Looking for CPAs of the OT to educate me on something

That is normal, and there are different levels of partners. A lot of those are probably junior partners.

P&N I assume?

P&N, the first spouse of many divorced accountants. He’ll get it out of his system in a year or two.

Seems normal. My first job was with a large regional firm here in Birmingham. I think there were ~150 employees overall, and 100+ in our main office with others in smaller offices in nearby cities, but you took out admin and IT, there were about 125 that were accountants. About 25-30% of those were partners and most had been there 15-20 years or more.

We were a large diverse firm, and the Audit department was slightly larger than the tax department, and we had a much smaller wealth management/business consulting group. I want to say there were about 40 in Audit, and maybe a dozen or so partners when I worked there. Most of them had started there out of college, or started working there after a few years somewhere else, and worked their way up. The only partners I knew of that were more recent hires were ones that came from one of the Big 4 and brought some clients over with them. And even then it was a few years before they were made partner. Had to spend some time as a manager then Sr Manager first.

I also spent about a year working for a much smaller firm, and there were about 20 employees overall and 4-5 partners while I was there. We went through a merger and brought on the 5th partner and her staff in another city.

Why are you concerning Yourself with his business?

Having worked at firms of various sizes, that seems like a lot of partners but that really depends on the nature of everything they do. My advice to him (if he wants to stick it out at one firm) is to look at the age of the partners and see if there’s a reasonable path to partnership. I made the mistake of going to work at a medium sized firm and the partners were old as shite so they simply sold to a huge firm that I hated.

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He interviewed with a firm based in BR that employees a little over 100 accountants. He mentioned that this firm has over 30 partners. I am not very familiar with the industry, but that seems a bit excessive for a firm that size. Is that ratio normal? Is that something he should concern himself with?

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I would say the number of partners should be related to the amount of revenue, not the number of employees.

Partners share in the revenues of the firm but it also depends on the number of clients you can generate and bring in to the firm you work for as well as provide quality work to keep those clients, of course, some clients are required to go out for bid every few years which puts the pressure on to try and keep them
Your share is probably based on the clients you bring in
Some of those partners may only have the title only (probably due to longevity) and the firm values their expertise over necessarily bringing in additional clients
Working for firms like that are great to get a lot of experience in different types of business, a lot of those people end up going work for their clients if working at a firm is not their long term goals
Just prepare to work a lot of hours at times but that experience will pay off down the road

Did my time at P&N and then moved on with the quickness into industry where I made 3X the salary and had 10x the free time.