Failure: An introduction.

Why another accounting blog? I look at some of the other blogs out there and they are generally either (a.) rah-rah pre-recession career advice, (b.) blogs targeted more toward experienced professionals, or (c.) blogs narrowly focused on particular areas, such as auditing. I suppose the main purpose of this blog is as a counterbalance to (a.), and also to provide something for those who aren’t quite at the point where they can really appreciate (b) and (c.)

I am a thirty-something liberal arts degree holder who went into accounting because it seemed to have good job opportunity and was a versatile degree that didn’t limit people to a particular career path. Unlike a lot of others of my academic background, I didn’t have an aversion to working with numbers and was actually pretty good at basic math and algebra. Accountants were getting hired left and right, and it seemed like a good move. Maybe it still is a good move. Hard to say right now as I have been unemployed for the past eight months, ever since parting ways with the Big Firm. More about that later. I figure I am still better off than a lot of people. I still get interviews occasionally. I have a CPA license, even though I am still essentially an entry level hire. I feel confident I can get a job if I can ever get myself to an area with a better job market. Accounting firms are in a state of chaos in my current location and there is just not much hiring going on.

Still, the public perception is that accounting is “safe.” “There will always be a need for accountants.” Maybe so, but there are more than enough people to meet the need right now. I wonder if accounting will become like law, with a glut of people graduating each year and only a handful getting good jobs while the rest struggle to find whatever they can to the point where they might have been better off had they studied something else. That is the position we’re in right now. I hope that things will straighten out by the time a lot of the current students graduate, but I am no longer certain that will be the case.

So this blog is generally designed to document my frustration as a newly minted CPA who has a bad case of impostor syndrome. No, there probably won’t be a lot of technical info, although I may occasionally link to things here and there. There are plenty of people already doing that.

P.S. I don't know if anyone will ever read this from the very beginning, but it's funny to read the early posts and to see how I pretty much abandoned any type of accounting subject matter early on. So, in the unlikely event that someone is reading this from the beginning and wanting to hear more about taxes and accounting, I'm sorry! I decided not to even write about it after a while, other than bitching about the job market and the Big Four. I guess it's a sign that accounting is pretty much "just a job" for me. I guess right now, it's not even that.