u/Neat_Town5456

I am 26 and my spouse will be giving birth to our second child soon. (I had my first at 23).

I have also just accepted a SFA role after starting my career in FP&A, moving to corp Treasury and now pivoting back into FP&A as a SFA.

I don’t feel like it’s affected my career growth, given that I have reached SFA in 4 years, 3 of which I had a kid during, however I can’t help but feel that I’m being judged at the companies I’ve worked for. Yes, there are times when you have to leave early for a sick child, but this might happen once a month at most, and coworkers have always left work early in the same frequency just for other reasons. It just feels like it hits different when the 25/26 year old leaves for their kid when your coworkers think of you as fresh out of school.

Anyone else done something similar? How did this affect your career? Ultimately, I don’t care to be a CFO. I’ve already amassed more wealth in these 4 years of my career than I ever was able to even fathom in my childhood (lower family income upbringing) and I feel like I balance pretty well right now between work and family life. Anyone relate or can chime in?

I'm at a crossroads, and slightly anxious about my future with multiple choices in front of me.

I'll try to be brief, but I am early career and recently pivoted from FP&A to Treasury. At my last company, I basically ran the Trade Finance program, Daily/weekly liquidity, and got exposure to capital markets. My intention has always been to try and bounce between Treasury/FP&A/Controllership through multiple companies or within the same company, simply to become multi-faceted and build my brand as a finance generalist.

I joined a new company recently(Fortune 1000) in their Corporate Treasury department and it was fully remote, but it has been a nightmare to say the least. I was told I would get to run the Daily Cash/liqudity and get exposure to capital markets. So far, I have been a collections monkey - not even tracking them and analyzing DSO or anything else. I literally code all the transactions and change descriptions. At times, it feels incredibly arbitrary and I'm getting dunked on constantly by my manager. "I TOLD YOU ALREADY, IF IT HAS 0248466283-DJFBSK in the description, YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO CODE IT AS SCOOBY DOO". And there are thousands of these arbitrary nuances on thousands of weekly transactions. I've NEVER dealt with this granular level of data even coming from business unit FP&A before.

They are incredibly old school and recently told me I am wasting my time trying to do anything in excel, and that I should eyeball the data in our ERP systems. As an "Analyst", well this crushed me. I also told I was wasting time googling financial concepts. Basically, they want me to memorize mechanical processes, but not the "why". The micromanaging is also next level, with frequent "what are you working on?" messages. Ummm, the thing you just asked me to complete, no?

I have recently interviewed for 2 companies. A Senior FP&A Analyst for a regional bank (hybrid schedule, pays around 100k) and a Finance Business Partner role (fully remote, former PE backed legacy tech company that IPOd a few years ago, and kinda rebranded themselves as an AI player, true or not, and pays up to 115k).

The bank is profitable, growing and operates across multiple business segments (commercial, personal, wealth mgmt). My concerns is going back from remote to hybrid schedule, as well as getting pigeonholed in "banking fp&a". I've heard that the client facing employees at banks view these guys just as "the back office guys" as well. The Tech company is unprofitable and seems to be burning cash, although they have a very optimistic growth multiple from investors. While legacy, they technically have proprietary saas, and their hype seems to come from their "AI" component, and I could have SaaS for the first time on my resume. My concern is the overall potential volatility of a cash burning tech company that's not truly a venture backed hot new thing.

Both roles offer exposure to upper management and the CFO, while the bank seems to be more pure FP&A and the tech company is a mix of FP&A, Revenue Analysis, and Operations. Which direction do you lean towards?