accounting – Real Thoughts

It’s Not You

Don’t worry, even with a CPA employers don’t want to hire you.

That was my reply to a LinkedIn post from an accountant struggling to find a job because employers were “obsessed” with the CPA certification. I have my CPA, so trust me, I know.

Everyone forgets one thing: market dynamics will always win against personal effort. People are not finding jobs because companies are not hiring. It is not you. It is the market.

People talk about how we are living through unprecedented times. As someone who was unemployed for almost two years during the Great Recession, I can tell you, these times are very precedented.

When I was first laid off during the Great Recession, so many people mobilized around me. Colleagues, classmates, friends, professors, academic staff. I was pursuing my MBA at the time. It was like a village sprung up around me.

Everyone was cheering me on and offering to help however they could. People would send me job postings, introduce me to contacts, and check in regularly.

After a year of unemployment, I could sense the shift.

People would ask how the job hunt was going, and when I said it wasn’t, silence would follow. I had zero interviews in year one of unemployment and three in year two.

Finally, a “friend” said the quiet part out loud: I had been unemployed for so long, I had to be the problem.

I tried to dismiss her comment, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to question myself. Was she right? What was wrong with me?

I tried to quiet that voice by pouring myself into volunteering. Maybe if people saw that I could work for free, they could eventually pay me to work.

In a culture where we base so much of our value on work, if you are not working, you are not valued. And there is so much that is out of a job hunter’s hands.

After two years, I found a job. And then found another. I was working seven days a week. I would have worked more if the week had moredays.

I didn’t change. I didn’t get an additional certification that made me more employable. I didn’t all of a sudden develop work ethic. I found a job when companies started hiring again.

A friend shared recently how she is struggling to find a job because employers keep discounting her years of experience as an entrepreneur. She built a business from scratch and wore far more hats than she ever did in her corporate jobs. Yet none of those skills are being recognized.

I joked with her that she had tasted freedom, and maybe hiring managers were afraid she had become unmanageable. Maybe only half-joked.

Hours later, I stumbled over an article written by a professional in her 50s. She was struggling to find a job too. She had cut decades of experience from her resume and removed her graduation dates, yet employers still labeled her as “too overqualified” and “too expensive.”

What do all these concerns have in common? They put the blame of unemployment on the unemployed.

A single individual cannot fight market dynamicsalone. A single individual cannot fight inflation, trade wars, wars-wars, interest rate hikes, and corporate hiring freezes alone.

So if you are hitting a wall while looking for work right now, remember what I learned the hard way. I didn’t become a better candidate. I didn’t unlock some secret. The market shifted, and the phone started ringing again.

Unfortunately, this’s not a motivational story. That’s just how it works.

Be kind to yourself. This is not your fault.

A Record of Your Accomplishments

I opened it and my heart dropped.

A former report reached out asking for help revamping his resume.I had worked with this guy. He is hardworking, smart, and dependable. Yet nothing on his resume showed that. His resume introduced someone who had “participated” and “supported” instead of “led” and “managed.”

I did a revision that more closely resembled the good work I saw him do. He found a great new opportunity shortly after.

I thought it was a one-off when just a few weeks later I got another call. This time from a former colleague. Her company had been acquired, and she was going to be out of a job by the end of the year. She had been looking but had not landed a single interview in months. I told her to send me the resume.

Same story.

I called her back immediately. I had been part of the team that hired her almost a decade ago. I asked her: how is it possible that your resume was better then, than it is now?

The resume is a tough document. In a world where so much of our identity is tied to our work, the resume becomes the record of our accomplishments. People want it to be faithful to their job descriptions, but they end up with a document that undersells their actual impact.

I offered to rewrite my colleague’s resume. I started with one question: what is your value proposition? What is the one thing you can do better than anyone else?

She was surprised by the question. She had not thought about it.

If you don’t know what you’re bringing to the table, you end up with a list of tasks that go from one to the next with no cohesive thread. A resume without a value proposition is an inventory not a story.

The core premise was not forthcoming, so I asked more questions. What projects did you oversee, and how did you contribute to their success? What are you proudest of from this experience? Did you make any changes that improved the processes, the company, or the team?

This is value creation. Most people have it. You just need to uncover it.

As important as what to include is what to exclude. Faulkner called it killing your darlings: removing the parts of the story that you love but that don’t serve the narrative.

My colleague had repetitive bullet points describing junior tasks that didn’t feed the pictureof an accounting professional with the power to automate manual systems and improve processes. She had done that work. It was real. But it was pulling the story in the wrong direction.

As we continued working, my colleague raised a concern that a lot of accountants share: how do you include numbers on a resume?

Salespeople have performance dashboards. They can say things like: increased revenue by $10M in my first year. Cost centers, accountants and other support roles usually have a hard time pointing to initiatives that made the company money. Success means getting the job done on time and as expected. Nothing flashy.

But you can add numbers in other ways. I asked my colleague to think about the number of accounts, countries, vendors, invoices, and entities she managed. These provide a sense of scope. Hours or days saved each month through process improvements, increases in accuracy, reductions in errors. These tell a story of continuing improvement.

After working on her story, I rewrote my colleague’s resume. She used it to apply for a few roles and started getting calls back almost immediately.

We spend so much time optimizing our resumes for the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) that we forget a human will eventually read it. Your resume still needs to tell a story that is compelling, specific, and that truly represents what you bring. The algorithm gets you through the door. The story is what makes someone want to meet you.

I think that sometimes a poor resume is connected to a poor sense of self. So when writing that record of your professional accomplishments, be kind to yourself. You are more qualified than you think. Your work matters. Let’s tell the story of why.

On Budget, On Time, Almost Never

Most projects don’t fail at the end. They fail at the beginning. The people involved just don’t know it yet.

How bad is it? From a database of 16,000 projects, only 0.5% were completed on budget, on time, and on benefit.

These numbers come from a book called How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. I just read it, and it should be required reading for anyone starting any project. The authors focus on big infrastructure projects, yet the lessons apply to projects of any size.

The book reminded me of all the failed projects I’ve witnessed in my career and how they were doomed from the beginning.

It starts with a question most teams never ask: why are we doing this project? Is it mission critical, or are we just following a trend? AI strategy projects come to mind. Everyone wants one. No one is asking the hard question of why.

Then comes planning. How much will the project cost and how long will it take? Usually the answer is a number pulled out of thin air without so much as a benchmark. People tend to assume that their project is unique, that it will somehow take less time, cost less money, and produce better results than similar projects undertaken in the past.

Who has not heard that story before?

And once the project starts moving, there is rarely a system in place to alert anyone that it’s running off course from the beginning.

I took a job with a company that was implementing a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system due to go live a few months after my first day. This project was one of the reasons I took the job. It pointed to a company that was serious about process improvement and growth.

Two months after I joined, the project was cancelled.

It was not a total surprise. After onboarding, I hit the ground running participating in the testing phase and quickly noticed that the project was not where it should be. I was not the only one with that thought, so leadership hired a consulting firm to audit the progress.

The project was already a year behind schedule and a million dollars over budget. The consulting firm confirmed that there was no way it could go live in a few months. Their estimate: one additional year and one more million to complete. That would have put the project at three years and three million dollars, as long as everything went right from that point on.

The project was dead.

I was full of questions, so I reached out to the most senior person in the department.

Question: Who from the accounting department was part of the implementation team?

Answer: Why would the accounting team be part of that?

The problems started to become clear. No one from the accounting team had participated in any aspect of the project. The very expensive consultants were supposed to deliver a turnkey solution.

Question: Was there anyone from the company who functioned as the bridge between the company and the consulting firm?

Answer: The IT Director.

Question: And was the IT Director removed from his day-to-day duties and allowed to focus on the project?

Answer: Of course not.

This project was never going to happen.

No one had asked whether the original budget and timeline were even realistic. In my experience, any transformation project that doesn’t plan for at least three years is setting itself up for failure. No internal team had been assigned to the project. The very expensive consultants were trusted to deliver a solution for a business they didn’t understand. And the one person designated as the bridge between the company and the consultants was doing it as a side project on top of their actual job.

The real cost wasn’t just the money or the time. For people like me, who took the job because the project signaled ambition and seriousness, the company went from forward-looking to stuck in the past overnight. The project didn’t just fail. It told everyone paying attention what kind of company this actually was.

A million things can go wrong during a project. But it is usually just a few things early on, the questions nobody ask, the resources nobody commits, the warnings nobody builds a system to catch, that decide whether it fails or succeeds.

DOE (Depends on Experience)

DOE. Depends on Experience.

They showed up on a recruiter’s LinkedIn post advertising opportunities at an “amazing” company. Senior Accountant or Manager, DOE. Senior Accounting Manager or Controller, DOE. Salary ranges also DOE.

Why?

Title and salary should not depend on the experience of the candidate. They should depend on the nature and requirements of the job. I have discussed title inflation before, so I will try not to repeat myself.

There is a moat the size of an ocean between a Senior Accounting Manager and a Controller. So which is it? Is the role a Senior Manager job or a Controller job?

If you need a Controller, hire a Controller, and pay for a Controller. Hiring a Senior Accounting Manager and expecting them to somehow do the job of a Controller is setting both the candidate and the company up for failure.

You’ll get Senior Accounting Manager output, and everything else will fall through the cracks.

But the candidate can grow into the role, right? Someone might argue.

How? I ask.

A company that can’t tell the difference between a Senior Accounting Manager and a Controller doesn’t have the accounting leadership to develop one into the other. So who exactly is going to grow this candidate into the role?

A recruiter reached out to me the other day for a “Controller track, Accounting Manager” role.

I laughed. Where is the track?

These imaginary tracks sound less like a well-defined road and more like a self-guided tour through a forest. No map, no compass. Good luck getting to the other side.

I used to work with a woman whose title was Senior Manager, Fixed Assets. Fixed assets, for the non-accountants, are the physical assets of a company. Think equipment, land, buildings, vehicles. Things the company uses to create value.

She was six years away from retirement and wanted to hire her replacement. The role she was really hiring for was Junior Accountant.

Her pitch to new hires: work hard and in six years you can sit in my chair and have my job. She hired two young people who quit in quick succession, unimpressed with what she had to offer.

She then hired an older, and as she put it, more “mature” candidate who would have the patience to wait his turn.

I pointed out that a forty-year-old with over a decade in accounting accepting a Junior Accountant position was possibly a red flag.

She had to terminate him after a week because after five days he still had not managed to learn how to turn on his computer.

She couldn’t understand why there were no qualified takers for this great opportunity. Why weren’t more people willing to take a junior role with low pay that would eventually transition into a middle manager role with possibly still low pay?

This sounds like a joke, but it gets worse. Even that laughable opportunity didn’t actually exist.

Six years is an eternity in corporate America. The company could have been bought and sold many times over. Her department could have been outsourced to a third-party firm, which I saw happen to other teams during my tenure. Or the company could have decided to move the whole function upstream to corporate.

This was not her company, soit was not her track to promise.

It’s time to stop. Stop advertising two roles as one. Stop posting senior roles at junior prices. Stop promising career paths that don’t exist and that aren’t yours to offer.

This is the role. This is the pay. We hope you grow with us, but right now we need this job filled and we need the right person to fill it.

That’s not cold. That’s honest. And honest is what candidates deserve.

Embrace the Chaos

“Embrace the chaos.”

This was the advice my friend didn’t expect to receive.

She called me asking for help updating her resume and preparing for interviews. She told the story of many toxic workplaces. Vague and ever-changing strategies. Lack of resources. Poor communication. High achievers leaving with their institutional knowledge, and managers whose only competency seemed to be delegating work.

She was done with her job.

To her surprise, my advice was to embrace the chaos instead.

I told her to prepare a vision for how things should be done, with her in charge, and present it to the CFO. After all, what’s the worst thing that could happen? The CFO could simply say no. And in that case, I would help her update her resume and look for another job as planned.

Here’s the thing about chaos: in a well-run organization, every problem already has an owner. There is no gap to fill. In a chaotic one, problems are orphaned. Nobody is in charge of fixing them because nobody has been asked to.

So my friend spent a few weeks documenting what was broken and wrote up a practical plan for how she would fix it. Nothing elaborate. Just a clear assessment and a path forward.

What people forget is that if you hate your job and feel like you are drowning, you are probably not alone. Your colleagues are feeling the same way. So is your boss. So is your boss’s boss. Everyone is waiting for someone to arrive with a plan to fix things.

If you are willing to be that person, to own the mess and bring the plan, you can turn a bad situation into the biggest career opportunity you’ve had.

My friend followed my advice. She got a promotion and a salary increase that would have taken a typical accountant many years to reach.

I would never suggest joining a toxic workplace on purpose. A toxic workplace can burn you out and make you question your own worth. I know from experience. But if you are already working in chaos and can’t leave for whatever reason, don’t just survive it.

Use it.

The Math is Not Mathing

Accounting Manager is the single worst job in accounting.

That was my comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post about what Accounting Managers do. It received thousands of impressions. Apparently, I’m not alone in my belief.

What I didn’t say in that comment is why. Not just why the job is bad, but why it matters. Because the damage isn’t limited to the people in the role. It reaches everyone around them.

There is a concept in organizational development called the Leadership Pipeline. The idea is simple: manager roles are linchpin positions. Without them, organizations can’t sustain themselves long-term.

The literature is clear that the most difficult career transition is the one from Managing the Self to Managing Others. The people who get promoted are the ones with the strongest technical skills. The ones with the interpersonal and relationship skills needed to succeed as a manager get left behind. What makes you good at the first job is not what makes you good at the next one.

Still, this is not an insurmountable obstacle. Training can go a long way.

But of course, that’s where the real failure happens.

I remember being a first-time manager and having my Director reprimand me for scheduling too many training sessions with my team. They should know, she would say. My response: how? Who taught them?

She didn’t have an answer because there wasn’t one. Nobody had taught them. Nobody had taught me either. The company expected people to become managers overnight and then blamed them when they struggled. The training budget was zero. The patience was less than that.

A less experienced person would have taken that feedback and stopped the sessions. I doubled down.

But most new managers don’t push back. They absorb the message: training is a waste of time, your team should already know, figure it out. And then they spend the next several years managing by instinct instead of by skill, burning out, and wondering why the job feels impossible.

Over the years, I’ve had friends take steps back in their careers because they didn’t want to ‘babysit’ a team. I’ve never liked that comparison, but I understand where it comes from. When you’re given a team with no training on how to lead them, managing starts to feel like supervising instead of leading.

But here’s what people miss: the team feels it too. Nobody wants to be managed by someone who is clearly overwhelmed, clearly untrained, and clearly just trying to survive until the next close. Reports can tell the difference between a leader who is developing them and a manager who is just keeping track of them. When both sides feel like the relationship is broken, it transforms from a people problem to a design problem.

And the math confirms it. The increase in pay from individual contributor to manager is rarely proportional to the increase in stress and responsibility. You take on twice the workload, lose your overtime eligibility, become accountable for other people’s output, and get a raise that barely covers the difference. The math is not mathing.

This is the first consequence that people feel in their careers, long before the pipeline runs dry. The job stops being worth it.

And young people have noticed.

A little more than a year ago, I was having lunch with a group of junior and staff accountants from another team. The conversation turned to the career ladder, and every single young person at the table said they didn’t want to ever become managers.

They saw their own manager and thought: too much work for not enough money.

Gen Z is choosing to stay in individual contributor roles. The more entrepreneurial ones are pursuing side hustles and their own path. The famous 5-9 after their 9-5.

They are not wrong.

The real question is what happens 10 years from now when there isn’t a pipeline of experienced managers who know how to build and lead a team. What happens when we forget how to get things done through others? What awaits us when the institutional knowledge of how to develop people, run a close with a team of varying skill levels, and turn a group of individuals into a functioning unit has simply disappeared because nobody wanted the job?

The optimist in me thinks that when faced with that crisis, companies will finally invest in real managerial training and build compensation structures that make the role worth taking.

The pessimist in me looks at current leadership, at how they’re letting things deteriorate in real time, and thinks that by the time anyone notices the pipeline is empty, it will already be too late to fill it. And when that happens, we won’t just be missing managers. We’ll be missing the people who know how to fix the problem.

The Worst Job in Accounting

Believe it or not, becoming an accounting manager was aspirational when I started out.

Being a manager meant making more money, having more freedom and flexibility, and having real power and autonomy. There used to be a clear distinction between managers and working managers. Managers oversaw teams: onboarding, training, reviewing, and assigning work. Working managers did all of that plus carried a full load of their own deliverables.

That distinction no longer exists. Now all managers are working managers, juggling workloads sometimes heavier than their direct reports’ while also being expected to manage their teams in their downtime.

Devaluing the title destroyed what made the job aspirational.

The worst part is that we did it on purpose.

In a recent episode of the Optimist Economy podcast (recommended listen), titled “No Overtime for the Supervisor of Sandwiches,” economist Kathryn Anne Edwards discusses overtime. Midway through, my ears perked up. She puts words to something I’ve observed for years but couldn’t quite articulate.

Edwards discusses how in 2004 Congress raised the salary cap for overtime eligibility. In response, businesses did what she calls the “systematic managerial titling of workers.” To avoid paying overtime, companies took employees who had just become eligible and gave them managerial titles. Managers are exempt. Problem solved. One of the most outrageous examples: hostesses becoming Directors of First Impressions.

I am not an economist, but this clarifies so much of what I’ve seen in my career.

Early in my career, I reached a breaking point waiting for a promotion. I was ready to quit when the company’s CFO called me to his office. He argued that the problem was not the lack of a promotion, but my attachment to a title. His words: we all know what you do for this company and we value it, so what does it matter what your title is?

I looked at the nameplate on his desk. It read: Cofounder / Chief Financial Officer.

I said: so we can change that to Janitor, and you wouldn’t mind, right? I mean, we all know this company wouldn’t be what it is without you.

He paused. Then he smiled. You’re right, he said.

Titles matter. They matter to the people doing the work. They matter when you’re looking for your next opportunity. A title is one of the few data points a potential employer uses to understand the scope of what you did. And it matters on the other side too: when a candidate evaluates a role, the title is how they gauge what the job is and what fair compensation should look like.

By overusing and outright abusing managerial titles, companies broke the compass. Accounting Manager has become the single worst job in accounting.

And things are getting worse.

In recent months, recruiters keep reaching out to me about Accounting Manager and Senior Accounting Manager roles. Their opening line is always the same: this role is expected to run the entire accounting function.

They outline the responsibilities. I listen. Then I let them know that what they’re describing is a Controller, not a Manager, and I advise them to go back to their hiring team and rethink the title and the compensation package.

The title inflation that started as a way to avoid paying overtime has now become something else entirely. It’s a way to get senior-level work at mid-level prices. That’s not a broken system. That’s the system working exactly as designed.

When Everything is a Priority

In a sea of “tell me about yourself,” someone asked an interesting question at an interview the other day.

The hiring manager asked me how I prioritize when everything is a priority. In this era of doing more with less and fast-moving environments, it is a fair question, and it started a meaningful conversation about how we work. It’s a question most people answer with instinct. There’s a better way.

When prioritizing, I use three pillars: risk, visibility, and materiality.

Risk.

In accounting, there are areas of the financials that have a higher propensity to cause harm if things are missed or not kept under control. Revenue recognition and accruals at reporting period ends are common examples. These areas tend to be the focus of compliance efforts. A useful signal: if an area comes up time and time again during audits, it is probably high risk. The question to ask: what happens if I get this wrong? If the answer scares you, that’s where you start.

Visibility.

Leadership will always have one or two KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they track closely while monitoring growth or the lack of it. Maybe it is a metric that once caused a major issue in a senior leader’s career, and they’ve learned to watch it closely ever since. You’ll know what these are quickly. They will be the first or second thing asked about during review meetings. It keeps you from getting caught off guard. When leadership asks, and they will, you need to have the answer. The people who advance prioritize based on what leadership is actually measuring.

Materiality.

Materiality is the accounting concept that only information significant enough to influence stakeholder decisions needs to be highlighted in financial reports. Most companies set a quantitative materiality threshold, a minimum dollar amount that triggers further review or action. If an issue falls below that threshold, it won’t necessarily be ignored, but it won’t be prioritized either. In accounting terms, “it is not material.” This is the pillar that gives you permission to say: this can wait. Most people never give themselves that permission.

These three pillars often overlap. When something is risky, visible, and material, that is where you focus first. No debate needed.

But here is what I find interesting: these are accounting concepts, but the logic behind them applies far beyond accounting.

When choosing what to prioritize in any context, ask yourself: What is the risk of not doing this? Do the people who matter, your team, your boss, your family, consider this important? And will this decision meaningfully change the outcome, or is it noise?

Those three questions can cut through most of the paralysis that comes with competing priorities. Not everything that feels urgent is risky. Not everything that is visible is material. And not everything that is material is visible. Knowing the difference is where good prioritization starts. And in a sea where everything feels urgent, that might be the only thing that keeps you afloat.

I’ve Seen Stuff

And just like that, we are in 2026.

After grad school I started this blog to organize my thoughts and share them with the world. I’ve always had so much in my head that it just made sense.

But then life got busy. I started my career, sometimes working two jobs. Suddenly, there were fewer and fewer hours in the day, so I decided to pause writing. The entire time, I was planning to come back once things calmed down. Well, it is now 2026, 14 years since my last post.

So what have I been doing for 14 years? I got my CPA and built a career in corporate accounting. I’ve worked inside companies whose names you’d recognize, alongside people whose personalities matched the size of the brands. I survived a global pandemic. And recently, I spent a year in a CFO Executive program at Columbia that changed my perspective on a lot of things.

As I told someone at a job interview the other day, “I’ve seen stuff.”

My new goal is to post consistently for the next year. Start with a goal, build a habit.

Still, as I revisit my old posts, I realize that my thoughts have not changed much. I have more nuanced opinions on a couple of things, but overall, I still stand by everything I wrote back in the day.

I don’t know if that is good or bad. On one side, it shows conviction and consistency. On the other, it might show inflexibility. After everything I’ve done, you would think my thinking would have evolved more. Adam Grant, author of Think Again and a big proponent of rethinking your assumptions, would probably disapprove. But I’d rather be honest about where I stand than pretend 14 years turned me into a different person.

Let’s restart this journey and see where it takes us.