Is TAS a boring career ?

I worked in FDD. It's definitely a step up from audit but it's not that great of a job IMO. 

Positives:

1. At the junior levels, you get a lot of experience spinning through and making sense of large datasets. Spending time in FDD really helped me become super fast in Excel with keyboard shortcuts, knowing how to do some advanced logic calculations, etc. 

2. You get slightly more business sense in FDD. You're looking moreso at trends in the financial statements and cutting the financial data into meaningful slices to try to figure out unusual items or the go-forward earnings power of the business. It's not like audit where you're just doing shit because the SEC says you should.

3. This is a positive or negative, but you do learn more value-add accounting knowledge. Instead of focusing too much on the minutia of transactions, you're moreso using your accounting knowledge to understand if it's reasonable and/or how it could impact the IS/BS.

4. Similar to point 2, you do a lot of ratio analysis and understand concepts like DSOs, current ratios, etc. to evaluate the health of the business.

Negatives: 

1. The work just isn't that interesting. You might get some interesting projects where you're doing a lot of pro-forma adjustments and whatnot, but a lot of the work is dealing with small, crappy bolt-on acquisitions that mostly involve cash-to-accrual adjustments

2. The hours are really unpredictable. It's kind of like being on an M&A schedule in terms of dealing with being on-call all the time but without the pay. The hours aren't nearly as bad as IB consistently, but having nothing to do and then dropping everything to work on a deal with an unreasonable deadline gets old very quickly when you're not being paid 50-100% in bonuses.

3. IMO the work is boring AF IMO. Yeah, trends and whatnot are interesting at first, but at the end of the day, there's only so many ways to dig into revenue/cost metrics. Once you've done a price-volume analysis a few times, it gets old churning those over and over again. Also, when your scope is limited to only current and historical data, which is how FDD operates, there's only so much you can opine on regarding the business and how well it'll do.

4. Building on point 3, the work is super commoditized because it's very rudimentary. A lot of audit firms realized audit is commoditized and got into FDD for higher margins. Well, now all those firms are trying to build out FDD practices by underbidding because they realize they can do the same work as the Big 4 and win on low-price, high volume. This doesn't matter as much for junior levels, but the broader point is that if your Partners can't charge as much for the work and is winning mostly on volume, it means there's less comp pool to go around and that you'll be stuck grinding out more and more deals to make money. My opinion is you want to be in a high-margin business in consulting to maximize pay while minimizing hours, but FDD is the polar opposite of this.

5. This is a problem bankers/consultants deal with too, but the investors don't really care that much about the QOE. They want to know major red flags, but they've 90% made up their mind when it comes to the QOE/NWC stage and mostly just want the report to present to lenders for funding by an "unbiased" third-party or to hopefully knock down the purchase price a bit before they buy it. Some deals do break based on the QOE report, but it usually takes a major red flag. I can't tell you how many times I made reasonable adjustments based on fantastic management assumptions that I've been asked to remove for fear that the lenders won't like it when they read the report.

Long story short is FDD is a great place for 2 years and is a huge step up from audit, but if you want to be in finance, don't expect it to rock your world.