My Big Mistake at the Big Firm, Part Two

I was thirty-five when I started at the Big Firm. In other words, I was usually about twelve years older than most of my fellow new hires. I was about ten years older than most of the senior staff that were directly above me. I was about the same age as a lot of the directors—senior manager types who usually had at least a decade of experience. I was actually older than a few of them. Age is just a number, right? Yes and no. And though age is not the only reason for my failure at the Big Firm, I think it is a major underlying reason for a lot of the issues I encountered.

It’s probably due to immaturity, but I generally did not see myself as being older than my co-workers, that is, it was not something I really thought much about on a regular basis.
Nor was it something that they brought up regularly, I think only a couple of times and even then it was more a case of wanting to know what I did before I came to the firm.

One of the main problems I had there was networking. Networking is the lifeblood of big organizations. If you can’t do it, if you can’t “put yourself out there,” you will not be able to find work, and soon your career will be on life support as mine was the last three or four months of my tenure. Unfair or not, people tend to associate with those who are similar to themselves. Most of the groups at my former job generally involved people who had gone to school together, partied together, played sports together, and so on. I did not have that type of connection with anyone who could really help my career. I had a “coach,” a director who was supposedly my mentor, but he was unable to do much to help me find work. His area of expertise was very specialized. Only one other person was in his workgroup, a manager. They did not require anyone at my staff level. So he was not able to do much other than attempt to introduce me to people during my first couple of weeks. The rest of the time he would check in every so often and basically ask me why I had been unable to find work. The HR “scheduler” did the same thing. I was placed on one assignment which I was not able to accept because I had already committed myself to a project which I had found on my own. After that apparently I was on the scheduler’s bad list. Other than a couple of projects during busy season, she never placed me on anything else the rest of my time there. She would just occasionally harangue me about why I wasn’t finding work.

I guess I should explain the concept of “finding work,” because it is one that I had a lot of trouble with. Accounting is not like working in a blue collar job, or even most office jobs that I had in the past. You are on your own to find something to do, to get yourself assigned to a project. Never mind that you know no one there, and have no experience.
Never mind that you are competing with co-workers who have interned in the past and have began their full-time career with a pre-existing network of contacts who prefer to work with them instead of with an unknown element such as yourself [see why my not being an intern wound up being a huge disadvantage?]. You are expected to find work.
It is basically looking for a job at your job, and it is almost as frustrating as job searching is for the unemployed. Or at least, that was the way things were at the Big Firm. I understand that things work differently at smaller firms. I am hoping at some point I can find out for myself.

If I had began in 2006 or 2007, there probably would have been no problem finding work. With my usual timing, I began my career just as the recession began picking up steam. The Big Firm began losing clients to smaller, less expensive firms. The clients who remained wanted a price break. The end result was, much less work to go around.
The partners began to lose money. Perks were cut. Occasionally, an e-mail would go out from someone who was leaving. Others would leave involuntarily. This all began not long after I started, and I was about halfway through my year there when I had the realization that things were not going to work out.

I’m hoping this doesn’t come off as bitter. Some of it can’t be helped. Not everything was negative. A lot of what happened was more or less my fault too. I will think a bit more about it, and post again later.