I Hate Public Accounting

By far, the very worst part of the job is dealing with incompetent people. People who's highest achievement in life is getting passing scores of 75 on the CPA exam after multiple attempts. They haven't the brains or ambition to do anything other than back-office monkey work. They are terrible at their jobs, lack the high level understanding of the auditing business, let alone their client's business. All they care about is checklists and balancing the debits and credits.  They are miserable managers.

Being a Senior in a public accounting firm is typically the first, and last, time a lot of these accountants will ever have any supervisory responsibility. 95% of them will not handle it, and leave the firm to be staff accountants in their client's industry. But for the time they are they 'boss', they are miserable people. Imagine having a boss that knows less than you do, just shit all over you and take all the credit when something gets done. Not for nothing, the female seniors are the worst. Its actually a knock against our western culture in general, that girls never get supervisory or leadership positions very often, before they are thrown into corporate america.

ACTUAL QUOTES FROM AN INCOMPETENT SENIOR:

"I totally forgot to email you this document yesterday. Sorry, but you should have reminded me. I forget things."

"I'm going to let you run with this project on your own, but make sure that you ask me any questions you might have if you don't get something within the first ten minutes, and we can figure it out together."

"We have a call at 10.
Staff-Do you want me to dial in?
No, its more for the client than for us.
Staff-Ok, so no then?
Just send me the updated outstanding items list asap so I know whats going on for the call."

"Is project X done?
Staff-No, I was working on project Y for the last 3 days because our manager told me to prioritize it.
If you needed help, you should have communicated that to me
Staff-I don't need help, I just didn't do X because your boss gave me higher priority work. Isn't the communication issue more between you and the manager? "