For 5 years, I was a senior accountant doing corporate accounting for a midsize mental health company. I joined in 2016 after a friend recommended me and, coming from food service, it quickly became the best job I'd had to that point. It was very family-oriented, with significant efforts to promote work-life balance and very understanding controller, VP, and President. High-level staff routinely conversed with the “front line”, the VP bought bagels for everyone (150-ish people) every Friday, and there were annual retreats and Christmas parties. Of course a mental health firm understood the importance of, well, mental health!
I was the first staff accountant on a team of a controller, an assistant controller/lead, five seniors, and me. Every month, we closed the books for 22 subsidiary companies. This took a week of dedicated work, but since it was industry and not public, outside of close there wasn't much to do. So for 1.5 weeks a month we'd work around 65 hours, then the other 3.5 or so we'd have maybe 25 hours of real, honest work. After a year of me mostly doing senior-level work, I was promoted.
Over the next few years, a huge shift took place. We were bought out by a larger firm and 15% were laid off. Gone were significant chunks of employee benefits. Our 401k, which had been wholly matched at 5%, was capped at 750 per year per employee (this means only your first 15000 received the match and no more). The President, VP, and controller were fired or forced to resign. Time started to get tracked religiously and workloads piled up. I was given a verbal warning for using one sick day a month to give myself a break after close.
Despite all of this, we were promised good times were ahead, we just needed to cut back spending for a few years. Yet people kept getting let go or leaving. Over the course of those 5 years I outlasted 31 other accountants. On a team of 8! I'm not happy about that. It's not a sense of pride or accomplishment; it's more me being flabbergasted that I stayed through it all. But I was 25 and had finally broken into the career I'd gone to college for.
I realized a few years in just how underpaid I was. I was doing the work of 2-3 people, yet making less than everyone coming in. I went from 42K-52K(promotion)-60K-68K over the first four years. But everyone who came in was making 72K or more (they told me when I asked). I was often taking over much of their work (“voluntold”), since I was completing my work well ahead of them, had better knowledge of Excel, and their work was often rife with mistakes. Hell, I'd even taken a company that had mistakes going back to 2013 and cleaned it up! When I added up everything I was required to submit on a yearly basis, and compared it to everything our team had to submit on a yearly basis, it turned out I was expected to do 21% of the overall work (on a team of 8, one should expect 9-15%). So why was my wage so much lower? Experience? A little, but mostly because I let it happen.
In late 2020, I lost all illusions of this being the company I wanted to work for. I was tired of not receiving proportional pay to work expected. I was written up the prior August, and one of the reasons was because I wouldn't stop asking for more pay when they asked me for even more work. (Specifically, I said I wouldn't take on an additional 6% of the entire workload for no increase in pay, amazing, right?). Another reason was due to COVID changing our processes-it now took 7x as long to do what I had been doing, and no help was reassigned to cover me. I had been put on a PIP and micromanaged to death. Told to describe each 15-minute portion of my day. I was asked for status reports on my status reports. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FINISH WORK IF I'M WASTING TIME DESCRIBING PRIOR WORK?? Even so, I hunkered down and cranked out all my backlog by that July.
By May 2021, I'd had it. I had managed to ruthlessly save 3 years' worth of expenses, so I quit right in the middle of a close period. Even offered to finish the work in my final 2-week notice period, but was told I was let go immediately. Ungrateful assholes.
A month later, I was hired for a government contracting job making significantly more, with immensely better benefits. The job wouldn't officially begin until late July, so the next few months were effectively a vacation. It was one of the most serene and blissful stretches in my 30 years on Earth. Now, I work a job with a great deal of downtime, that gives me ample time off and an uncapped retirement. I work for a client who appreciates the work I do and makes sure to put that appreciation in writing so my bosses can see. I wish I'd quit my old job well before I actually did, but I'm glad to be in a place that isn't stomping on my self esteem. From what I hear, they've expanded the team to 10, partially to cover my workload, and the one company I cleaned up is now bouncing around the team because no one understands it as fully as I did. Feels good man.
For those who made it this far, thank for reading my story. At some point I'll add a comment describing lessons I've learned, in the hopes it helps one of you not make the same mistakes I did.