I suspect most people following this question are students hoping to break into the Big Four — curious about where that path might actually lead. Let me share my own story and the thinking behind the choices I made, in the hope that it's useful to someone.
My background, in brief: I joined a Big Four firm's audit practice straight out of college, stayed for a little over a year, then left to study abroad. I now work in financial analysis at a European FMCG company in Tokyo. It's a fairly conventional finance career arc — and yet, in some ways, a departure from what most ex-Big Four people end up doing.
How I Ended Up at a Big Four Firm
I'll be straight with you: I bombed my college entrance exam. I ended up at a second-tier university I'd never heard of before I enrolled, studying auditing — a major I hadn't chosen myself. As it happened, my school had been one of the earlier ones to partner with ACCA, so on my very first day of orientation, my parents stumbled into an ACCA information session and signed me up on the spot.
Throughout college, every internship I did was in consulting — Big Four strategy lines and top-tier firms. All my interview prep was aimed at those handful of elite firms. What I didn't understand at the time, being young and naive, was that without a target-school pedigree, you simply don't get a seat at that table. Every hour of preparation was wasted effort. As for Big Four audit, I applied to exactly two firms almost as an afterthought — purely to get some interview practice.
The outcome: the only offer I accepted was from Big Four audit. I also had a few bank offers and some Fortune 500 finance roles. All things considered, Big Four audit was the best option I could see from where I was standing, so I took it.
Why I Knew I Had to Leave
About a year in, it became clear to me that staying wasn't a long-term option. My reasons:
- I care deeply about the environment I'm growing in. After joining, I quickly noticed that the people around me — seniors and peers alike — were rarely the kind of people you find yourself admiring or aspiring to become.
Part of that is structural. The qualities celebrated in Big Four audit tend to be "hardworking," "detail-oriented," and "good at managing up and managing clients." That value system was fundamentally at odds with mine. From as far back as I can remember, I've believed that work should mean something — that every task you do should leave you with something gained.
I do think audit can give people a solid financial foundation — a real sense of how numbers reflect and serve actual business operations. But in practice, whether you're a first-year or a senior, the work boils down to documenting that "audit procedures were performed." Rigid, uncreative, and — here's what really got to me — even for someone genuinely trying to extract industry knowledge and business intuition from client financials, the endless deadlines, the senseless questions managers raise just to cover themselves with the partner, the painstaking formatting of workpapers, and the glacially slow company computers all conspire to make the job deeply demoralizing. It's nearly impossible to walk away from a day's work having learned anything transferable or broadly applicable.
There's also the people problem. Big Four firms hire in enormous cohorts, which means a meaningful share of any intake got in simply because they went to a brand-name school or had the right major — not because they have sharp minds, real potential, or business sense. The gap between those people and the ones who actually thought hard and got something out of their education is vast. In my experience, the population most likely to fall into the first category skewed heavily toward graduates of UK and Australian master's programs and the bottom of the class at schools like Jiao Tong or Fudan. (To be fair, that may have changed — those cohorts may be excellent now. But that's how it was when I was there.) Working alongside people like that, you get very little out of the social and professional fabric of the office. And that matters a great deal to me.
- A lot of people choose Big Four because the promotion ladder, compensation structure, and exit opportunities all seem clearly mapped out. If someone told you that five years here would get you to ¥450K a year, it's hard to walk away from that when you're fresh out of school. But after spending some time inside, I started seeing cracks in that story.
The predictable ladder really only holds true up to manager — and these days, even getting to manager on schedule is no longer a given. Back then, plenty of people assumed that ten to thirteen years meant partnership, because that was the timeline the sitting partners had followed. What those people missed was that those senior partners had climbed in an era when the partner seats above them were waiting to be filled. By the time I joined, those seats were already occupied by people in their thirties and forties. Even if I stayed another decade, those people would only be in their forties or fifties — nowhere near ready to step aside. The supposedly inevitable path to the top already felt like a myth for anyone born in the nineties.
Five years is not five years — it depends entirely on luck. If you're lucky enough to land on a large, high-quality engagement — stable fees, consistent work on the same client and similar accounts quarter after quarter, a good working relationship with the client, and a manager who has a clear-eyed view of the risks involved — that's one kind of five years. If instead you're cycling through a new engagement every few weeks, meeting new colleagues, facing new clients, and fielding phone calls defending the work you did on your last project, that's an entirely different weight to carry. The internal exhaustion those two paths produce isn't even comparable. And how you get onto the good engagements has a lot to do with factors outside the work itself — political capital, relationships, social skills. My upbringing didn't equip me for that game, and I was honest enough with myself to know it.
My actual interests had nothing to do with audit — this became even clearer after I joined the FMCG company in Tokyo, and I'll write more about that another time. But looking back at my time in Big Four, the thing I was most engaged by was figuring out how to make the company's locked-down computers actually usable. I paid for my own VPN, installed Dropbox to back up my workpapers, bought an SSD to swap into the spare M.2 slot on the motherboard, researched which background processes I could kill without breaking anything, and taught the whole team which software installs would make their lives easier.
The finance work itself was a bad fit for me in almost every way. I'm careless with details — to avoid numerical errors, I had to spend far more time checking my own work than anyone else did. I don't retain numbers; I'd look at a figure on one spreadsheet and forget it completely three minutes later. And maybe I just understood too clearly how the whole thing worked: once I grasped the underlying logic of audit, it was obvious that the end result was predetermined. The client gets a clean opinion. Everything the junior staff does is just mechanical documentation designed to arrive at the conclusion that nothing is wrong. There's almost no room to be resourceful, to problem-solve, to find a better way. My entire sense of achievement, going all the way back to childhood, has always come from figuring out something on my own — finding an approach others missed, seeing an opportunity the market overlooked and actually doing something about it. This job gave me none of that.
I'll give myself credit for genuine curiosity. Whether the client made industrial equipment or sold jewelry, I wanted to understand the margin structure, the cost base, the sales channels, the core value proposition. But in Big Four audit, from day one of any new engagement, you're handed last year's workpapers and the client's documents, and most of what you do is swap out last year's numbers for this year's. And the sheer volume of that tedious work is almost always more than you can finish in the time allotted — which means you end the day too drained to wonder what those additional loan agreements in the client's files are actually financing, or what they might mean for the business.
- The working conditions are, frankly, inhumane.
Budget constraints mean that on many engagements, you end up getting paid for maybe twenty to thirty percent of the overtime you actually work. If you've had any exposure to basic labor rights, you'd find it farcical — and demeaning — that you have to ask your engagement manager's permission to report your own hours, and that when she does let you log a few extra, she delivers the news with the magnanimity of someone granting a personal favor.
Scheduling is equally arbitrary. The rhythm of a project is entirely at the discretion of whoever's in charge. I saw situations where a manager with a two-year-old would stroll in at 11 a.m. and leave at 11 p.m. You were technically free to arrive whenever you wanted — but you had better be there when she left, which might be eleven at night, or one in the morning.
I've never been willing to wait in line for food, no matter how good the restaurant. The idea of having my daily schedule, my sleep, my entire life rhythm bent around another person's routine for no reason at all — that was genuinely difficult for me. I know, I know: this is the Chinese workplace. Someone with higher emotional intelligence wouldn't say any of this out loud. You endure it, and someday, when you're the one in charge, you'll have the same privilege. But I couldn't make peace with the logic of that. Why turn the workplace into an ecosystem of mutual harm? The fact that you'll one day be able to inflict the same treatment on someone else doesn't make what was done to you okay.
What I Think About the Big Four Today
People often say it's a great launchpad for a finance career. That statement deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. For one thing, how much of traditional finance work will still require human involvement in ten or twenty years? The answer, if you look at it honestly, is not reassuring.
The institutional prestige is also deflating — fast. The fact that so many current and former Big Four employees are out here monetizing their experience through paid talks and knowledge-sharing posts tells you something. This industry is on the verge of being thoroughly demystified.
And on a personal level: in the long run, people really should do work they genuinely believe in — work that gives them at least some sense of accomplishment — rather than chasing a salary or a credential that, in the case of the Big Four, is increasingly a mirage anyway. Most people, I think, will find it hard to feel any deep sense of meaning in work that is this mechanical, this rigid, and this laden with busy work that serves no real purpose. Don't let other people's expectations, or the conventional wisdom of an older generation, push you away from opportunities that might look less prestigious on paper but actually fit who you are.
For those still standing outside the Big Four's door, wondering if they should knock harder: as the old saying goes — why fight for a ticket on the Titanic?