Job with Ernst and Young

Yeah, well my son can fill up his entire mouth with marbles.

Form 5471. Learn it, love it, live it.

Hours will be reliably bad during January - March and September-October. Austin isn’t a huge office so there’s no hiding in the crowd.

International tax is a good spot to be in though. Multinationals make the world go round, Pillar 2 is going to generate a ton of work.

ETA: it ain’t that bad though when you are young and single.

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Why is he starting soon if he doesn’t know what he’s doing?

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Public accounting staff don’t know what they are doing, that’s why they get paid in experience

That was the issue. The salary is nice but they asked him several behavioral questions and nothing about the actual job. He has no clue what he is stepping into and it sounds like they might want it that way.

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they didn't give him any details about the job during the interview.

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Sounds like a healthy work environment to me

He's screwed. His entire experience will be dictated by who his Manager/Senior Manager/Partner are.

The milk is spilled, but he should have proactively asked what he would end up doing during the interview.

If he has a good partner leading his group, the partner won't let clients dictate he fly in on Sunday to make an 8AM meeting in Seattle, and not let him fly out before lunch time on Friday. Yes, this kind of stuff happens.

He should be prepared for "Busy Season" to be an excuse to sit at his desk for enormous amounts of hours. Big 4 consulting is very much like being a doctor; he will get subjected to stress and BS for little reason than everyone above him had to endure it for the last two decades.

Now, he *may* have some cover since he's not an accounting grad, and the accountants may struggle to understand what they can ask him to do on a job.

1. Attention to detail. Don't send a slide to a senior or manager unless he's checked it multiple times. Once I identify a consultant as a quality problem, this means I can't trust you (yet.) The canary in the coalmine for me is if someone switches font sizes in text. Yes, I can look at something and tell if most of it is in 12 point font, but one paragraph or sentence is in 11 point font. This means you don't pay attention, and the beatings will continue until morale improves.

2. File expense reports fast. Do *not* let them linger until the project is over, etc. Take pictures of all receipts, even if they're below the threshold of not requiring receipts for reimbursement. I watched many consultants "lose" money through the black hole of forgetting what they paid for parking at the client, how much the Uber was to the office, etc.

3. Always submit time in the tracking system ON TIME. Fail to do the backend stuff, especially related to time, brings the wrong kind of attention from office managing partners, etc.

4. Find any way possible to avoid filing time as "on the bench." He should take any CBT training he can so he can charge the training time code instead of "I did nothing but wait for people to tell me to do." Hell, even volunteering in the community probably has a charge code (it did for me at a different firm). The absolute biggest red flag to end up on the naughty list is him charging 40 hours to "unbillable" or the equivalent.

5. Read travel and expense policies, and follow them. Tell him to be proactive in scheduling hotels and flights the way he wants them, and don't let him sit on his arse and wait for the partner to tell him which flight to take to La Guardia. I actively avoid flying with coworkers, and have only had to do it once in 20 years. It just turns into more work.

6. Do not let him "eat" hours. This means he works 60 hours, but bills for 40. It's not his job to deal with the repercussions of the Manager being unorganized or unprepared, etc. The senior manager can adjust the discount rate to make the invoices have the amounts needed, but if he eats hours, that's work he is not getting credit for. This also becomes the project's nearly only defense against a client, or someone else at E&Y expanding scope in the middle of a project, which loses the company money. Partnerships do not like losing money.

7. Pick a hotel/airline alliance and stick with it.

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Taxman2010

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With a screen name like Taxman you would think you would have been pretty familiar with how hard the big 4 drive their new hires in to the ground.

If he’s an economics major.. does he have a CPA?

Started my accounting career with PwC. I wouldn’t be where I am now without that on my resume but it will be a grind. Tax actually works more hours than audit. Tax is more of a pigeonhole as well but with an Econ major it might make it easier for him to pivot to advisory/consulting a few years in