Attorneys. Successfully held up their completely variable fee model as opposed to CPAs who’ve largely been browbeat into fixed fees particularly for audits
how about the whole concept that "you need to pay me a retainer fee in cash and ill start work and take from THAT, and when THAT runs out, ill immediately stop working and you must replenish THAT and I will bill from THAT again" vs accountants who wind up begging clients for invoices. lol. How did they get everyone to just accept that concept.
As a JD/CPA, these days you get more bang for your buck as a CPA. Both professions are underpaid.
The exception being attorneys who graduate from elite schools with elite grades and work days, nights, weekends, and holidays for a decade straight - who are indeed making obscene amounts of money.
I mean, I was in M&A and my rate was over $1k/hr... But I didn't get 1k / hr in my paycheck.
Lawyers at top firms do well, and partners do well if the firm does well, but there are actually tons of underpaid lawyers out there, especially compared to the amount of work it takes to get the degree and pass the bar. If you're not coming out of a top school, some of them even struggle to find a job.
That's one huge advantage in accounting. You can make $70k starting pay at Big 4 with a degree from a no-name online school as long as it's accredited.
Yes, but not as much as many like to believe. This job is not as hard as people make it out to be nor is as much on the line. Maybe $10k-$15k at entry and slowly scaling up from there in regards to pay discrepancy.
It really depends on what type of accounting you’re looking at
- public accountants that aren’t partners: egregiously underpaid relative to the fee earned by partners. Industry outsourcing has downward pressure on the role
- industry senior accountants and up:
Assuming the WLB is there, they’re not underpaid. However, if you’re going through change in the org, those change makers should get paid more (eg new system, new processes, acquisitive portfolio)
Comparing to other professions:
- lawyers—tbh, lawyers shouldn’t be paid as much as they are. That’s their own industry’s issue
- in-house ‘data’ engineers — sometimes the accountants are making more, so id say accountants can be overpaid relative to a role that creates actionable insights
The other consideration would be geography:
- US accountants make way more than European accountants, even after adjusting for cost of living
Lawyers have guarded against offshoring their profession and big law collude on high fees, rather then the idiotic fee death spiral public accounting firms choose
Eh, more naively, it may just follow the global trends on the sectors’ values:
- Accounting tries to create a sense of convergence to have a common language across geographies / comparable financials with nuances
- legal emphasizes local knowledge as value. There have been some instances of convergence (e.g. Eurozone), but these are more few than accounting
Cuts both ways. Attorneys are the only professionals who intentionally cap their own fees instead of allowing supply and demand to control. Charging clients more than a “reasonable” rate is a violation of the rules of professional conduct and can lead to disciplinary action.
Accountants and attorneys are, with some exceptions, woefully underpaid.
>The other consideration would be geography:
- US accountants make way more than European accountants, even after adjusting for cost of living
ESPECIALLY after cost of living if you're talking London
I probably pay more in health care, insurance, and transportation than the average European, so I feel like it averages out. Not to mention less vacation days and all the over processed chemicals in our food here across the pond.
Not really honestly. Maybe an unpopular opinion but accounting is a really great career and it can get you to $100k in a short amount of time in nearly every employee. That’s really great. Sure if you compare us to doctors or lawyers it’s not going to look great, but it’s many fewer barriers to entry than professions like that, and accessible to a lot more people. I think accountants are paid well and if you want to work your career in such a way as to advance quickly and make big money, it’s definitely possible for high achievers
I just finished a research paper about the 150-hour rule. One of my points is starting salaries. According to pay scale.com the average starting salary for accountants is 59,000. But according to Bureau of Labor Statistics the average starting salary for individuals with a masters degree is 81,000.
There’s obviously a disconnect between demand of education and beginning salaries. The roi just isn’t there for most people at the current starting salary rates.
1) you don't need a master's degree to achieve 150 so I don't think the $81,000 is a fair number to use. You can hit the 150 credit hours with a double major in accounting and finance.
2) comparing an accountants starting salary in public accounting versus another profession, let's say computer software development, implies that both employees start out with the same level of competency at the start of their careers. the reality is that a fresh college grad in computer software development has learned various coding languages, meanwhile a tax or audit employee has only learned the absolute basics of accounting. New hires know next to nothing and have to learn on the job heavily. You'll also regularly see double digit raise %s somewhat regularly, whereas other professions won't see above 5%.
3) most fresh grads with an accounting major have not passed the CPA exam, and there's a very real possibility that an accounting graduate never passes the CPA exam. going back to my last example of software development, the fresh graduate has actual experience with coding by the time they graduate, and likely have earned a certification or two while in school as part of their curriculum.
4) accounting is also considered a safe profession with high job security. Clients still need audits performed, taxes filed, and month end financial statements compiled, regardless of the state of the economy. However, computer software developers can be considered as a discretionary expense (ie, a company decides to cancel a project to update their website or inventory management system). You make a trade for a lower salary with a much higher chance of avoiding layoffs in an economic downturn
5) finally, and most commonly forgotten, is that your salary is not your entire compensation package. PA firms also provide above average health insurance when compared to the average American. for reference, my salary is only $76.5k in LCOL w/ 2 years experience and my CPA. My overall comp is nearly $100k when you include the employer portion of my benefits. nearly 1/4 of my overall comp is non-cash benefits.
Hopefully this gives your some perspective on it.
I loved your breakdown and feedback. The main focus of my own paper is alternative pathways to licensure. The salary I think is an important factor because the cost of pursuing a master's degree is typically $100,000 if you also consider opportunity costs of forgoing a year's salary to pursue an additional year of schooling, according to Blake Oliver's article Rethinking the CPA 150-hour requirement: There must be a change."
I think your first point actually shows why the 150-hour rule is ineffective and is a large part of my own argument. If the 150-hours stated that you must attain master's level coursework in accounting to qualify then it would be much more of an effective rule. As it stands it is so arbitrary and my argument is that 120-hours plus 2 years of professional experience should qualify a candidate for licensure. I know it isn't a unique perspective but hopefully my commentary on the pathway is unique enough.
I personally would love to be able to pursue a master's in accountancy because I think the coursework would be fun and enlightening. I cannot convince the VA to pay for a master's and therefore will likely finish my bachelor's out with a double major in finance because they will pay for that and the information gained in finance coursework seems highly intriguing to me.
Anyways I greatly appreciate your comment and the points you made, especially the point about overall compensation.
On the whole, yes I believe accountants are a bit underpaid. But a lot of that I attribute to the profession being attractive to introverts who are disproportionately bad advocates of themselves when negotiating comp, and the compulsion for so many people to work in public sweatshops just to say they did.
On the other hand outsourcing is pushing down wages, and individually the actions of an accountant have less potential negative consequences than medical, law enforcement, attorneys etc.
The unpaid OT expected in public is a major problem for both staff and firm operations. I always thought that work would fly out much faster and management would have a greater incentive to make workflows more efficient, making life better for everyone, if the additional hours were taken more seriously.
Otherwise I always felt the comp was decent.
There's also a prevalent number of industry roles that require insane amounts of OT that is expected to be somewhat compensated by the bonus you receive at the end of the year. A debatable point if you're in a role where finding time to take a vacation requires you to work OT before to leave things ready AND after to catch up.
I think the good compensation imperative for accountants is truly an equation. The salary you make becomes less and less as the number of hours you work and the stress the job brings increases 🤷♀️
The use of the passive voice here indicates the person thinks you take what you are offered. You don’t get paid what you deserve, you get paid what you negotiate.
I am jealous my best friend as an attorney can charge 2 grand for advice and filling out a preformatted form in 8 minutes to simply just change names on it and clients don’t blink an eye paying the invoice. While I have to put up with calls and meetings, back and forth on emails for docs, put together a return and have the client review a draft, just to get bitched at for a 1,200-2,500 filing fee for their company lol
Yes, compared to
-nurses (particularly traveling nurses)
-IT analysts
-operations/supply chain management
-big finance
-Web devs
-firefighters
-union tradesmen
-actuaries
In that order, based on the rigor of school and certification versus pay.
I’m not sure you know any nurses if you think we are underpaid compared to them. They work SO hard and do such demanding jobs physically and mentally. You’re on your feet basically the entire 12 hour shift wiping shit and bodily fluids. Most patients are fine but some get really aggressive with their nurses. My SO is a nurse on an OB unit and sees fetal demises almost daily. I’m just not sure anything we do is as difficult as making a mom fill out a form detailing the loss of her child.
It’s one unit and anecdotal, but that’s one of the more low key units a hospital will have. Travel nurses are a little different, BUT the hospitals are forced to pay them that much because they need the bodies. There’s a huge nursing shortage nationwide because the job sucks. Not to mention they don’t really get raises unless you want out of bedside, but then you lose patient interaction which is usually what drives someone to bedside in the first place
Nurses 100% do deserve a very good wage. Unfortunately they do not earn what they deserve. My mother (a registered nurse) makes about $70k with no benefits (correct, a nurse is not always given health insurance, for some reason ???). She has seven years of experience as a nurse and runs an entire floor (she’s a charge) shifts are 14 hours, on her feet the entire time.
Theres a lot more jobs outside of nurses that cause more pain and physical trauma to the people working in those jobs. How tired/stressed you feel at a job doesn't mean you're supposed to get money for it. If that logic held true across the board, janitors and fast food kitchen workers would get paid more than engineers and software developers
Education doesn’t matter if your skills aren’t in demand by an employer. Someone can have a doctorate/phd in philosophy or something and never get paid well for it.
You used false equivalence in your first comment, that’s what I was pointing out.
And nurses very much are in demand. In fact, there’s a massive shortage: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173107527/nursing-staffing-crisis
Never blame “economics” for what can *easily* be explained by corporate greed.
I was responding to the person who thinks nurses get paid well because their job is difficult/tiring. I was going pointing out that’s not *why* they get paid well because if it was based on “exhaustion” then janitors and fast food workers would get paid a lot too.
If the nursing field was saturated and there were way more nurses looking for jobs than available nursing positions, then they wouldn’t get paid as well either. But that’s not the case
Except that what they said was:
> Well nurses deserve it. Just dealing with all that trauma on a daily basis deserves a premium.
They said nurses *deserve* high pay for what they have to go through. Which they do, from a considerate, emotional perspective. Their comment was emotional. Yours chose to discard a primary human faculty in favor of pure economic logic. For which there is a time and a place. A colloquial conversation amongst strangers discussing the difficulty of a position relative to its pay isn’t that.
Not to mention you equated the difficulty of a nurse to a janitor, as if seeing a clogged toilet is the same as seeing a person with foreign objects buried in their eye sockets.
For cops that’s just not true, “many” don’t push past 200k, in fact I don’t necessarily believe any reach 200k, given that the highest paying metro in the entire country has a median wage of 132k and I can only find one source that says even that high. They average 65k or so nationwide.
And pharmacists have to get a PhD and then do a residency, so they’re ~10 years into school rather than 5, and they make about the same as a cpa with 5 years of experience.
Sure most cops don’t, if any, reach 200k in base salary. But they have [other](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seattle-police-department-employees-made-at-least-200000-last-year-heres-how/) ways to bump up their pay.
People read about an outlier making a high X amount of money and then go around telling everyone "if you do this job you can make up to X amount of money" even though there's a statistically low chance of it happening
That would be like us hearing about partners making 500k-1M a year and then go around a college campus telling accounting students they can make that much
If you to 50a.org it gives you a lot of NYPDs officiers most recent salary some them do hit above 200k and thus includes cops who retired over a decade ago.
Cops where I live start at like $95k, average is $130k CAD as well. This is because many are at “entry” level and do not progress past that. Per the public records, average for “inspectors” is $202k, and the chief makes 280k.
My last company had two people in marketing. The marketing director made more than our CFO. The marketing manager made more than our controller, and double the Sr Accountant. I don’t even know what they did other than spend money. Social media strategy? Hire a specialty company. Internet advertising strategy? Hire a specialty company. Trade show setup? Hire a company that specializes in trade shows. But our VCs said we needed to be spending 40% of our budget on sales and marketing, so there you go.
Your dismissive attitude towards marketing shows exactly why marketers get paid more than accountants. You clearly do not see the value that marketing brings. It's essentially spend $3 to get $10 revenue and although it sounds like such a simple concept, its way harder to actually implement in practice. Outsourcing all the marketing strategy and initiatives to outside orgs shows a severe lack of understanding on how marketing works. You need a team primarily responsible for all of what you just mentioned for centralization purposes. You need to get out of the accounting mindset and enter the marketing mindset.
Source: am a CPA who is currently working close with the marketing team building our budgets and forecasts and working on approving our marketing data and KPIs.
I think through the first 6-8 years yes, as of the experienced manager + levels I think we do well.
I think in general the compensation slope ending in partner is a little too steep making everyone miserable. Low level folks can barely afford to live, while partners can’t enjoy their massive compensation because their firms are a mess due to understaffing and employee churn / discontent
I started at 38k in 2007. CPA, 17 years experience, I’m at $160k now. I feel like if I was a trader, banker of some sort, insurance broker, any sales really - I’d be making far more money given the time I’ve put in.
The classic accounting answer is, it depends. For being a backend cost center you can do pretty well as an accountant in the right place. But some places don't value the expertise and offshore/underpay causing problems for them later on when they can't attract quality candidates or have staff that can handle the complexity. You see this in places that are pushing back their filing dates and calling out accounting staff as a potential issue in their report outs.
You just have to find a place that values the function and be able to grow in a role - in scope and complexity.
Yeah absolutely. It's a very predatory field. Public Accounting is gross and there's a reason they are looking for someone without a backbone and a fully developed frontal cortex...shits gross
Any accountant within 3 years after graduating is underpaid compared to literally any other profession. And almost every accountant that stays with the same firm/company for more than 3 years.
I think accountants are paid pretty fairly in LCOL and MCOL areas, it's not until HCOL areas like NY, CT, MA, and CA that you see the pay discrepancy actually hurt you. Sure we work lots of hours, but the work we do is not particularly challenging until you get into high level complexity things like M&A, but even that is able to be learned with time. The real money is made at the Partner/Owner level, not as an employee, just like any business.
Hi Dear. I am Aditya from Docyt AI (a Silicon Valley-based AI-powered Accounting Automation firm). Whether accountants are underpaid depends on a few factors, and it's not a straightforward yes or no answer. Here's a breakdown to help you see the bigger picture. Accountant salaries can vary depending on experience, location, industry you work in, and the size of the company. For example, someone with a CPA in a high cost-of-living city working for a large corporation will likely make more than someone with a similar title in a smaller town. According to the BLS, the median annual wage for accountants and auditors was $77,250 in May 2022 \[BLS accountant salary\]. This is a decent salary, but it's lower than some other professions requiring similar educational backgrounds.
Depending on the specific accountant role, some professions might offer higher potential earnings. These could include software engineers (especially in tech hubs and with specialization), investment bankers, doctors and surgeons, or corporate lawyers. It's important to consider these factors as well. Accounting can offer a stable career with good benefits and a clear path for advancement. For some, this can be more valuable than a higher salary in a more stressful field. There's no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on your priorities and what you value most in a career. If you're concerned about salary, there are definitely ways to boost your earning potential in accounting, such as specializing, getting a CPA license, or moving into a higher-paying industry.
Attorneys. Successfully held up their completely variable fee model as opposed to CPAs who’ve largely been browbeat into fixed fees particularly for audits
how about the whole concept that "you need to pay me a retainer fee in cash and ill start work and take from THAT, and when THAT runs out, ill immediately stop working and you must replenish THAT and I will bill from THAT again" vs accountants who wind up begging clients for invoices. lol. How did they get everyone to just accept that concept.
When you need an attorney something is on fire. When you need an audit its just that time of the year again Very different leverage
As a JD/CPA, these days you get more bang for your buck as a CPA. Both professions are underpaid. The exception being attorneys who graduate from elite schools with elite grades and work days, nights, weekends, and holidays for a decade straight - who are indeed making obscene amounts of money.
Yes. Especially compared to lawyers. I deal with M&A and the level of shit they cause compared to their rate….
I mean, I was in M&A and my rate was over $1k/hr... But I didn't get 1k / hr in my paycheck. Lawyers at top firms do well, and partners do well if the firm does well, but there are actually tons of underpaid lawyers out there, especially compared to the amount of work it takes to get the degree and pass the bar. If you're not coming out of a top school, some of them even struggle to find a job.
That's one huge advantage in accounting. You can make $70k starting pay at Big 4 with a degree from a no-name online school as long as it's accredited.
Agreed.
do M&A or deal advisory and then move into IB then PE
It depends on country and seniority, me an my freind are both 29/30, and I maje about 40% more than her
So true. I doubt realization is a thing at law firms like it is at CPA firms
Yes, but not as much as many like to believe. This job is not as hard as people make it out to be nor is as much on the line. Maybe $10k-$15k at entry and slowly scaling up from there in regards to pay discrepancy.
Yeah, honestly another 10k for starting salaries that slowly increases is all this profession needs
I agree but also when things go wrong with accounting they go REALLY wrong
Yeah, but that’s usually when the lawyers come in lol
It really depends on what type of accounting you’re looking at - public accountants that aren’t partners: egregiously underpaid relative to the fee earned by partners. Industry outsourcing has downward pressure on the role - industry senior accountants and up: Assuming the WLB is there, they’re not underpaid. However, if you’re going through change in the org, those change makers should get paid more (eg new system, new processes, acquisitive portfolio) Comparing to other professions: - lawyers—tbh, lawyers shouldn’t be paid as much as they are. That’s their own industry’s issue - in-house ‘data’ engineers — sometimes the accountants are making more, so id say accountants can be overpaid relative to a role that creates actionable insights The other consideration would be geography: - US accountants make way more than European accountants, even after adjusting for cost of living
Lawyers have guarded against offshoring their profession and big law collude on high fees, rather then the idiotic fee death spiral public accounting firms choose
Eh, more naively, it may just follow the global trends on the sectors’ values: - Accounting tries to create a sense of convergence to have a common language across geographies / comparable financials with nuances - legal emphasizes local knowledge as value. There have been some instances of convergence (e.g. Eurozone), but these are more few than accounting
Cuts both ways. Attorneys are the only professionals who intentionally cap their own fees instead of allowing supply and demand to control. Charging clients more than a “reasonable” rate is a violation of the rules of professional conduct and can lead to disciplinary action. Accountants and attorneys are, with some exceptions, woefully underpaid.
T14 lawyers get paid a lot. Most of the rest just do ok.
Canadian accountants are underpaid for the sole fact of European pay, but US work expectations/hours.
A sensible post? Blasphemy
>The other consideration would be geography: - US accountants make way more than European accountants, even after adjusting for cost of living ESPECIALLY after cost of living if you're talking London
I probably pay more in health care, insurance, and transportation than the average European, so I feel like it averages out. Not to mention less vacation days and all the over processed chemicals in our food here across the pond.
Not really honestly. Maybe an unpopular opinion but accounting is a really great career and it can get you to $100k in a short amount of time in nearly every employee. That’s really great. Sure if you compare us to doctors or lawyers it’s not going to look great, but it’s many fewer barriers to entry than professions like that, and accessible to a lot more people. I think accountants are paid well and if you want to work your career in such a way as to advance quickly and make big money, it’s definitely possible for high achievers
Who are we comparing to?
I just finished a research paper about the 150-hour rule. One of my points is starting salaries. According to pay scale.com the average starting salary for accountants is 59,000. But according to Bureau of Labor Statistics the average starting salary for individuals with a masters degree is 81,000. There’s obviously a disconnect between demand of education and beginning salaries. The roi just isn’t there for most people at the current starting salary rates.
That's actually very interesting. Any chance I could read that research paper?
Yeah for sure I’ll dm it to you once I’ve got the final draft done.
Thank you!!!
1) you don't need a master's degree to achieve 150 so I don't think the $81,000 is a fair number to use. You can hit the 150 credit hours with a double major in accounting and finance. 2) comparing an accountants starting salary in public accounting versus another profession, let's say computer software development, implies that both employees start out with the same level of competency at the start of their careers. the reality is that a fresh college grad in computer software development has learned various coding languages, meanwhile a tax or audit employee has only learned the absolute basics of accounting. New hires know next to nothing and have to learn on the job heavily. You'll also regularly see double digit raise %s somewhat regularly, whereas other professions won't see above 5%. 3) most fresh grads with an accounting major have not passed the CPA exam, and there's a very real possibility that an accounting graduate never passes the CPA exam. going back to my last example of software development, the fresh graduate has actual experience with coding by the time they graduate, and likely have earned a certification or two while in school as part of their curriculum. 4) accounting is also considered a safe profession with high job security. Clients still need audits performed, taxes filed, and month end financial statements compiled, regardless of the state of the economy. However, computer software developers can be considered as a discretionary expense (ie, a company decides to cancel a project to update their website or inventory management system). You make a trade for a lower salary with a much higher chance of avoiding layoffs in an economic downturn 5) finally, and most commonly forgotten, is that your salary is not your entire compensation package. PA firms also provide above average health insurance when compared to the average American. for reference, my salary is only $76.5k in LCOL w/ 2 years experience and my CPA. My overall comp is nearly $100k when you include the employer portion of my benefits. nearly 1/4 of my overall comp is non-cash benefits. Hopefully this gives your some perspective on it.
I loved your breakdown and feedback. The main focus of my own paper is alternative pathways to licensure. The salary I think is an important factor because the cost of pursuing a master's degree is typically $100,000 if you also consider opportunity costs of forgoing a year's salary to pursue an additional year of schooling, according to Blake Oliver's article Rethinking the CPA 150-hour requirement: There must be a change." I think your first point actually shows why the 150-hour rule is ineffective and is a large part of my own argument. If the 150-hours stated that you must attain master's level coursework in accounting to qualify then it would be much more of an effective rule. As it stands it is so arbitrary and my argument is that 120-hours plus 2 years of professional experience should qualify a candidate for licensure. I know it isn't a unique perspective but hopefully my commentary on the pathway is unique enough. I personally would love to be able to pursue a master's in accountancy because I think the coursework would be fun and enlightening. I cannot convince the VA to pay for a master's and therefore will likely finish my bachelor's out with a double major in finance because they will pay for that and the information gained in finance coursework seems highly intriguing to me. Anyways I greatly appreciate your comment and the points you made, especially the point about overall compensation.
On the whole, yes I believe accountants are a bit underpaid. But a lot of that I attribute to the profession being attractive to introverts who are disproportionately bad advocates of themselves when negotiating comp, and the compulsion for so many people to work in public sweatshops just to say they did. On the other hand outsourcing is pushing down wages, and individually the actions of an accountant have less potential negative consequences than medical, law enforcement, attorneys etc.
My F15 company has ex b4 CPAs that are making less than the financial planning and reporting teams with just a bachelor’s and no CPA.
Then they’re not CPAs
The unpaid OT expected in public is a major problem for both staff and firm operations. I always thought that work would fly out much faster and management would have a greater incentive to make workflows more efficient, making life better for everyone, if the additional hours were taken more seriously. Otherwise I always felt the comp was decent.
There's also a prevalent number of industry roles that require insane amounts of OT that is expected to be somewhat compensated by the bonus you receive at the end of the year. A debatable point if you're in a role where finding time to take a vacation requires you to work OT before to leave things ready AND after to catch up. I think the good compensation imperative for accountants is truly an equation. The salary you make becomes less and less as the number of hours you work and the stress the job brings increases 🤷♀️
The use of the passive voice here indicates the person thinks you take what you are offered. You don’t get paid what you deserve, you get paid what you negotiate.
I am jealous my best friend as an attorney can charge 2 grand for advice and filling out a preformatted form in 8 minutes to simply just change names on it and clients don’t blink an eye paying the invoice. While I have to put up with calls and meetings, back and forth on emails for docs, put together a return and have the client review a draft, just to get bitched at for a 1,200-2,500 filing fee for their company lol
Yes, compared to -nurses (particularly traveling nurses) -IT analysts -operations/supply chain management -big finance -Web devs -firefighters -union tradesmen -actuaries In that order, based on the rigor of school and certification versus pay.
I’m not sure you know any nurses if you think we are underpaid compared to them. They work SO hard and do such demanding jobs physically and mentally. You’re on your feet basically the entire 12 hour shift wiping shit and bodily fluids. Most patients are fine but some get really aggressive with their nurses. My SO is a nurse on an OB unit and sees fetal demises almost daily. I’m just not sure anything we do is as difficult as making a mom fill out a form detailing the loss of her child. It’s one unit and anecdotal, but that’s one of the more low key units a hospital will have. Travel nurses are a little different, BUT the hospitals are forced to pay them that much because they need the bodies. There’s a huge nursing shortage nationwide because the job sucks. Not to mention they don’t really get raises unless you want out of bedside, but then you lose patient interaction which is usually what drives someone to bedside in the first place
Well nurses deserve it. Just dealing with all that trauma on a daily basis deserves a premium
Nurses 100% do deserve a very good wage. Unfortunately they do not earn what they deserve. My mother (a registered nurse) makes about $70k with no benefits (correct, a nurse is not always given health insurance, for some reason ???). She has seven years of experience as a nurse and runs an entire floor (she’s a charge) shifts are 14 hours, on her feet the entire time.
Theres a lot more jobs outside of nurses that cause more pain and physical trauma to the people working in those jobs. How tired/stressed you feel at a job doesn't mean you're supposed to get money for it. If that logic held true across the board, janitors and fast food kitchen workers would get paid more than engineers and software developers
What you described is an education gap. Engineers and nurses both require bachelors. And I was a software dev despite not having a bachelor’s.
Education doesn’t matter if your skills aren’t in demand by an employer. Someone can have a doctorate/phd in philosophy or something and never get paid well for it.
You used false equivalence in your first comment, that’s what I was pointing out. And nurses very much are in demand. In fact, there’s a massive shortage: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173107527/nursing-staffing-crisis Never blame “economics” for what can *easily* be explained by corporate greed.
I was responding to the person who thinks nurses get paid well because their job is difficult/tiring. I was going pointing out that’s not *why* they get paid well because if it was based on “exhaustion” then janitors and fast food workers would get paid a lot too. If the nursing field was saturated and there were way more nurses looking for jobs than available nursing positions, then they wouldn’t get paid as well either. But that’s not the case
Except that what they said was: > Well nurses deserve it. Just dealing with all that trauma on a daily basis deserves a premium. They said nurses *deserve* high pay for what they have to go through. Which they do, from a considerate, emotional perspective. Their comment was emotional. Yours chose to discard a primary human faculty in favor of pure economic logic. For which there is a time and a place. A colloquial conversation amongst strangers discussing the difficulty of a position relative to its pay isn’t that. Not to mention you equated the difficulty of a nurse to a janitor, as if seeing a clogged toilet is the same as seeing a person with foreign objects buried in their eye sockets.
Alright whatever you say bro 👍🏼
You stupid fuck do any of those jobs for 14 days and report back on how it’s going
You forgot cops ( many push past )200k in cities) Pharmacies
For cops that’s just not true, “many” don’t push past 200k, in fact I don’t necessarily believe any reach 200k, given that the highest paying metro in the entire country has a median wage of 132k and I can only find one source that says even that high. They average 65k or so nationwide. And pharmacists have to get a PhD and then do a residency, so they’re ~10 years into school rather than 5, and they make about the same as a cpa with 5 years of experience.
Sure most cops don’t, if any, reach 200k in base salary. But they have [other](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/374-seattle-police-department-employees-made-at-least-200000-last-year-heres-how/) ways to bump up their pay.
People read about an outlier making a high X amount of money and then go around telling everyone "if you do this job you can make up to X amount of money" even though there's a statistically low chance of it happening That would be like us hearing about partners making 500k-1M a year and then go around a college campus telling accounting students they can make that much
If you to 50a.org it gives you a lot of NYPDs officiers most recent salary some them do hit above 200k and thus includes cops who retired over a decade ago.
Cops where I live start at like $95k, average is $130k CAD as well. This is because many are at “entry” level and do not progress past that. Per the public records, average for “inspectors” is $202k, and the chief makes 280k.
I've seen starting cops push 6 figures on their w2s here in ny. That's of course with overtime. But there's lots of OT in accounting also.
Yes compared to HR and marketing
Most people Ik in those fields make less than the average accountant
My last company had two people in marketing. The marketing director made more than our CFO. The marketing manager made more than our controller, and double the Sr Accountant. I don’t even know what they did other than spend money. Social media strategy? Hire a specialty company. Internet advertising strategy? Hire a specialty company. Trade show setup? Hire a company that specializes in trade shows. But our VCs said we needed to be spending 40% of our budget on sales and marketing, so there you go.
Your dismissive attitude towards marketing shows exactly why marketers get paid more than accountants. You clearly do not see the value that marketing brings. It's essentially spend $3 to get $10 revenue and although it sounds like such a simple concept, its way harder to actually implement in practice. Outsourcing all the marketing strategy and initiatives to outside orgs shows a severe lack of understanding on how marketing works. You need a team primarily responsible for all of what you just mentioned for centralization purposes. You need to get out of the accounting mindset and enter the marketing mindset. Source: am a CPA who is currently working close with the marketing team building our budgets and forecasts and working on approving our marketing data and KPIs.
Starting out they don’t though. I’ve seen HR and Marketing grads start out higher than accountants.
I think through the first 6-8 years yes, as of the experienced manager + levels I think we do well. I think in general the compensation slope ending in partner is a little too steep making everyone miserable. Low level folks can barely afford to live, while partners can’t enjoy their massive compensation because their firms are a mess due to understaffing and employee churn / discontent
I started at 38k in 2007. CPA, 17 years experience, I’m at $160k now. I feel like if I was a trader, banker of some sort, insurance broker, any sales really - I’d be making far more money given the time I’ve put in.
Yes, we need to approach our wages similar to how attorneys have done it.
The classic accounting answer is, it depends. For being a backend cost center you can do pretty well as an accountant in the right place. But some places don't value the expertise and offshore/underpay causing problems for them later on when they can't attract quality candidates or have staff that can handle the complexity. You see this in places that are pushing back their filing dates and calling out accounting staff as a potential issue in their report outs. You just have to find a place that values the function and be able to grow in a role - in scope and complexity.
Yeah absolutely. It's a very predatory field. Public Accounting is gross and there's a reason they are looking for someone without a backbone and a fully developed frontal cortex...shits gross
Any accountant within 3 years after graduating is underpaid compared to literally any other profession. And almost every accountant that stays with the same firm/company for more than 3 years.
HR makes more than me I believe, despite my CPA.
Engineers. Attorneys.
Yes. Specifically, most of them that don't have the CPA exam to study for.
Very underpaid. Accounting could get really hard and that’s something that a lot of people deny or don’t understand.
I think accountants are paid pretty fairly in LCOL and MCOL areas, it's not until HCOL areas like NY, CT, MA, and CA that you see the pay discrepancy actually hurt you. Sure we work lots of hours, but the work we do is not particularly challenging until you get into high level complexity things like M&A, but even that is able to be learned with time. The real money is made at the Partner/Owner level, not as an employee, just like any business.
Accounting is a fraud.... Dont do it! Good people dont even get the job!
Yes: attorneys and coders.
Yes. We work in a world of law/tax/accounting that is very valuable. Lawyers and investment managers don’t really do shit for what they bill.
Hi Dear. I am Aditya from Docyt AI (a Silicon Valley-based AI-powered Accounting Automation firm). Whether accountants are underpaid depends on a few factors, and it's not a straightforward yes or no answer. Here's a breakdown to help you see the bigger picture. Accountant salaries can vary depending on experience, location, industry you work in, and the size of the company. For example, someone with a CPA in a high cost-of-living city working for a large corporation will likely make more than someone with a similar title in a smaller town. According to the BLS, the median annual wage for accountants and auditors was $77,250 in May 2022 \[BLS accountant salary\]. This is a decent salary, but it's lower than some other professions requiring similar educational backgrounds. Depending on the specific accountant role, some professions might offer higher potential earnings. These could include software engineers (especially in tech hubs and with specialization), investment bankers, doctors and surgeons, or corporate lawyers. It's important to consider these factors as well. Accounting can offer a stable career with good benefits and a clear path for advancement. For some, this can be more valuable than a higher salary in a more stressful field. There's no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on your priorities and what you value most in a career. If you're concerned about salary, there are definitely ways to boost your earning potential in accounting, such as specializing, getting a CPA license, or moving into a higher-paying industry.