I only read the TL;DR but I can say that it was not the case at an investment bank I worked for. There are a lot of bad things one can say about working there but this is definitely not one of them. You could get enormously empowered and start and run with pretty big and completely new things that have never been done before on the trading floor very early on you if you are smart. And that provided an enormous (even scary) scope for putting one's intelligence to work.
Among the (very arrogant and highly ambitious) group of people I went to b-school with and then worked with, Big 4 accounting firms were never viewed as a choice of very intelligent people who wanted to put that intelligence to work. They were thought to go to hedge funds, bulge bracket investment banks, vc, pe, strategy consulting, tech but never to do audits at Big 4, which paid at least a digit less than all of the above and immersed you into the exciting world of putting together audit files for years (nobody sought employment at Big Four after graduation really). The stereotype was that undergrads who do not really have a passion for anything and not enough ambition to really go for it join accounting firms and train as accountants to go with the flow, etc. Accounting firms were never associated in our minds with very smart people shaking things up, changing the game, etc.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-10-17 09:28 pm (UTC)Among the (very arrogant and highly ambitious) group of people I went to b-school with and then worked with, Big 4 accounting firms were never viewed as a choice of very intelligent people who wanted to put that intelligence to work. They were thought to go to hedge funds, bulge bracket investment banks, vc, pe, strategy consulting, tech but never to do audits at Big 4, which paid at least a digit less than all of the above and immersed you into the exciting world of putting together audit files for years (nobody sought employment at Big Four after graduation really). The stereotype was that undergrads who do not really have a passion for anything and not enough ambition to really go for it join accounting firms and train as accountants to go with the flow, etc. Accounting firms were never associated in our minds with very smart people shaking things up, changing the game, etc.