Case Study: Computer vs. Accounting

The following is the career path of Jane, a Chinese immigrant.

Jane graduated from a Chinese second tier university in 1995 with a BS degree in science. Then she went to Canada for a MS degree in biology, married to a Chinese gentleman Joe, then moved to California in 1999.  At first, Jane worked as a research associate at biology labs but became tired of killing mice on a weekly basis to harvest their cells and working on some stupid hunches of the PI's who were, in her eyes, designing one meaningless experiment after another.  After the birth of her first baby, Jane quitted from the biology lab and jumped to a computer startup company in 2000.

Although Jane had no formal training in computer science (her only exposure was an online course in C++), she taught herself PHP, Java, SQL, etc., just like every other Chinese at the dot-com boom would do.  Her job was pretty demanding but she could handle it.  However, when she talked to the architect of her company or other seniors at project meetings, she realized that she could never achieve their level without a formal training or decades of experience.  In addition, she couldn't work overtime everyday like another American colleague, who only had a high school diploma but worked extremely hard (>72 hr/wk in front of the computer screen).

Then came the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2002.  Jane was laid off in the third round.  In contrast, that American colleague was retained.  At that time Jane was using H-1B visa and her husband just started working on his Green Card application use the LC route.  After some discussion, Jane stayed at home to take care of her baby.

While watching the baby grew bigger and bigger under her wings, Jane was constantly thinking about her career path.  She hates biology although research associate in biotech is a fairly stable job in California.  She likes computer for the working environment.  But she didn't want to compete against new graduates in their twenties or learn new techniques every half a year. Another two options very popular among Chinese are nurse and accounting.  After consulting with her husband, she chose the accounting route.

After taking TOEFL and GMAT, plus 4 required business classes from community colleges, she was accepted by a top tier accountancy program in California, very close to her home.  She struggled at first when absorbing the principles of accounting and business.  But she ploughed through just like most Chinese would do.

After one year at the MS program, her husband submitted I-485 and both of them received EAD.  To test water of the job market, Jane started attending job fairs at her university.  She worked for two weeks as a clerk before landing a 3 month intern position doing internal audit at a medium-size financial company.  She did pretty well but her supervisor was not very friendly to foreigners so Jane still interviewed for other positions.

One month after the end of her summer intern, Jane accepted an offer to work in a healthcare organization as a financial reporting analyst, which she had no idea what to expect.  Her manager was a nice ABC, who wanted to develop tools to streamline the financial reporting system.  Jane's experience as a software engineer and her training in accounting were the right combination for the job.  After several vendor-sponsored training and trial-and-error experiments, Jane had a solid grasp of the technology needed to complete her job duties.  That was followed by two year’s journey of a full time employee during the day and a full time student during the night kind of routine for Jane.  It’s not easy but she made it.  Gradually she became the go-to-person for system administration and application development.  She enjoyed her work very mush as it requires knowledge of both worlds: accounting and computer science.  That’s her niche.

One drawback of Jane’s job is the low salary since when she was hired, she was nobody.  After graduated with a MS degree in accounting, she asked the company for a salary adjustment.  That application had to break a lot of red tapes and the eventual pay raise was laughable.  Unfazed, Jane started another round of job hunt right away.  With a degree in accounting, 2.5 years of working experience, and a green card in hand, she was very picky for her next job, which had to satisfy the following criteria: 1) higher pay; 2) convenient commute (save ga$); 3) flexible hours (to take care of her child in elementary school); 4) portable skills.  That’s not easy to find to say the least.  In a slowdown economy like what we are in now, finding a good job is about as tough as scoring floor seats for the NBA finals.  But she tried anyway.

Jane interviewed first at a research branch of a large corporation, an America household name, and found out that this legendary company’s accounting system is, well, quite a legacy.  They use Excel for all most everything!  When Jane showed them that she can automate a lot of accounting operations, display real time data from daily operations, provide up-to-date financial information at the fingertip of executives, build drill-down-enabled financial reports, and use BI tools or forecasting software for other financial operations, the interviewer was stunned!  He didn’t’t know the availability of all these new technologies.  No wonder that company struggled in the market place.  They were steps (if not miles) behind the recent innovation in information technology judging from their financial system setup.

Her second interview was at a head quarter of a real estate/financial service company in California.  The interview went well and Jane liked the manager there.  Plus that job satisfied all 4 criteria of her job hunt.  So she gladly accepted the offer in the spring of 2008.  As it turned out, her new job gave her a lot of freedom to explore things she wanted to do such as budgeting and forecasting.  As usual she fixed quite a few bugs in the financial/accounting system of the real estate company and created a few other long-sought-after functions in just one month.  By demonstrating her coding and accounting capabilities, Jane made inroad against her piers at work.  All these strengthened her belief that playing at the interface of IT and accounting/finance is to her advantage. Case in point: the person who worked in her position before was a brilliant programmer.  He wrote sheets and sheets of beautiful codes.  However, he also had next to zero understanding of financial/accounting operations, which led to many silly mistakes in the eyes of the managers.

Although Jane enjoyed her honey moon at the new company, the financial health of the real estate industry gave her goose bumps.  The company was loosing money, shutting down offices at numerous locations.  There would not be any job-related training.  From the data Jane generated for the executives, it’s obvious that the real estate industry remained mired in a deep malaise.  In a nutshell, there is enough smoke to believe that a fire is in the vicinity.  Data won’t lie if you look straight into their eyes by removing the spins or makeup!

Luckily for Jane, a lot of recruiters had her contact numbers.  One day she received a recruiter’s call at work, recommending a system administrator position at the head quarter of a national retail chain.  With nothing to loose, Jane restarted the job search engine and followed the routine of phone interviews, first- and second-round interviews.  Again the interview went very well as what Jane described in her talks struck a cord with the hiring manager.  It turned out that they bought a fancy financial software years ago, which nobody in the company had figured out how to integrate with their current toolbox.  Jane convinced them that she would thrive at new challenges by combining her strength at both accounting and IT.  That’s a good selling point and she passed with flying colors.

So after only two months at the real estate company, Jane jumped ship again and went to the retail chain headquarter with a new title and a new raise.  Will she move again?  “Not in five years” was her answer.  Her final remark was “A dream job should stretch your mind and build your skills, turn your crank, touch your soul, give you meaning beyond the dollar sign.  I am still working on that.”

One muggle