Shayne Kuhaneck still remembers the review that could have ended his accounting career before it really started.
Nearly 20 years ago, Kuhaneck was a junior staffer at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, trying to prove he belonged among some of the sharpest technical accountants in the country. Then his first big technical memo came back from an International Accounting Standards Board director with a line brutal enough to stop a career cold.
“Halfway through reading this memo I lost the will to live,” the director told him.
Then came the kicker: “I think it needs some work.”
Kuhaneck, now chief accounting officer at Rippling, recently shared the story on LinkedIn. His verdict today: the comment was harsh—but not wrong.
“That was rough,” he wrote. “But he was right.”
A ‘Welcome to Accounting’ Moment
The post hit a nerve with accountants who know the ritual well: a first memo, audit file, tax return or workpaper goes up for review, and comes back looking like a crime scene.
In a profession built on precision, review is unavoidable. Bad numbers, weak analysis and sloppy documentation can have real consequences. But Kuhaneck’s story also raised a question many young accountants eventually face: when does tough feedback stop being coaching and start becoming humiliation?
Several accountants who responded to the post shared their own early-career beatdowns. One recalled having a first memo torn apart in a public board meeting. Simmons University accounting professor Ray Pfeiffer warned there is “no advantage to humiliation” as a teaching tool.
That distinction matters in accounting, where young professionals are often trained under deadline pressure by reviewers who are themselves under pressure. The work has to be right. But the delivery can decide whether criticism builds confidence or crushes it.
‘Everybody Here Is Smarter Than Me’
Kuhaneck said the memo disaster landed at a vulnerable moment.
He had not followed the typical path into FASB. He had not been a FASB postgraduate technical assistant. He was not coming from a Big Four advisory group. He had left Big Four for an industry job before joining the board.
Once he arrived, he said, he quickly felt outmatched.
“Everybody there was extraordinarily talented, extraordinarily seasoned and highly intelligent,” Kuhaneck told Thomson Reuters in an April 30, 2026, interview. “It was sort of one of the first times where you kind of experience, ‘Everybody here is smarter than me.'”
The feeling was personal. Kuhaneck grew up in a small town in Western New York and graduated in a class of just 24 students. He did not see himself as the obvious future technical director of FASB or a speaker at major SEC accounting conferences.
So when the IASB director torched his memo, it cut deeper than a normal review note.
“To me, that could have gone one of two ways,” Kuhaneck said. “It could have been like, ‘Wow, sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy of, yep, I’m not worthy of being here,’ and I could have folded up my tent and gone home.”
He didn’t.
Turning Criticism Into Fuel
Instead, Kuhaneck said, he treated the criticism as a dare.
“It doesn’t matter that I’m a kid from Western New York who graduated in a small class with 24 people,” he said. “I work hard, I’m smart, and I’m going to figure out how to do this.”
The sting stayed with him. He studied harder, reviewed his writing more carefully and dug deeper into the accounting literature.
“I never ever want to have a comment like that again on a memo that I write,” Kuhaneck said.
Michael Bottala, a Los Angeles-based CPA and solution consultant at MindBridge, said the topic captures a common “welcome to accounting” moment.
“You think you’ve prepared this return or you’ve done this audit process and you’ve done a great job, and you send it in for review and it just gets absolutely demolished,” Bottala said.
His advice to young accountants: do not confuse a rough review with a personal verdict.
“Don’t take it personally,” Bottala said. “It’s work. Work is work.”
But Bottala said there is still a difference between a demanding reviewer and a bad manager.
Some people make the work better. Others just make the room worse.
“There’s going to be certain people you just don’t thrive with,” he said. “You have to keep your peace and navigate around them.”
When the Blow Comes Quietly
Not every career blowup comes with a savage one-liner.
For Bob Michaels, a partner in CrossCountry’s Accounting Advisory practice, the painful moment came when he expected a promotion—and did not get it.
Early in his career, Michaels thought the path was simple: work harder than everyone else, know the material and deliver for clients.
“I believed the path to partner was simple: outwork everyone, know the material better than anyone in the room, and deliver for your clients,” Michaels said by email.
Then he was passed over in his first year of eligibility. The next year, his promotion was delayed again.
Michaels started interviewing elsewhere. But the setback forced him to rethink the way he was managing his career.
“The playbook that gets you to a certain level—hard work, strong performance, client delivery—is not the same playbook that takes you to the next one,” he said.
His message to younger accountants: being good is not enough if the right people do not know what you want.
“You alone have to manage your career,” Michaels said.
Pressure Only Gets Louder
For Kuhaneck, the memo review became an early lesson in pressure—and the pressure only grew from there.
Later at FASB, he dealt with angry banks, furious constituents and political blowback over controversial accounting decisions.
“You really haven’t lived until you’ve been yelled at by a senator,” Kuhaneck said. “Once you’ve been yelled at by a senator, or you’ve had a congressman on the phone screaming at you about something that they don’t like, you truly haven’t lived yet.”
That experience changed how he viewed corporate stress.
“I can always look back on those early days and some of the tough times that we went through at the FASB and think, well, it isn’t that hard,” he said. “I don’t have an entire lobby of banks mad at me for what I’m doing.”
Kuhaneck said the demands on accountants change as they rise. Early on, the job is mostly technical: know the rules, get the answer right and prove the work can survive review.
“Early on in my career, it was 80 percent technical tasks, 10 percent relational, and then 10 percent learning strategy,” he said.
Now, he said, the mix has flipped.
“I spend 50 percent on relationship building, 40 percent on strategy, and 10 percent on technical tasks,” Kuhaneck said.
That shift requires a different kind of toughness—managing people, building trust and knowing when the perfect technical answer is only part of the job.
Accounting Is Still a People Business
Kuhaneck said mentors at KPMG, FASB and PwC helped him learn that accounting is not just a numbers business. It is a people business too.
“If people don’t want to work for you or work with you, you’ll never be successful,” he said.
His advice to young accountants is simple: do not try to survive the profession alone.
“Don’t go it alone,” Kuhaneck said. “If you go it alone, you’re likely going to find it to be a hard road.”
The failed memo did not knock Kuhaneck out of accounting. It pushed him deeper into it.
But for a profession trying to bring in and keep young talent, his story lands as more than a colorful career anecdote. Tough review may be part of the job. The question is whether it has to leave a mark.
“Don’t let failure discourage you,” Kuhaneck wrote. “Let it sharpen you.”
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