The Shrine

So I haven't been posting (or reading) regularly for the past month or so because I just moved and transferred schools. I was in Williamsburg, VA going to William & Mary. Sometime in March, my advisor dropped the bomb that he had accepted a position at Virginia Tech, and that we could go with him.

This was a mind fuck for me, because I did my undergrad at VA Tech, and I thought I would never live in Blacksburg ever again. Ever. Again. But here I was about to go back.

So, here I am, still a PhD student, just in a better program, at the place I left three years ago.

Well, i hope it works out for you in the long run. Not to be a bitch, but i thought people frowned upon getting you masters and/or phd at your undergrad college, almost like they prefer a well rounded education career. Is it worth switching programs for a professor?

Flip wrote:Well, i hope it works out for you in the long run. Not to be a bitch, but i thought people frowned upon getting you masters and/or phd at your undergrad college, almost like they prefer a well rounded education career. Is it worth switching programs for a professor?

It's generally better to go elsewhere for variety, but in the end, it doesn't make much of a difference. What matters is what you did to get your Ph.D., not where you did it.

And yes, it is worth switching schools for an advisor. One, VT has a better name in CS than WM. By a very wide margin. While what you did to get your Ph.D. is more important, we live in a world in which names and reputations matter, even if they don't make a practical difference.

Two, for me, it's basically going to be same shit, different town. I'm going to do the same research here that I was going to do in Williamsburg, except maybe a bit better since there are more resources here. I don't take classes anymore, all I do is research. (Although I'll have to take the qualification exam here.) I've been working with my advisor for about two years, and I have about two years left. Had I not continued working with him (stayed at WM), I would have to start over. Transferring to VT actually preserves the status quo and lets me get my Ph.D. in a reasonable amount of time.

Although a bit unexpected, sounds like a good move for you career-wise. I'm lookin' at moving out of the hell that is public accounting, so I'll be going through a similar large change in my life very soon. I hope that works out well

Have you considered what to switch to? We're thinking about moving early next year (one more tax season) to a place where we can get an actual single family house, NoVa is so expensive we cant afford one here, and a lower mortgage so that i could possibly try something new, too. Accounting, and office life in general, is slowly killing me. Whatever i do, i'll keep up on my CPA and still do soime taxes during the season, try and create my own small client base.

heh, I'm not sure whether to congratulate you or not. It sounds a bit bittersweet. Fuck it, I'm concentrating on the positive and congratulating you anyway. Congrats!

BTW, what's your primary area of research? I remember you posting about multithreading a while back, but I was never sure if that was the focus of your research or merely an offshoot from it.

Also, two negative posts about accounting (Zeus and Flip). Is this a general trend in this field?

So what's the change you're looking to make Zeus?

Ishamael wrote:heh, I'm not sure whether to congratulate you or not. It sounds a bit bittersweet. Fuck it, I'm concentrating on the positive and congratulating you anyway. Congrats!

BTW, what's your primary area of research? I remember you posting about multithreading a while back, but I was never sure if that was the focus of your research or merely an offshoot from it.

It's overwhelmingly positive. Blacksburg (despite being in the middle of nowhere) is a more fun town to live in than Williamsburg (which is near stuff, but is a place where fun goes to die). There's some people in Williamsburg I'll miss - and one girl in particular - but other than that, everything about coming here is better.

Right now, I'm finishing up a project on <a href="http://www.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/streamfl ... tithreaded memory allocation</a> (I need to update the posted code...). In general, I do "systems" research, which doesn't say much. My advisor is a High Performance Computing guy, and everything I do is HPC in some way, but my own interests are in programming languages, compilers, and general operating systems. But I end up doing whatever seems like an interesting problem when we encounter it.

Ishamael wrote:Also, two negative posts about accounting (Zeus and Flip). Is this a general trend in this field?

So what's the change you're looking to make Zeus?

Public accounting is a garbage field. All the work is is doing the same shit over and over again following the same rules. So, although it looks like there's variety, there actually isn't. As well, EVERYONE is lookin' to sue your ass, so you spend - not exaggerating - 50-60% of your time doing stuff to cover your ass. This generally involves filling in checklists, which take hours, and spending days doing stuff that's not really required EXCEPT to save your ass from future lawsuits. Hence, the long hours for no reason. Oh, and the client's are always bitching about how long it takes and don't want to pay. Yeah, that's a great way to spend my time.

And on top of that, because everyone hates it so much (90% of the people leave public accounting), there's even more time pressures 'cause there's no one to do the work. So, that just means longer hours on top of the reasons above.

So, you can move to industry (where you're preparing and not auditing) where you make more money and work less hours. Um, YES!

And thus is the explanation for the crappiness of public auditing. If you didn't have to do it to get you designation, I"m sure 90% of the people would never enter it to begin with.

Public Accounting has two sides, Auditing and Taxes. As an auditor you are unappreciated at the client site and do meaningless work on last years financial statements. Who cares about last year? Noone. I hated auditing for the reasons Zeus stated.

I decided that i wanted to actually DO business, not just scour over last years numbers that noone gives a rats ass about and moved to tax. While i like tax better, and am appreciated by clients for my work, it still is pretty annoying to have to always be billable and go through the tedius steps that my firm requires for every return. I am so tired of 1040 checklists. All in all it is just not very creative and very boring.

I need to be up and moving, i think. When we move i am going to seriously look into buying a retail franchise of some kind. With a financial background i should be able to make whatever it is work and people make a lot of money by owning those things.

Flip wrote:I need to be up and moving, i think. When we move i am going to seriously look into buying a retail franchise of some kind. With a financial background i should be able to make whatever it is work and people make a lot of money by owning those things.

Retail is an evil, evil animal. It CAN be profitable, but it's very hard. No one wants to give you the money to get it going unless you can prove you don't need it and everyone is trying to take money from you any which way they can. On top of that, all the customers always think you're ripping them off regardless of how good of a price you give. This is why most small start-up business fail within the first two years (I believe it's as high as 95%)

You're an accountant, why dont' you just open up your own small firm? Don't you have any contacts that you can relay into steady work? Even if you're making a bit less, you can still be happy and not have to do shit work all day. Eventually, you can build your name and make more. I'm thinking of doing it on the side while I'm going to my new job. I have lots of families with businesses and such. When it's profitable enough, I can just move into my own business.

Enron seemed to appreciate *their* auditors plenty.

Anyway, I have a friend that works for Earnst and Young and I got a sense for the pressures you guys are under, especially in the US with Sarbanes-Oxley. I don't envy her.

Best of luck with your transitions. I think a lot of job happiness is having control over your environment. Running your own business is definitely a step in the right direction, IMO.

Zeus wrote: You're an accountant, why dont' you just open up your own small firm? Don't you have any contacts that you can relay into steady work? Even if you're making a bit less, you can still be happy and not have to do shit work all day. Eventually, you can build your name and make more. I'm thinking of doing it on the side while I'm going to my new job. I have lots of families with businesses and such. When it's profitable enough, I can just move into my own business.

That is a possibility, too, but it would be slow going. I have friends and family that i could do some work for, but not enough. It would take a lot of time to build my client base so i would need to work something in the meantime... the first step, though, is to find a place that we can confortably afford so that risks like this can be taken seriously. Kim and I pay a little over 2,000 a month for mortgage + condo fees... we could move 15 inutes away from the beach at Wilmington and get a house where we pay 1200-1300. Kim grew up in San Diego and really wants to move to the beach, Wilmington is a great town to get away from the hustle and bustle of NoVa, but isnt too southern redneck.

That's where my wife and I are lucky. We were able to get a house with decent land in a nice area for under $190k Cdn in a city that is not considered to be within commuting range of Toronto but is about as far from Toronto as some of those outer "commuter" cities are. Only prob is, I have to take the bus or drive; no commuter trains...yet. But it's only really a problem if I'm working on the grid (core of the city), which I don't plan on doing for that much longer. And I know for a fact that it's not going to drop in price as long as we take care of it, so I'm pretty happy I was able to get that deal.

Plus I'm not in the city, which I despise. I"m a comfy-focused guy and not being able to leave my house between 6 and 10 am and 3 and 7 pm in fear of getting stuck in insane traffic isn't my idea of a nice place to live. All I have to do now is secure my future