Making the leap from accountant to analytics engineer
In seventh grade, I decided it was time to pick a realistic career to work toward, and since I had an accountant in my life who I really looked up to, that is what I chose. Around ten years later, I finished my accounting degree with a minor in business information systems (a fancy way of saying I coded in C# for four or five classes). I passed my CPA exams quickly and became a CPA as soon as I hit the two-year experience requirement. I spent my first few years at a small firm completing tax returns but I didn't feel like I was learning enough, so I went to a larger firm right before the pandemic started. The factors that brought me to the point of changing industries are numerous, but I’ll try to keep it concise: the tax industry relies on underpaying its workers to maintain margins and prevent itself from being top-heavy, my future work as a manager was unappealing to me, and my work was headed in a direction I wasn’t excited about.