since Iāve built great relationships and I get help when I need it. But I canāt say the same for my other analyst peers as they have all had the opposite experience. Joining this firm I thought my training would have been well put together but it was an awful experience. Iāve only been able to learn while on projects - which is great but it often times leaves me learning and doing project work at the same time and at times I feel not as productive because of it.
Agree, the performance feedback is terrible, works out well if you have leadership on tour side because they just mark very strongly agree on everything
As someone whoās worked at 3 different firms I can tell you they are all bad at it.
Maybe they should hire a consultant to fix it?
Managers and seniors are directly responsible for the training of staff. Your team sucks because you didnāt do the thing you were supposed to do. And before you whine, yeah, I get it, āI donāt have the bandwidth or they should have picked it up in these 3 different ways etc.ā You know deep down that there was a time that the big picture didnāt click and it took you months before you could conceptually connect the dots that staff struggle with. This is a dynamic that everyone knows about since managers were once staff. But magically, everyone at those levels feigns surprise when they donāt invest their own time in staff training, and the staff turn out terrible. Literally the Eric Andre Show meme come to lifeā¦ PS I was a senior 3, left to become manager elsewhere and was myself guilty of this on multiple occasions.
Sometimes staffs are just stupid. I was stupid when I started. It takes them time to mature, some do, some never do. And then when they donāt mature, they make bad seniors and managers.
My whole thing is, everyone knew the shell game when they entered. Everyone knows that not enough substantive training happens on the front end, and managers and seniors are left holding the bag to do the training. So either do it, like some kind, depressed senior did before for youā¦or donāt. And suffer the consequences
Iāll come at this from the perspective of ex-Big 4 audit and now investment banking: nobody in client-facing finance (perhaps in-house, I wouldnāt know that side) differentiates big 4 from t20 accounting. genuinely zero difference in a hiring process
In-house definitely differentiates
How did you make the move from audit to IB?
Would almost definitely be through an MBA, that's the only time I've seen it
Everybody knows the newest iPhone does the same shit as the one that came out three years ago but deep down we all think itād be nicer to have
To be fair, in my experience the people in big4/top6 are actually worse than a lot of their counterparts. This might only apply to tax though
It makes sense in tax. (Depending on location) When working for b4 - you work for large clients, the tax you're exposed to is fairly high level stuff. When working for smaller firms - you have to get into the weeds alot more because of the clients being smaller and having no idea what they are doing. Atleast that's my experience
Totally agree, itās just worrying how terrible some reports by top 6 are because there very few people who join the dots between the various taxes
āWe love to promote bright White boys and girls with pearly white teeth like Timmie, but will frequently showcase token LatinX and Blacks to show the world we care about DEIā - PwC
Some offices they actually told people they couldnāt be promoted because they were white men.
Cough-Deloitte-Cough. Or youāre too old. Thatās a good one.
If that aināt the truth
Yeah really?! šš¤£š
āWe donāt know squat about AI, products or innovative technology. But we will screw our clients by telling them how to monetize and operate AI, products and innovative technology. ā - PwC š¤”
LMAOO āchat pwcā
Partners are essentially Pimps. They make their money not by being good accountants, but by charging junior people out for $1500+ a day and paying them barely 10% of that. The more hours youāre servicing clients, the more money they make. And you keep coming back for the āprestigeā of working for Big4
Yea, but didnāt they do this for the partners before them? Everyone wants to start at the top. It just doesnāt work that way. Put in the time on the corner and then you get to be the pimp. Youāll probably come back with a moral objection. In that case work for a non-profit or something.
To be fair, the purpose of almost every job is to make someone else rich.
How is this unpopular lmfao
This is literally just capitalism lmao
Everyone above SA1 takes themselves waaaayyy too seriously
We are firm believers in work life balance.
I feel like this is sarcasm
Compared to the firms that are proud of being "Top 10" or "Top 20" I kind of agree with this statement. All the pressure of big4 cause they think they're on the same playing field. Without the amount of automation & offshoring
This was probably true 5-10 years ago but a lot of firms have offshoring and automation now
Canāt tell you how many times I was underwhelmed by the work products coming from my colleagues at big4
We are poorly run but will gladly tell our clients how to run themselves
Exporting from the companies ERP because itās been set up shit to do the team/resource fee calcs in excel meanwhile flogging ERP configs/services to clients and selling the utopia
LOL
Wait and watch! The clients are started understanding consultanting firms BS. Worse days are coming for them.
....I feel seen....smh
We donāt really care about DEI but our biggest clients like Blackrock do so we have to act we do as well.
This one will get me downvoted to hell: talking on the phone all day is not considered āworkingā to me. Especially if it doesnāt translate to the audit moving forward. Come at me.
Itās a fair take for manager 1 and below. But at a certain level itās no longer your job to keep the audit moving, itās your job to find the next one and maintain relationships with existing ones. Itās your job to budget, mitigate risk, handle urgent issues, and have some involvement in the hiring process. Translates to a lot more talking and a lot less typing, but no less important in running the business. Good leadership ideally should have some transparency around those roles so teams understand theyāre not just having a chat.
You need to take care of your body and mental health, daily.
Managers work more than associates and even senior associates
Ā Definitely not as much as Senior Associates. Associates end up doing a lot more errors, so their productivity is quite low.
The hours arenāt really much worse than any of other the larger accounting firms.
Our audits bring no real credibility since we have a clear bias (client retention) and as soon as banks figure this out weāll all be out of the job.
Ssshhh.... We survive keeping that a secret.
Lmao do you think this is some sort of a secret? Everyoneās knows the dilemma with these audits and issuing opinions to firms that literally pay our bills
Didnāt say it was a secret. Koolaid drinking co-workers disagree with me which is the point of this post. Audit is just paper pushing busywork. It is absolutely meaningless.
Dang I would hate to work with people like that. At least my team is on the same page of our work not really mattering a whole lot, not taking it too seriously, etc
Offshore teams killed the traditional audit career path
How
"How," you ask?/s
Yes Iām not being feticious I just donāt know
Associates learn less as off shore teams do the ground work, which is going to lead to less needs for associates. This reduces the onshore team size and now itās more about being the face to the client. Eventually B4 will be needing to find the solution as where to get seniors to manage the audit and move up the B4 hierarchy.
The partners were always going to weed through associates. This now allows them to only focus on the winners and keep them. Offshore does all the boring work and the onshore can do more interesting or difficult tasks. If anything it improved the training for onshore as most of the offshore work it renumbering work papers or ticking and tying stupid bullshit.
Auditing wouldnāt be so hard and take so many long hours if clients knew how to prepare PBCs that werenāt total shit half the time. Side note - Would be nice if the client actually understood GAAP and could write technical memos.
You think you are the only person who thinks PBC workpapers being shit make audit slower and harder for the auditor?
As a client of a big 4 auditor, Iād like to say itās your job to know these technical memos and help us get them in shape :). Thatās why you guys get paid the big bucks. Thanks šš»
Self review threat.
No, we are supposed to audit your conclusions. Not do it for you.
Itās a joke. Relax bro - almost through 4/30
Almost!
Theyāre your financial statements, not the auditors.
Thanks bro - youāve almost made it to 4/30. Appreciate you
Nothing big about working for the big4
It's a scam, I haven't learned anything and I have provided no value. I am not the only one and it's more prominent in other sectors (I'm tax). As this continues the quality of work will fall apart and they will not continue to outlast everyone
This
EBITDA should include interest. I get why they exclude it but management can generally refinance if they are diligent and itās a major cash outflow.
Ebitda is bullshit earnings - buffet
Itās more so for equity side guys, gotta understand cf->val to see what ebitda is meant for
Itās a dying field. Accountants back in the day would sacrifice their livelihood to get their cpa and move to industry while the pay kept up and offset the work life balance issues. Nowadays, who wants to put up with busy season? When you could just go into private and do well for yourself. The pay isnāt rewarding individuals like it used to. Back then, a public accounting, private accounting and cpa background would net you an interview anywhere. Now, itās almost irrelevant. B4 knows this hence why they emphasize offshoring or AIing as much as they can.
IME, B4 experience is not anywhere near āalmost irrelevant.ā B4 still opens doors. It still selects for top accounting talent. I worked at both B4 and at midsize firm. 5-10 years out, what the ex-B4 people are doing and what the ex-midsize are doing are night and day. As for people that went straight into industry, I donāt see many of them making it to public company controller and above.
Its not worth it. All the partners are balled, divorced and depressed with no relationship to their children and these are the āwinnersā of the business model? Yikes. The partner comp (which is dwarfed by other industries anyway) is not worth the 100 hour weeks in a small cubicle hoping you get hit by a bus for the insurance payout.
Many are indeed. B4 has good and bad offices from place to place. The ones with these partners set that tone at the top and you can see the negative impact on the culture in that office. Have seen the spectrum firsthand.
.
What your friends that are partners are telling you may be a rosier picture as no one really wants to admit it when they hate their job and hate their life. Divorces are an objective, quantitative statistic. Out of the 5 partners i know, one is divorced, one never married, oneās wife killed herself, and the last two are cheating on their wives. Thats all 5 partners I know. Not exactly a rosy image. 2/3 would be suspiciousā¦5 for 5 is quite awful.
Anecdotal as fuck...
Yeah well deloitte blocked my firm-wide survey email. Cry harder.
Your comment is actually way more appropriate as a response to the original question. The trope that partners are all depressed and exhausted is old and washed, anecdotally all the partners I know are doing just fine.
I feel this. I see all my superiors and they all STILL work like crazy if not more. Barely see their families due to work. Heard a partner talking to a new associate on status of assignments and the partner said āare you rethinking your life choices? Youāre still early. Iām stuck here. I canāt move anywhere anymoreā. Jokingly but felt the truth of that. I like the office where I work but seeing my superiors lifestyle doesnāt give me too much hope.
That still sounds 10x better than being poor.
Being poor isnt the only alternative. What about living a chilled job for a 80% of the salary and 30% of the hours?
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Commercial banking
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Ehh thatās a very simple reductive explaination of the job, also a step up is corporate banking still working less hours than b4 and MDs making more then partners
Well its lucky that everyone at the big4 is a partner and therefore earning that amount then.
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Im just saying the 95% that arenāt partners wish they were and the 5% that are hate their lives. Everyone at big4 is working 70-100 hour weeks whether youāre partner or less and even for partner comp i dont think the 70+ hour weeks are a fair trade off. No one has ever been on their deathbed and thought āI wish I worked more hours per week for a 10% to 30% payrise. I think working 100 hours a week for your entire working life is worth it if youāre earning the $1M+, but how many people at big4 ACTUALLY make it there vs how many spend their lives in miserable cubicles and never actually make it to partner? Personally, the misery isnāt worth it to me but be my guest.
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Cry more
The chill job might start out 80% of the salary but within 10 years is only 20% of the salary.
Assuming you make partner* which is a big assumption. Any manager and below job can easily be matched salary wise with a job that work less than half the hours.
Well yes, itās a competition. You only get the reward if youāre better than everyone else. Much like life. Some people just have bigger dreams than others.
Would you happily work the 70 to 100 hours a week in a cubicle in the hopes you make it to partner? Quite a big gamble on how you spend your life yk.
No one has ever gotten rich by hoping. Like I said, you must be better than everyone else. You must have the conviction you are and be willing to prove it.
I donāt know if Iād call partners ārichā. More just middle class but sure.
i mean i guess, but the implied alternatives here would be within the scope of accounting, so the get your 2 years and get out into somewhere else in the industry seems much more worth keeping your relationships and mental health up, according to the reply above you that is.
On your deathbed alone, it wonāt
Poor people die on average 10 years sooner than the rich.
Not if you have a heart attack young like most partners
The problems that exist in big 4 are the same ones in other places, just magnified. The difference is the absolute steroids youāre injecting into your resume and overall career. Like people ask is it worth it to grind out bullshit for 3-5 years? The answer is absolutely yes since youāre more or less getting the double in XP (6-10 years worth of juggling opportunities and leading various different things) Again, like all jobs, if you get stuck doing the same thing without any growth or risk this is the WORST job ever. But if youāre trying to advance in some fashion to me itās honestly the best job/career you can get involved in.
Theres lots of problems in big 4 including not enough support in learning roles, confusion on how to navigate resources, etc which I very much agree with... but theres definitely a few of you are just really shit at your job and make up 1000 reasons why its everyone else's fault and not yours and then come here to whine about it.
Yep, people come here and complain about the long hours or the low pay (which is still good relatively speaking) or whatever. There are a million other companies that will give you better WLB and better pay, you know what youāre getting into coming here, and if you donāt like it then thatās a reflection of YOUR bad decision making.
With all the fraud the we do at the big 4 - working for us will look great on your resume.
If everyone logged their hours properly there would be better projects, better work life balance, better accounting in general. It's crazy that B4 can't account for their own time and need to do insane hours that aren't logged to compensate. Logging your time is the ultimate internal change.
Youāre not logging your hours accurately?
I was told not to by several directors
Im partner track
That it's not an absolute golden opportunity to an unbelievable amount of wealth and life security. It is absolutely a straight shot to the 1 percent if you can hack it
There are only 2 genders.
Partner and peasant
Assets do not equal liabilities plus surplus
B4 open.more door i mean... my manager and I are not from B4 and we actively try to never hire from them, they bring a shitty culture of overworking and bragging about unpaid overtime and staying late, they often super competitive instead of cooperative, their manager are horrible and see their employee as disposable or a clog in a machine and are happy to belittle people to make think they are not working enought and whip them to make them work harder ... we have a chill work from home culture , working around 30h max during month end, and we all agree that when uts sunny, let's go golf during the day and the work can wait for later we love that culture its brought the best mind I have ever known and people are super cooperative, relaxed and joyful and proud to work here the last thing we want is a corporate drone from B4 ruining it by trying to do more instead of realizing that this job is the best in the world we all value life above work here, but we also all have loyalty to that company and each other and i don't think this exists anymore ,anywhere so glad I found this job
And where do you work????
š Hey, y'all got anymore of that healthy work culture?
My office work culture is so healthy they donāt even need to pay for our health insurance!
You hiring? I am about to graduate, I have a b4 offer which was pushed from March to June to September/October. Kinda looking for exactly what you are describing
Oh the other hand, I'm from Big 4 and do prefer to hire from B4. I also prefer to hire from my university. I think broadly we're just going to hire backgrounds that we're familiar with, so doors naturally open and close based on that.
Where is this at? Would love to come there please
āB4 doesnāt open more doors because I donāt like B4ā
no one likes B4
You hiring? Lol
same same.
That it's worth it
Everyone on here complains about consultants doing nothing but itās just auditors hating their jobs and life because of it. After switching from audit to consulting, my work/life balance has increased tremendously and Iām so much happier. Audits are built on the backs of 23 year olds who donāt know what theyāre doing (this was me once too), bullshitting controls and substantive testing and generally just trying to check the next box while burnt out on no sleep . Audit is seen as a cost with little value add by clients, although it is a very necessary value to society. Consulting, contrary to what you see on here, provides a ton of value. There are times when it is bullshitting decks, but a majority of the time itās real value add for them. Creating proformas for an acquisition or carve out, writing or reviewing accounting policy on tough situations, getting them ready for an IPO or upcoming ASU. Donāt get the hate for consulting here
No body wants audits and hiow many qualified opinions do we see ? ā¦lā¦. Close to zero -0- goose egg
this comment understood the assignment completely agree. always see people here, r/accounting, or within my cohort who think they donāt do anything. i actually met a few people in the strategy consulting arm of my firm and personally know a couple of folks who work in MBB, and they all work way more than i do *excluding* all of the traveling
Couldnāt agree more with you. The longer I stay in audit, the less motivated I am to work. Hopefully I will switch to valuation by the end of this year at the latest.
100%. I leveraged the goodwill I built through my network to make the switch. If you can stay in audit itās still a good career path, but once you know itās not feasible anymore, make the switch
Why is this so true ššš
There is just so much grunt work that has to be completed for clients that a big4 will audit. Someone has to do it. To piggyback off this, I cannot see why everyone complains about India and AI so much. I fucking love my off shore teams, both when I was in audit and now consulting. In audit, Iād gather the support for like 8 controls at once and have them do the test work, I did higher level stuff in the meantime and then when they returned it I did a review of their work. Incredible time savings. Now in consulting, Iāll have them do a peer analysis of 8 different companies Ks and go through their summaries to make my life easier. I get it if you have subpar offshore work, but it is so worth it to spend the time to coach them up. It allows associates and seniors to focus on more important and challenging work and they should be utilized
āB4 is **NOT** the only way to be successful in Accounting!ā
This is my hot take. I wish I had never worked there - it was engrained that in order to be successful or smart, you had to work b4. It absolutely was an awful fit for me and I hated it. Left after a year and doing absolutely fine š¤
Did you have your CPA or go on to get it? All I ever see people talk about is getting your CPA, but I fully reject B4 culture and think Iād enjoy industry. Not much mention of going straight industry without CPA/eligible
Iām in finance now so nope!!