5 Reasons why I left Big 4 behind.

I worked 7.5 years for a Big 4 firm — as a single parent and loved every minute of the experience. It was exhilarating to deliver at the highest levels and it was oh-so-sweet to wave the fancy tag under my naysayers name and show them what a woman can do if she just had backing.

I bought myself expensive technology, took expensive trips, bought fancy clothes and basically indulged in the case of not-knowing-where-you-spent-your-money.

I also quit with a shortened notice period 2 weeks ago. And this blog is to unpack my reasons for quitting -that — in the words of more than one Manager friend — was a ‘shocker’ of news to them.

I get it: the CPA, the eager-beaver asking questions in training…. she… quits? and isn’t hopping to another Big 4? or atleast mid-tier? What is going on…..

1. Others see potential; you see direction.

I had the Executive Director take me aside after a Townhall and tell me that being ‘Manager’ was the very least I should be.

If it weren’t the nth time I was hearing it that year — I would have been more moved. And I was moved; but just also tired. Becoming Manager was now ranking among my list of to-do s apart from ‘stay sane’ and ‘stay connected to my teen son’ and ‘prepare for parents’ mortality’.

These didn’t particularly carry the same thought-length. And they all over-lapped. Being Manager means allowing the top brass to basically brand your butt with an iron calling you theirs for ever more — and you’ve to be okay being their mouthpiece and their fall guy for utilization hours gone wrong.

Look; I’m built different alright. I survived a 9-year abusive marriage and fought extradition requests to keep my son. My world view is just not given to putting sparklers around a title.

2. Boiling the frog slowly: how much life is really left?

Its pretty known that Big 4 tax professionals have to pretty much ignore their families for those 2–3 months where business is in full swing. I just ran through my old notes-book where I’d filled reams of pages with client notes occasionally peppered with a scrawly 12-year old’s writing that went ‘Im sick today’ or ‘Its my birthday tomorrow and mummy will celebrate it.’

That year — he spent many months in the school hostel. It was my first year in this tax practise and we wanted to let me have a good shot at it. On the last day of this tax season, I was berated by the Country Lead for prioritising my son’s illness on a saturday evening and called for ‘lack of communication.’

I never did kiss that Lead’s a**. I had a cool call with him post season informing him I was a single parent and couldn’t be around 24/7 like this each time. And he marked me down ever since as a non-pressure-taker. Because in the Big 4 — you’ve to allow them to cook you. And I didn’t.

Since this memorable tax season, we discontinued what my son considered to be a barbaric practice, we settled into having him at his grandparents’ while I worked 80–90 hour weeks. His main refrain when ever I called to check on him ‘Hey Im doing fine’ — meaning, ‘Mum I ain’t going to call for you while you are out there earning a living, even if it costs me.’

There’s something to be said for staying isolated in a 1.5 bedroom apartment and working those hours. It feels like freedom but its the kind of freedom you get from being single — you swap the messiness for a silence.

The silence is only freeing to a point. Families — relationships — do not thrive with that kind of isolation and my son was too young for me to allow us to live with that kind of ache.

His hospitalization mid-season came like a clarion call — demanding to be answered what or who I was really serving if I could barely survive the hospital duties minus the father. If the role was being single parent, being single parent whose metaphorical cup was mostly full with enough batteries to spare for emergencies is part of job description.

My dad’s hands shake when he holds mine to comfort me. That factors in, too, when I make decisions on how much stress to put the family under.

If Im exchanging a piece of life, in order to perform at the Big 4, I sort of still needed a ‘life’ to defend. Not a hollow scene — that looked picture perfect but the smiles came with a tug in the heart and people paused before barging in with a question. Not that, kind of life.

I dont want to have done this for so long that I’m literally incapable of watching movies or reading books as too many of my Managers confess to being.

3. Your life is lived in your head. And your head is a patchwork quilt.

I had this lovely checkered throw/blanket — whatever you want to call it — back in San Diego that was so comforting for its asynchronous patterns. Pretty much like our minds — a patchwork of to-do s, driving values, decision-markers, catalogue of prior judgment calls and a wariness of how much patchwork can be done on the fabric.

What Big 4 does is — it seeps in its particular brand of color (yellow and gray in my case) all over your blanket and leaves precious little for you to seek any comfort from.

Meaning my top onshore Managers dreamt taxes as they slept and I wake up bleary-eyed on tax day to the Partner going ruddy-cheeked with laughter at our predicament at having to stay up all night to make sure the straggling returns make it past the finish line. What does this to do bodies that have been sleep-deprived and running on cortisol for months? Oh that’s…. that’s, not a part of the quilt.

Without knowing it, my own emotions, preferences, needs — including that of needing my son’s voice around me as I worked — was getting dyed into yellow and gray. I couldn’t wait to finish eating meals so I could get back to work. Sleep was made to feel like a luxury; heck the country-lead used to cap the hours we could sleep at 6 hours — in the name of work planning. The onshore Director would advise us to use warm lights as we worked the night and offer his own exalted example for working on sunday through a family gathering because ‘they would understand.’

This was in the year that girl died from anxiety attacks while working in the Big 4. Not saying work caused it — but its like saying cant say the sky is the blue — its the ocean!

So what, actually, was I doing if my son came home to me on busy season weekends and the 13-year-old clung to me despite all his bravado and wept saying he missed me.

Im a firm believer in the colors red, blue, green and white, too. So: no thanks. That’s just about how much yellow I need on my quilt. and I’d prefer to not make my life so synchronized to tax work that I dont recognize myself in the middle of it. I want to marvel at the intricate design of nothingness and the pointlessness of the mismatched colors and recognize that all I ever do is not just do tax returns for people who are too wealthy to know what to do with their money and simply send millions to DAF s to save on taxes.

4. If its India, sorry, you gotta kiss a : its not about how good you are.**

I mean, the way my Country Lead talked to me about promotions about 2 years before I was up for it — you’d think everyone was following my every move. I should be flattered. But I hated it.

I did not want Manager. I tried going pillar to post trying to gather traction for my particular brand of ambitious non-ambition where I simply wanted to give out good work and stay at my level.

I always knew I was great raw material. A CPA, good communication skills, actually kind and capable of hard work. I had people often asking to work with me. Senior Managers (onshore and GDS), Managers and staff alike.

Heck when I left my staff wrote me a poem describing what I meant to her. And she isn’t even the one I mentored most.

But I knew I was raw around the edges — too sincere, too transparent emotionally and too given to believing review comments that were basically nonsense if it were presented professionally enough.

The India-Partner once had this get-together where he got a front-row question from me on how to find mentorship. He said there were official channels of mentorship available (but suitably out of my then-rank) and he added as a side line that most “real” channels of mentorship were unofficial. The other Director said someone has to “invest” in us. That’s when the growth happens. That’s when we learn the inside deal of how to deal with this corporate meal-grinder that chews people out for one quarterly result.

I saw my best friend get her mentorship— in exchange for basically being his “hey you”. A mother to a 3 year still eating liquid food, she would be at his beck and call and allow him to clock hours for work she had done for him. A known liar and a ruthlessly cruel Manager, he consistently got promoted and headlined as he knew how to kiss the Lead’s a**. In fact, he’s such a pig he probably sleeps well at night despite the lives he ruins with his attitude and ratings-ransom.

She got the mentorship. She stayed. I left.

Don’t get me wrong. I had plenty unofficial mentors. People who would take my teary calls. Calm me down and offer me direction. Just that this pig was the loudest voice in the room.

In his last call with me he basically said if I had taken a little more time to “connect” with him — my experience would have been different. Oh okay, should I have treated him as my confidante? And allowed him to talk me down ? And waited for his permission to log off at 2 am ?

I was careful to name his best friend as one of my favored mentors in my goodbye email to the firm.

5. There’s never a good time to say bye.

The people you cried with and laughed with when faced with those hostile hours — one can never forget. The ones who taught you the work and ones you taught. The ones who showed you the best you could be. These stay with us for a lifetime. When’s a good time to say bye and begin again. Especially at 40 ? There’s never a good time to do that. It was very very hard to say bye. Especially to the colleagues who had become friends. They had literally walked the busy season path with me so many times. We learnt resilience…. truth.. honesty and kindness from and with each other.

And that’s why — this time was as good as any.

Besides — I like to remember that its not what I did but how I left people feeling.. that counts. And I think I left them feeling pretttyyy good!

10/01/18–05/16/26.

And that’s a wrap!