A view from the other side.
If you follow along, you know I was able to secure myself a new position where someone pays me to do something other than accounting. This is my first winter without the busy season blues, and let me tell you first hand, its as amazing as it sounds. I love skiing and winter sports, and I essentially had to give it up to be an auditor and sit in a conference room and "tie-out" work-papers for 13 hours a day, 3 months straight.
What's also striking is how short the first quarter of the year really is. Life moves fast, and public accounting's busy season really slows it down for you. Outside of the audit room, three months is flying by, but when your life is miserable, it seems to never end.
I want to share with the auditing world some truths about the working world that really shocked me when I first sat down at my desk at my new job:
1. People deserve their own desks!
What an unbelievably depressing thing to not have your own desk. As an auditor I was a travelling workpaper output machine, and was sent to where I was needed, be it down town, cross town, or across the country. I love my desk. I have a place to sit everyday! Literally, on more than one occasion, I went home from my Big4 job beacuse I had nowhere to sit. All of the desks in the building were taken, the tables in the cafeteria had been claimed by those senior auditors more adept than I at claiming real estate, and after over an hour of stressed out searching, I decided the fastest way to get working and get to billing my time was to go home and log on my wifi. What an unacceptable way to run a business!
2. No one yells.
How many times have you heard someone yell during your accounting career? I've heard it a lot. Senior managers particularly like to yell, as they are the most stressed and most underpaid. But senior auditors like to yell too, its their first time as a manager, and most dont know the first thing about handling people. Part of the problem is busy season and the stress it creates, the other part is the people. In real corporate america, on the front lines, there are no 'episodes' or blow ups. People are exceedingly professional and politically correct.
3. Working 7 days a week is unheard of, if you're not paid for it.
I knew some go-getter audtiors who worked investment banking hours. Literally 7 days a week. And for literally 1/3 the pay of the bankers who put up with those hours.
4. There are a lot more adults.
In public accounting, I'm pretty sure the average age is 28, the partners are all retired, and those who are older, and not retired, are too busy doing the real work and winning business to show their face in the audit room.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
I Escaped!
Well, I did it! If you couldn't tell from the abrupt end to the blog posts last summer, I actually got a new job!
I successfully transitioned my career from the depths of the windowless staff room in a big 4 public accounting firm to a front office role, sitting on the trading floor of a buy-side asset management firm. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm still qualified as a CPA after all, my job is not as glamorous as my fancy new title sounds, but it's infinitely better than public accounting. If I could give anyone who is dissatisfied in accounting any advice, it's to interview and expand your world of opportunity.
Time for a brief postmortem:
How I got the job:
The sad truth about leaving accounting is that it's an uphill climb, the happy truth is that it is possible. You need to have a great story, and, in every interview, you need to answer the question "why should I hire an accountant?", I had to at least. Applying to jobs is a numbers game. The more resumes you send, the more the chances you get to interview. Also, the sooner you submit your resume to the new job posting, the better the probability it actually gets looked at. Applying the simple expected value theory will give you the secret strategy: apply to as many of the fresh job postings as possible.
Practice, practice, practice interviewing. Take as many interviews as you can get, even if you're not crazy about the position. The interview allows you to practice your interviewing skills, better hone your answers, and you get the absolute best networking experience imaginable: you get the opportunity to explain your resume and story to someone looking to hire. In some cases, even when I didn't get the job I had interviewed for, the hiring managers recommended me for other open positions in which I was interested! Talk about effective networking!
The more interviews I went on, the more confident I became, and I think it's ultimately is just a confidence game. I was absolutely destroyed on my first interview: nervous and jittery answers, poor eye contact, low volume and unsure tone of voice. I actually cracked under the pressure of that first quantitative brain teaser and incorrectly answered what would be the easiest of all the brain teasers I would get asked during my job search. With each successive interview, my answers to the standard questions became more smooth and my delivery became dialed in. "Why are you looking to leave accounting? What do you actually do on a day to day basis? Why is your experience applicable to this new role? Tell me about a time when X happened and how you dealt with it." I was getting really good at answering the quantitative questions, and I had my story down pat.
One memorable question was "How do you deal with making mistakes and how do you feel about having to ask for help?" In the swagger of my interviewing confidence, my response was: "I think I'm a pretty smart guy, and I'm able to figure most things out relatively quickly. If something doesn't make sense to me, a lot of times it means something is missing in the communication, and so I'm not worried about asking clarifying questions." I literally told the interviewer I was a "smart guy" and if I don't understand it means something actually doesn't make sense. It doesn't sound too smart prima facie, but given the right tone and context, it made me sound like a boss.
What I expected on the job:
Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. When I asked in the interview what the day to day was like, the spoke in their industry terms that made no sense to me. The same way I got blown away by the audit staff when I was interviewing for my first job, I got blow away by the quality of these people as well. I interviewed with portfolio managers, assistant portfolio managers and research analysts, who spoke about yield curves, spreads, duration and convexity analysis, and credit ratings. The spoke of interesting work like trade allocations and making investment decisions. The same way the idea of preparing financial statements and interacting with valuation experts appealed to me in auditing, the asset management industry's decision making prospects called to me.
As with all jobs, its not a cool as it sounds. There's a reason that someone is paying you to do it: there's going to be shitty parts.
Where to go from here:
The best part of this job is the exposure to all aspects of asset management and the buy-side of the capital markets. On a daily basis I'm exposed to everyone from our traders, the investment bankers, ratings agency analysts, our internal analysts, the quant team, middle office and operations professionals, financial advisers who's clients capital we manage, and the senior portfolio managers who call the shots.
I successfully transitioned my career from the depths of the windowless staff room in a big 4 public accounting firm to a front office role, sitting on the trading floor of a buy-side asset management firm. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm still qualified as a CPA after all, my job is not as glamorous as my fancy new title sounds, but it's infinitely better than public accounting. If I could give anyone who is dissatisfied in accounting any advice, it's to interview and expand your world of opportunity.
Time for a brief postmortem:
How I got the job:
The sad truth about leaving accounting is that it's an uphill climb, the happy truth is that it is possible. You need to have a great story, and, in every interview, you need to answer the question "why should I hire an accountant?", I had to at least. Applying to jobs is a numbers game. The more resumes you send, the more the chances you get to interview. Also, the sooner you submit your resume to the new job posting, the better the probability it actually gets looked at. Applying the simple expected value theory will give you the secret strategy: apply to as many of the fresh job postings as possible.
Practice, practice, practice interviewing. Take as many interviews as you can get, even if you're not crazy about the position. The interview allows you to practice your interviewing skills, better hone your answers, and you get the absolute best networking experience imaginable: you get the opportunity to explain your resume and story to someone looking to hire. In some cases, even when I didn't get the job I had interviewed for, the hiring managers recommended me for other open positions in which I was interested! Talk about effective networking!
The more interviews I went on, the more confident I became, and I think it's ultimately is just a confidence game. I was absolutely destroyed on my first interview: nervous and jittery answers, poor eye contact, low volume and unsure tone of voice. I actually cracked under the pressure of that first quantitative brain teaser and incorrectly answered what would be the easiest of all the brain teasers I would get asked during my job search. With each successive interview, my answers to the standard questions became more smooth and my delivery became dialed in. "Why are you looking to leave accounting? What do you actually do on a day to day basis? Why is your experience applicable to this new role? Tell me about a time when X happened and how you dealt with it." I was getting really good at answering the quantitative questions, and I had my story down pat.
One memorable question was "How do you deal with making mistakes and how do you feel about having to ask for help?" In the swagger of my interviewing confidence, my response was: "I think I'm a pretty smart guy, and I'm able to figure most things out relatively quickly. If something doesn't make sense to me, a lot of times it means something is missing in the communication, and so I'm not worried about asking clarifying questions." I literally told the interviewer I was a "smart guy" and if I don't understand it means something actually doesn't make sense. It doesn't sound too smart prima facie, but given the right tone and context, it made me sound like a boss.
What I expected on the job:
Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. When I asked in the interview what the day to day was like, the spoke in their industry terms that made no sense to me. The same way I got blown away by the audit staff when I was interviewing for my first job, I got blow away by the quality of these people as well. I interviewed with portfolio managers, assistant portfolio managers and research analysts, who spoke about yield curves, spreads, duration and convexity analysis, and credit ratings. The spoke of interesting work like trade allocations and making investment decisions. The same way the idea of preparing financial statements and interacting with valuation experts appealed to me in auditing, the asset management industry's decision making prospects called to me.
As with all jobs, its not a cool as it sounds. There's a reason that someone is paying you to do it: there's going to be shitty parts.
Where to go from here:
The best part of this job is the exposure to all aspects of asset management and the buy-side of the capital markets. On a daily basis I'm exposed to everyone from our traders, the investment bankers, ratings agency analysts, our internal analysts, the quant team, middle office and operations professionals, financial advisers who's clients capital we manage, and the senior portfolio managers who call the shots.
An Update
Reading back over this little blog, I'm a little nostalgic about how introspective and serious I was in learning about myself. I'm definitely not nostalgic about how much I hated my old job, though! I like helping people, and if anything about my short career thus far is useful, or if you want more details on my job search, please don't hesitate to ask. I'll try to update the ol' blog with more of my musings on the accounting world, and maybe you'll find them slightly more interesting coming from my new perspective as a public accounting alumnus.
In that spirit of nostalgia and working on myself, I'll be posting a bit more for my own sake as well; I really enjoy the challenge of organizing and recording my thoughts and theories, and, looking back, I'm actually a bit impressed with the maturity of the ideas I recorded here.
I'll start off this latest blogging kick with a post about the new role and how I landed it.
In that spirit of nostalgia and working on myself, I'll be posting a bit more for my own sake as well; I really enjoy the challenge of organizing and recording my thoughts and theories, and, looking back, I'm actually a bit impressed with the maturity of the ideas I recorded here.
I'll start off this latest blogging kick with a post about the new role and how I landed it.
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