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To Whom It May Going Concern: ‘Your jaded mentality toward the profession is often over the top’

Welcome to a special Tuesday after Labor Day edition of To Whom It May Going Concern, our infrequent feature of the best (read: worst) and worst (read: best!) tips and feedback we get from readers. Have a tip or feedback for us? Email us at [email protected] or drop something in the tips box. All messages are on the record unless stated otherwise. 

It's the first day back after a long holiday weekend which is nearly as eventful as the first day before a long holiday weekend, so it dawned on us a little cheap entertainment may be in order. Luckily, we were handed the feedback from this year's GC Reader Survey this afternoon and it does just the trick.

We got plenty of people saying nice things like "love it" or the tepid "[It's] occasionally entertaining," or "it's the tits" and we appreciate those, but we think you'll enjoy these more interesting comments. 

Let's kick things off with someone who obviously put a lot of thought into their response:

At the risk of pissing off firms even more you have to stop being so sterile and provide more detail wherever possible.  so many of the articles that would be otherwise compelling where people are looking for name, rank and serial number read like the home page for AOL which is wickedly lame in trying to get your curiousity piqued to click on the story, "the website this intern visited that changed her life at work" and then there's very little in terms of detail.   There's reasons for not disclosing certain information which is totally understandable but to say you heard that one firm is firing a partner because of improprieties and leave it at that is not worthy of reading – it happens all the time.  The only time you get into detail is when something is already in the public domain and newswires.  You need to be cutting edge where people read your articles, forward them and mention – you're not going to believe this…You don't want your website to be as boring as the poor accountants that read it…  better investigative reporting, more cutting edge news, pick it up a notch.

We got one personnel suggestion:

Get rid of Caleb. He's a tool.

As well as content ideas:

Needs a forum

Publishing input:

Too many adds.  When I get ot home screen an immediately have a pop up without a "X-out" option… that is bullshit.  Won't be returning to the website if that is the case going forward.

Here's some community management advice:

Please encourage the posting of substantive comments and discourage (to the extent possible) the disruptive and crude, pointless remarks. Some of the threads have really valuable input, while most are destroyed by frustrated/angry people who don't seem to like their lives.

There are potential stalkers:

Kudos to Adrienne for her fiery articles and dry humor…love it!  Someday, when I get my CPA license, I'd love to go to the Maryland CPA day and meet her in person.

And honest expressions of regret:

I only read your articles with fun sounding titles/images because I am immature like that. Thanks for being both informative and sympathetic towards people who dislike their careers.

A nonsensical insult:

Collin is kinda weird. Hard to imagine him auditing anything other than his shoes….

An accurate critique:

I think Adrienne Gonzalez is RUDE! (and uses vulgar speech)

Someone is outright confused:

Often, I can't even tell what the topic of an article or discussion is.

And of course more than a few people don't like our attitude:

Snark is good but sometimes you're sacrificing important information just to achieve cheap snarkiness.

Stop being so bitter! It's depressing

[Y]our jaded mentality toward the profession is often over the top and just comes off as annoying.  

If you didn't get the chance to leave feedback in our survey, you can do it below or email us

Thanks for your continued support of Going Concern.