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You'll have to take a big pay cut to move to industry right now is what I'm seeing too, unfortunately. The Big 4/accounting firms fired a bunch of people in 2020 and then desperately hired for a couple of years after that when the deal market was red hot. Since it was an employee market then, they also gave insane raises/bonuses and we're all now at the high end of the spectrum, which is rare for the Big 4.
If you're in FDD, I'd really recommend getting out as soon as a reasonably good offer comes along if you want to move to industry and know you don't want to get on the PPMD track btw. I worked in FDD for a while and found it really hard to sell my experience. The M&A/corp dev side want ex-IB (seen the whole deal cycle), FP&A will hire people with actual forecasting/budgeting experience, and accounting jobs want people with stronger close/technical accounting experience.
I learned a lot in FDD, and thought that was complete BS because the work is very suited to FP&A jobs, but I moved into a more FP&A-focused group at the Big 4 and am now doing much better because the work I'm doing is more relevant and isn't as niche as due diligence is.
Jumping out of FDD without a pay cut is tough. Have you looked into corp dev, investor relations, or strategy roles? Some VC portfolio companies pay well too. If you’re open to adjacent fields, fintech or high-level consulting gigs might be worth exploring. What are your non-negotiables with WLB??
No actually, I only heard that FPA could be the only place where there is a better work life balance so I really never thought of going to IB or PE Side and I don’t even know much of what you mentioned honestly.
When you say strategy roles, are you referring to consulting? That would be even worse work life balance, or wouldn’t it? I think same with Corp. Dev, right?
Do you think it would be easier to switch to fan tech or high-level consulting given that I have an accounting background?
As far as work, life balance, I really want to be around 40 hours steady
200k and 6 years out of school? You probably won’t find something better than that…..
It floors be that the Big 4 is paying staff this much. I am in industry 18 years of experience and just are about at that salary. But I've also had 18 years of work life balance so I regret nothing.
...do you understand how many hours are involved with FDD? You realize that not only are you regularly working 12-14 hour days when you're on a deal, but you're also on-call when you're off of a deal because a data room can hit you at 5PM on Friday after having nothing to do all week.
You don't get paid a lot in FDD to sit there and smell the roses...
What city?
Hey, are you in NYC? Also, could you give an estimate of hours for a senior associate?