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I’m in a similar boat but unsure if it’s just the rose colored glasses.
I certainly miss the more sophisticated clients, internal technology/systems, and professional drive of my teams. However, the work life balance is significantly better not being at a B4 firm.
I suppose it boils down to if you prefer the challenge of larger and more complex clients and constantly being under pressure. However, the flip side of accelerated career growth/exit ops and better pay are a larger consideration as well.
Yeah - technology is outdated and i miss that from b4
I did the same thing a bit over a year ago, the small regional firm I'm at is the complete opposite of Big4 in worse ways, imo. The hours are actually worse at my smaller firm because we can't offshore anything (last fall we had 4 people out on maternity near the same time which drove hours up for others due to poor client engagement planning). The technology is ancient, there is poor client project planning, and I went from big interesting clients to tiny one off clients that bring no fulfillment and have no opportunity to build client relationships.
Managers are rogue and will enforce their own rules & policies rather than what the partners say and it's been very confusing what the actual rules are so it seems like I'm always doing something wrong. There's no common standard and even performance evaluation metrics are vague and end up being more a popularity contest above anything else. Small firms with poor standards internally are so much worse than Big4 in my view. There may be some good small firms out there, but the one I'm at is not.
There are definitely problems at Big4 as well, but I feel like I had more fulfillment and less guess work on the standards there which takes a lot of stress out of the job. At Big4 my biggest stress was planning to meet deadlines and actually get the work done. At smaller firms I stress over the actual job I was hired to do as well as all the unorganized internal crap that no one is bothered to fix.