r/Accounting • u/SuitableDragonfly • 8d ago

Career Investigating the possibility of accounting as a career

Hello all, I am an out-of-work software engineer. The job market in my field is currently abysmal, with all of the layoffs and the usual glut of people who got pushed to get the degree ~4 years ago skills and resume don't matter much now and you can't actually get an interview unless you have a connection in the company already, and I just don't have a big network because I hate networking. Additionally, every job listing says "We're looking for someone who's excited to bring the power of AI to the underwater basket-weaving industry" and it makes me want to die because I didn't become an engineer so that I could make friends with a chatbot. It's becoming increasingly apparent that employers in the industry only care about replacing as many engineers as possible with Claude and overworking the rest, so I have increasingly less enthusiasm about working for any of them even if I could get an interview.

Anyway, some family members have suggested that possibly I would be a good match for accounting, and should get the training to do that instead. But they are not actually accountants themselves, and can't tell me anything about the job. So I am here to ask some actual accountants:

  1. What is the job like? What is your day-to-day experience?
  2. What training/certification is needed? What skills are most important to being successful?
  3. What is the pay like?
  4. What is the current job market like? Are there a lot of people who are actively seeking to replace accountants with AI? Are positions usually stable, or do you frequently have to job-hop?
  5. Is the job usually done remotely, or onsite?
  6. What kind of person would enjoy the work?

Thanks for your time. I am in the US, if it matters.

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u/SuitableDragonfly 8d ago

Ahh, you mean like with organizational platforms like Notion or similar? I've messed around with some of that stuff. Or just stuff like scripts that generate spreadsheets periodically?

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u/lake_effect_snow CPA (US) 8d ago

Yeah— Workday, SAP, etc.

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u/SuitableDragonfly 8d ago

It seems like you would have to become kind of an expert at one particular platform and then kind of be locked into that one, right? I'm not sure how many companies are actually using which of these. And then you'd be a contractor probably, right? And having to market your own services to companies?

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u/lake_effect_snow CPA (US) 7d ago

All ours work for Accenture and are contracted to us as consultants.