Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
I mean...this is a sector that hires tons of m'sians and local uni grads who had no ambition or savviness to get into finance. They just need warm bodies doing rote work.
B4 isn't exactly known for attracting legions of Ivy Leaguers or IB target school calibre people.
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ya but the real reason is because..
What transferable skills are we talking about? Vouching? Analytical reviews? Issue review points? Managing both senior and junior staff? Wait, now managers are doing fieldwork because there’s no manpower.
You leave audit without any commercial knowledge, no understanding of accounting systems, and the only skill you have is picking samples and reviewing financial statements. Honestly, the quality of audits has declined so much that I think there’s a problem even with reviewing financial statements, let alone preparing them. There’s a reason locals don’t want to stay in audit—it’s because it takes away your life. Next thing you know, you’re in your mid-30s with nothing but a decent paycheck and feeling like a shell of your former self. You forget what having hobbies even feels like.
You think the commercial sector will hire you as a Financial Manager? You’re expensive but lack the necessary skills. You can’t leave audit because you’re too costly, and so you continue this life, year after year, until you’re in your mid-40s, realizing you missed your kids' birthdays and your parents' funerals.
Is it worth it to trade your life just to grow your salary to 8–9k? You stagnate unless you become partner. You can't leave—your skills are too generic and not specialized. Your day consists of trying to book staff, but no one joins, and all the competent seniors quit, assuming there even are any.
You look around and realize there are hardly any Singaporeans left—just Malaysians who speak broken Chinese, and you end up working just as many overtime hours because they're motivated by a 3:1 exchange rate, while your own is 1:1 at best. Eventually, you marry a Malaysian girl and pick up their strange Chinese accent.
What branding does Big 4 actually provide? Just leave as a senior if branding is that important. Whether you leave as a senior or manager, your branding is the same. And once you reach the senior level, your knowledge is on par with that of your managers, if you know what I mean.
As a manager, your skills start to deteriorate because you’ve lost touch with the excel work—you're too busy reviewing working papers all day. When you finally leave for a commercial role, you struggle to keep up because you haven't used Excel in so long. Your accountants and senior accountants look down on you—they don’t respect you as just a people manager who never contributes to the work itself.
The Big 4 doesn't pay you enough for the amount of hours you put in. Just do the math. Aren't accountants and auditors supposed to be good with numbers? Should I hire a McDonald's worker to do your job instead?
There’s a reason why seniors handle senior-level tasks and juniors handle junior-level ones. The speed at which you comprehend, the level of technical competency, your efficiency in testing, and the time spent on documentation all play a role in how late you work at night. And partners are lying to you that you are getting exposure. LOL
At this point, there’s no distinction between peak and off-peak periods—it's peak season all year round unless you're underperforming and no one books you. When manpower is low, peak season is permanent.
Clients have an entire year to manipulate their financials, but auditors have less than a month to review them.
Have you ever gone without sleep for days on end? Spent a whole week doing nothing but working and catching up on rest? Your weekends are consumed by catch-up work, and you take sick leave just to manage your backlog. Try doing that for months. Are you really willing to sacrifice your life just for "branding"? Branding for what? Commercial roles? The industry is flooded with Malaysians now, and salaries are being low balled.
You can’t apply for leave during peak periods. In fact, nowadays, you can’t apply for leave at all unless you get explicit approval from your manager. Are you okay with taking your laptop overseas? When you’re sick and on MC, does your workload shrink? The peers I worked with would spend their sick days working because clients and partners won’t wait for you to recover. There are statutory deadlines, group auditors to report to, and no one will wait for your health to recover.
Want to guess what happens if you miss those deadlines? Your entire year’s work could be undone during promotions. You’ll be left behind while some Malaysian with broken English gets promoted, not because he worked harder, but because his rented room in Woodlands is too small to OT and he cant even turn on the air conditioning before 10 PM.
Are Singaporean students so naive to think they can compete with these people? These Malaysians have left their families behind to compete with us locals, driven by a 3.5 exchange rate. Do you think it’s worth competing with them? They won’t bother mentoring you—they’d rather side with their own and dump all the heavy work onto you.
Now, let’s say you’re promoted to manager and decide to leave for a commercial role. You join an SME or an MNC as a Financial Manager. Here's the issue: competency is a problem. Your AR/AP executive is probably an ACCA drop out, holds a diploma, or has some Malaysian certification. You can't expect them to handle heavy lifting because their exposure to auditing and accounting is limited.
Your accountant will always be missing, especially before the year-end audit. They’re underpaid, have no growth opportunities, and face immense stress with a heavy workload. As a Financial Manager, you’ll struggle to find replacements unless you join an MNC with a strong reputation that attracts talent. You’ll be living on borrowed time—your performance as an FM will depend on how smoothly the audit goes. From March to December, you might experience work-life balance, but come January and February, when audits kick in, you’ll realize that your balance was just a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
There’s no future in this industry. Malaysians have flooded the market by taking advantage of low entry barriers, and partners are too focused on maximizing returns. Now they’re panicking because the government is raising EP requirements. Do auditors really think their salaries should be determined by the whim of the government?
Don’t buy into the growth hype that people in Big 4 love to peddle. As long as you’re trading time for money, your hourly rate will be low. The long hours, lack of work-life balance, and high stress are simply not worth it. Just look at your managers—they’re stuck. Ask them why they haven’t left, and they’ll tell you they’re stuck.
What’s the point of a 1-month or 1.5-month bonus for "great performance"? How many jobs do you need to close for that bonus? Does the math add up? You could probably earn more doing GrabFood on weekends and ignoring your work—assuming, of course, you can even meet the bare minimum requirements to get promoted.
