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New Hires Are Making Absolutely Wild Demands Like Decent Salaries and Remote Work, Says Guy

a kitten playing with money

Fresh off the ole tweet machine today we have this:

Discuss. And don’t bully Brandon, he agrees new hires are grossly underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked. “Firms can’t pay new grads $100k unless they raise prices… drastically,” he wrote.

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8 thoughts on “New Hires Are Making Absolutely Wild Demands Like Decent Salaries and Remote Work, Says Guy

  1. Most people these days even out of college are too stupid and lazy to even deserve 1/2 of what they’re asking for. They’re coddled by their parents, super entitled, and so emotional. Real life is going to smack these inept kids pretty hard

    1. Let’s be honest, people (not millennials, boomers, libs or conservatives, or whatever terms are being used to turn poor and middle class people against each other nowadays) are smart enough to calculate the value proposition of a job. Supply and demand and all that.

      Salary alone – these people presumably spent 8yrs in school to get a CPA? Yeah, $80k out of the gate seems pretty reasonable as an entry point. That doesn’t even afford the median home price of 400k in my area at 30 years and 5% apr with taxes and insurance.

      People need to just stop judging others for wanting better. At minimum we’re trying to get by (don’t you?). And if you have the position like the workforce is in now, you want the best deal.

      It is absolutely sustainable if we demand the cut we deserve, its due time the people at the top of this place tighten their belts like the rest of us have had to do for decades now.

  2. My firm still hasn’t made back the money we lost in 2020 and 2021 when covid struck. Clients, and rightly so, wanted to pay their people first then what was left was over was paid to vendors, which included us. Yea, partners have plenty of vacation houses, but selling off all of them doesn’t leave enough money left over pay fabulous salaries. On my team, showing financial transparency helps. “This is our revenue, expenses, salaries, etc”. Letting people work from home 4 or 5 days a week helps keep staff. Having the better paid people handle the terrible clients helps too. If someone asks to be trained on something new and is willing to meet over the weekend, i will teach them. You want $100k out of school? You either sell $500,000 of new work every year or work 80 hour weeks all year long as an associate. Go ahead and raise your rates with your client just to pay $100k salaries; the next day I am in front of that client’s board signing them with us. Have fun with those resulting layoffs. There is no easy fix. In lieu of not offering fantastic salary, be transparent, be creative, and be decent. Our industry is not flush with those three, but it is what I have.

  3. Just because potential talent is demanding a high salary doesn’t mean you have to pay it. He should be more specific about what his complaint is.

    Does he mean: ‘SOME talent is demanding salaries well above the market average’? If so then I don’t see the problem. He should still be able to find employees at a rate he thinks is acceptable.

    Does he mean: The market rate for accounting labor is too high for our business to make a profit. If so tough shyte! No one is entitled to another persons labor. Either find a way to entice talent to work for you, find a way to automate so you need less labor, or shut down operations and make money another way. I hear Amazon warehouses are hiring.

    Also, what’s all this complaining about remote work? It’s almost free to implement, attracts talent, widens your potential employee pool, and in the long run saves on overhead.

  4. Client facing right out of school? Absolutely not. Managers need to take time to properly train staff and gauge where they are at before letting them work directly with clients or sending them out on engagement teams. Senior staff are not babysitters & until a team can make sure an entry level staff has appropriate etiquette and work ethic they should not be given client facing or advisory roles.

    Advisory roles need at least a few years of solid experience & positive client interaction. Unless you are talking about very, very small mom and pop businesses where you aren’t working with as many layers of regulatory and compliance or technical complexity. Advisory is not entry level, it’s impossible to truly advise a client in an area you have nothing more than textbook knowledge of.

  5. I don’t see a judgment in his tweet on whether this is good or bad. What he’s trying to do here is spur a conversation about the humongous gap between what accounting firms are offering and what kids out of college want. And anyone who thinks the demands are ridiculous need to read the whole thread, because these demands aren’t coming from nowhere. There ARE industries that are offering those sorts of opportunities.
    So the real question is, are the accounting firms going to concede the top talent to other industries? Or are they going to change their offerings to match (or at least get closer to) graduates’ expectations?

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