Freedom or Face?

I will be perfectly honest. There have been so many times where I’ve contemplated leaving, and just decided to stick on for a little while longer. I’m a relatively young guy, and to be honest, I face the same dilemma, I’m sure a lot of you do.

I am a young ambitious person. Throughout my university career, I always knew accounting wasn’t really what I wanted to do. However, I stuck around, and I’m still around, wondering when I should make the move.

I think a lot of our readers face a dilemma of freedom vs. face.

A lot of us want freedom, but we don’t want to lose face.

We want to quit our jobs, but we don’t want to face the embarrassment.

We’ve built a sort of pride that we don’t want to lose. We got the 40K co-op jobs while our friends were making $12 an hour at Mcdonalds. When we graduated, we got the 60K senior staff accountant Big 4 job, when our other graduating friends were still struggling for work. Our friends and parents respected us and we didn’t want to lose that respect.

Our parents brag to their friends about us. We’re Big 4 Prodigies. My son is making 60K. Your son doesn’t have a job. Etc., Etc. I mean, what kind of 21 to 22 year old has a 60K job in another field?

We’ve built ourselves into our trap.

Deep down, we also know, that if we weren’t in accounting, we wouldn’t command the 60K senior starting salary, and the respect of our high school friends and parents.

Do we have the skills to even get an 40K job?

We’d be regular graduating Joes like everyone else.

We are on the inside and know it’s not that great. But because, the people on the outside don’t know, even if we secretly resent our jobs, we choose to be stubborn, and play the appearance game.

After all, it does feel good to blow your peers out of the water in terms of comparison.

No there is nothing wrong with you if you’re young and you hate accounting and your job. If you ever considered quitting, but felt something was holding you back, I truly believe it’s a matter of not wanting to lose face.

Why They Left…Part II

Ok, I’m on a roll here. Just posted a new blog on the Big 4 and the recession, and now this. But then again, I’ll be taking a trip this week so it will not be possible for me to write new posts during the week. Plus, I just can’t help it, my fingers are itching to write this second part on the Why They Left post.

In my first post Why They Left, I wrote there the reasons I noted why my officemates (and ultimately, I) left. These are my readily-observable-very-true-but-safe reasons. I received a couple of comments on this one, the notable of which came from an anonymous poster and to quote: “Some people leave just because the job just plain sucks.....vouching 200 invoices a day can really make you wonder about your purpose in life.....and they wanna give something else a shot”. Hmmm, telling it for what it is, I see. I was curious. Evidently there are more reasons out there than those I covered, hence this part II post.

Someone wrote me an email referring me to another site: www.jobvent.com. This site basically shows the reviews of various people (employees, both current and former) from all around the globe on their companies. Now, I know the site may be familiar to you but it is definitely new to me. So I browsed it. Of course, being an accountant / auditor, I promptly went and searched for the Big 4 auditing firms. What I found is quite…Er disturbing to say the least. All Big 4 firms have negative scores! EY has a -199 score, PWC a -26 score, Deloitte – negative 396 and KPMG has a -485 score! Wow! What negatives! Reading through the reviews opened my eyes to some of the possible reasons why these “reviewers” left (leaving the firm and leaving the negative reviews). Let me just summarize some of these reasons. A caveat first: these are based on the reviews I read and do not, by any stretch of imagination, pertain to my personal experience. So don’t quote me on this, okay?

Kiss @ss managers, bad @ss partners: Managers who retaliate because their juniors / staff do not worship the ground they work on. Partners who are being bad examples to their staff. Partners who have simply no heart and just give their staff their walking orders without so much as a by-your-leave. Managers or partners who have absolutely no ethics, who unfairly treat the staff and who do not seem to appreciate their staff’s work. Need I go on?

Not so good work environment: No work – life balance (even though this was one of the things promised when they were recruited). Stressful work atmosphere. Strict policies / stifling work atmosphere.This also includes bad technology, slow IT people, slow materials procurement, etc.

People problems: Other than the manager or partner, that is. Lack of young people working within the same office (the one who posted this may still be young and wants the company of people his / her same age). Rampant drug use (what the…? Hope this is not true). Brutally honest people (so brutal, they can reduce you to tears). Hypocrites who say one thing and do another (aren't these people found everywhere?).

Low pay. I guess I was too kind in my previous post. But some of the comments here are really negative when it comes to this aspect. Salaries / rates are too small. There are times when salaries were delayed (that hurts, you work your @ss off just to get your pay three months after!). Overtime pay virtually non-existent (this after working 7 days for the whole week!). And what about the benefits? Not so good and even sometimes, they suck.

There are some more reasons I no longer included here. Suffice it to say that the above are the most cited reasons. But they are also quite the eye-openers. I guess I was just lucky enough not to have experienced these things (except for the low pay but our benefits were okay).

Another note: This blog is not to discourage those who want to go into the Big 4. It just shows how it is inside BUT you don’t really want us who used to work in these firms, to sugar-coat it for you, do you? In my next blogs, I will write positive stuff about the Big 4, promise. Till then, bye and see you!

Why They Left

Big 4 firms (and even mid-sized and small firms) are notorious for their high turnover rate. As a matter of fact, I just read that the average turnover rate in the Big 4 is somewhere between 15% to 20% every year while other industries are just averaging 5% (Note: the study was done two years ago, before the recession set in, the average rates may actually be higher during the crisis)! I won’t say if these rates are reasonable or not but turnovers have become so much a part of life of the Big 4 that they have targets for it and even have plans to lower the rate.

In my 8 years in a big auditing firm, I’ve seen my share of people who left the firm. From my co-juniors (when I was just starting out) to my co-managers and even to myself, it seemed like a never-ending exodus of auditors going out of the firm and even out of audit.

So why do these auditors leave? If the Big 4 is such a great place to work in and to get good training and great audit experience, why do we still see juniors, seniors, managers and even partners leaving the firm? I don’t have the hard and fast answers but in all those years, I had the chance to ask my co-auditors who resigned from the firm and I will share some of their answers here.

• The grass is greener…on the other side of the fence. The number one reason? Money or financial reasons. Don’t get me wrong, salaries in Big 4 are okay. But they’re not really that big and well, private companies pay bigger salaries. And if you have loans to pay or a family to support; or if you just want to live a better life, this can be a very good reason for leaving. Of those people I saw leave the firm, maybe about 60% to 70% left because of this reason.

• The other company’s (and even firm’s) offer is too good to resist. This is not only based on salaries, it also includes perks. Perks such as giving you a car, giving you company shares, more benefits, less overtime, giving you a chance to travel to other places and even in other countries. The list can just go on and on. I have a former senior (I was her manager) who resigned to become a chief accountant. Two years later, I saw from her Facebook account pictures of her visiting other countries (with her family in tow). Turned out she was sent there for certain job assignments and the company allowed her to bring along her family (the company subsidized some of their expenses). Lucky her!

• They don’t like their clients / boss. I had a fellow junior who, after finding out she’ll be assigned to the same client for the next busy season, promptly served her resignation letter to her boss! Obviously her reason was, she does not like the client (like may seem a mild word, okay, she hates the client). Or there’s this other junior who was constantly at odds with her manager that she left after just one busy season. Of course, she wouldn’t admit it but, knowing their history, we could read between the lines. Resigning because of the client or the boss is not quite as common as the first two but they do happen. And when they happen, you can be sure that client or that boss will be avoided like a plague by the other juniors.

• Health reasons. Okay, I’m not trying to give you a panic attack or something. But it is true that sometimes, people leave the firm because they want to stay healthy or to manage their blood pressure (which is perpetually high during the busy season) or to live a longer life. I’m just kidding on the last one. Seriously, the Big 4 is not for everybody and sometimes, being in a Big 4 can wreak havoc on one’s health. Some people just deal with it by taking in more and more medicines (and staying on the firm) but other people, well, they deal with it by leaving the firm.

• Family reasons. How does family become a reason for leaving the Big 4? Let’s count the ways. One, your family pressured you to leave the firm because they see that you are looking very, very tired, are often sick, have dark shadows under your eyes and have no time to visit them anymore. Two, the family is banking on you to earn more money because you are helping them out financially so they pressured you to leave the firm (even if you don’t want to) just so you can get a higher-paying job. Three, you, yourself, are starting a new family and you want to have a more balanced work-family life so you chose to leave the firm and get another job that is not too demanding and does not make you work until 2 in the morning (on a Sunday at that!). Fourth, your aunt, uncle, father or mother runs a small town accounting firm and he or she wants you to take over him or her. And you, being the dutiful son / daughter / nephew / niece, resign from the firm to jump to a smaller one.

So those are the reasons I compiled over the years. What about me? What was my reason for leaving the firm? Honestly? Last reason, fourth way. What about you? If you left the Big 4, what was the reason? Or if you’re thinking of leaving one, what do you think you’re reason will be?