As someone that worked at that exact office for many years and then thankfully got out of that rat race I can sympathize with someone being exposed to the culture that exists there.
Generally people work ridiculous hours because they want to. They do it because the environment is highly competitive and the rewards can be huge. It is not the place for sensitive people, or indeed people with ethics and morals. It is all about the buck$ and screw the rest. People that can make money are Gods, even if their decisions only make money in the short term, no-one cares - all that matters is the next quarterly result and the annual bonus.
There is a reason that Merrill Lynch is now called Bank of America Merrill Lynch, their short term decisions came back and bit them in the ass and they got bought out. I doubt that any lessons were learned. Lots of lip service but I would be beyond stunned with surprise if any meaningful changes have taken place - the fact of this intern's death probably means I am correct, although of course nothing has been determined as to any link or otherwise.
I am probably over dramatizing here but if you value your soul, stay the heck away from Big Investment Trading & Commodities Houses.
i'm sure in a few weeks (if not ALREADY) this guy will be the going-joke around the offices as "don't pull an X. don't be the guy who can't handle the grind."
The other possibility is, "X is a hero, we should aspire to have that level of dedication to our work. Only shows how serious you got to be to get anywhere"
"If you ever care to see how all the world's most awful jokes spread, spend a day on a bond trading desk. When the Challenger space shuttle disintegrated, six people called me from six points on the globe to explain that NASA stands for 'Need Another Seven Astronauts. "
...That's it? If you think that's an example of the world's most awful jokes, I have some news for you. You should probably spend some time in just about any other industry, or even in a high school.
It's unfair to stereotype bankers this way. You could find books that similarly portray politicians, lawyers, etc. I know a few bankers and they're not like that at all. It's a mixed bag.
I've also heard far worse jokes in the kitchen of a restaurant. You want to be offended? Thems' a good place to start.
You give them too much credit; check out twitter.com/GSElevator for typical banker humor. Bankers pride themselves on borderline-sociopathic cynicism mixed with arrogance and workaholism. It's not pretty.
I don't think there's any real proof those tweets are submitted based on real experiences, to be fair. I know a few bankers, and I've spent holidays with them even. The ones I have seen are pleasant, polite, and more than willing to talk about things other than money/politics/things they're typically stereotyped with.
Not that I'm saying they're all like that. But they're not all arrogant or cynical. Maybe workaholics.
On the one hand, no, that sort of cavalier attitude wouldn't be prudent, and most human beings wouldn't say things like that publicly (even sociopaths, who ironically might be less likely to do so).
On the other hand, this sort of humor emerges even in high school among guys. If a group of bankers not very connected to him hear about it, I could see a joke like that beinf said. But the same could be said of any profession. That's humanity for ya.
Like any high pressure job, there is a certain amount of gallows humour. This is no different than what you would find amongst, say, A&E (ER) medical staff.
It depends where you work in the Bank. I worked at BAML for a while and apart from staying late on a Friday to release outside of US business hours, I didn't have many late nights.
The most insane period of work I had was when I worked at another bank and we had to put in place modifications to a system by a certain date, otherwise a downstream core trading system was predicted to fail (by capacity management) and the bank would be out of that particular market.
Even that was only every weekend for 6 weeks or so and regular nights of 9pm+
If you think this stuff is interesting from both a "what the hell is going on here" standpoint and a "no, really, what's it like in an investment bank?" standpoint, read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis. It's a pretty interesting look at Wall Street in the late 80's, and it does a good job of avoiding an outright demonization of the industry while offering an honest appraisal.
As an aside note, I'm always amused when I hear my tech friends lambast investment bankers' crazy work schedules and then go on to brag about pulling an all-nighter Thursday and then hit up a hackathon after work on Friday. (Just because you get free beer and t-shirts doesn't mean its not unhealthy.)
The difference here is that an all-nighter Thursday and then hackathon Friday will not be happening every week, or result in a 100 hour work week. These kids are literally doing 90+ hours every week for three months. A hackathon once in a while won't be near as detrimental as the hours this kid was working.
I second the Liar's Poker recommendation. Besides being insightful, there are some great anecdotes. My favorite was the one where traders would ask interviewees to open a window, which had been previously nailed shut. One interviewee was so exasperated that he tossed a chair through the 43rd floor window.
I once got told of a trader at a large bank that was called "Keep the fucker".
He had been late to work that morning and had parked in a board member's parking space. A security guard was sent to ask the trader to move his car. The trader was mid-deal and angrily waved the security guard away.
Seeing this, the trader's colleagues asked the security guard to keep asking him in order to wind him up further. In the end the trader snapped, threw his car keys at the security guard and said "It's a 3 year old BMW, and I'm doing a billion dollar deal. Just keep the fucker."
At least in tech it's a choice, though; I know lots of techies who work 40 hours a week (and, you're right, lots who don't), but I don't know a single banker who doesn't pull this sort of crap. And I know a lot of bankers.
Random anecdote: A good friend of mine is working as an investment banker and he often puts in a 40-50hr work week. Of course, there are the 80+ hr weeks, but he's got a sweet gig.
You're completely right, but while I'm not going to look these numbers up I'm very confident that the average investment banker works longer hours than the average software engineer; or even, yes, the average startup founder. I can promise you Google interns don't die from overwork.
Yes and there were many people very confident that the world would end last year. The amount of confidence you have doesn't prove anything, especially if you have no basis for that confidence outside of a few anecdotes.
Hmmm I love getting down-votes when I don't agree with the circle jerk.
The difference between tech people and banking people are that tech people are trying to build an actual new idea and only secondarily are interested in making money (which often happens as a pleasant side effect).
Right out of college I took an investment banking job, and it didn't take me too long to realize it definitely was NOT what I wanted to be doing for the next 10 to 20 years of my life.
I had it relatively easy - working for a small firm, our hours were more in 50 to 80 hour range - so not nearly as stressful as many. But it was still pretty brutal, especially when things got busy.
I worked with good people and it's not true that all bankers are insanely greedy and immoral. I met some of the best people I've ever known in the banking world, and also some real scumbbags. But one stereoype is true: just about everyone I worked with was insanely driven and incrediblely competitive.
Already a skinny guy, I dropped at least another 10 to 15 pounds due to the long hours and no lunch hour. Most of the guys simply ate soup at their desk so they could get more work done. I remember my out-of-town girlfriend coming into town for a rare weekend visit and I spent 8 hours at the office on a Sunday. That might have been the day I vowed to quit.
So I started saving my money like a miser, and after a few years had enough in the bank to quit cold turkey. Had no idea what I was going to do, but just let them know I was done at the end of my two-year commitment.
At my going away party, the wives of my co-workers secretly told my girlfriend she was incredibley lucky I was getting out and were happy for her.
I ended up starting an eCommerce business and have been doing that - and loving it - for the last 5+ years. Apart from marrying that incredible woman who stuck with me when I was in banking, leaving to pursue a more balanced life was the best decision I've ever made.
If anyone is interested in the full story, I wrote a blog post about it here:
Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly did your work as an investment banker consist of? I see below that you mention "cranking out loads of monotonous pitch books that didn't require too much mental energy". Is there any reason work like this couldn't be delegated to a separate person? I guess my larger question is whether or not the 50+ hours of work you needed to do could trivially be split across multiple people, and if these people would have to be highly skilled.
I'm asking this because it seems to me that a lot of investment banking falls into either building models (could you clarify exactly what that means in the i-banking context) or making presentations to clients/other investment bankers. I could imagine these 2 things being split up in a way similar to what product managers and software engineers often do.
Some of that work is being offshored to India, but I there is an advantage of being able to scribble directly on something in front of someone to explain the changes you want made.
Question for you - how much more productive were you on your 80th hour than on your zero-th? I ask because I typically work 50 hour weeks. I've pushed to 80 when projects are wrapping up but I find that the extra hours are mostly only useful for rote work like writing/running tests, fixing simple bugs, and not for creative work. In fact most of the most difficult problems I solved in my off hours rather than at my desk. So I've always wondered what the net benefit is of working crazy hours like that in the long term, especially when there's always the option of hiring two employees and paying them 1/2 of the salary (I know I prefer x for 40/wk rather than 2x for 80/wk, the marginal cost of that 80th hour is huge!)
I'd say I was much less productive. Usually when we were pushing 80 hours weeks, we were getting ready for a big conference that our bank put on - and cranking out loads of monotonous pitch books that didn't require too much mental energy. At least, not too much if you'd done similar ones 100 times before!
If I had had to create a financial model from scratch - or put together something really complex at hour 80 - that would have been a MUCH harder task.
Makes sense! This I can understand. Analogously, at the end of a software project you tend to have to take care of all of the little things - re-run all of the tests, figure out the packaging script, fill out paperwork, make sure the website is ready, etc. This sort of stuff can be done on relatively little sleep with few breaks. I was imagining the interns putting together models and doing lots of calculations in that 80th hour - seems like sooner or later this would be disastrous.
They aren't destitute, sure, but they really aren't paid that well either--judging from the other comments in this thread, a junior banker gets $150k for 100 hrs/wk of work. That's equivalent to making 60k at a 40 hrs/wk job; entry-level software engineers can (they certainly don't always, but can) clear twice that.
Although, working 100 hour weeks definitely helps you save the money you do earn--since you never have time to spend it.
With a pretty lavish college student lifestyle you can live on $20K a year. If you're pulling down $100K+ (reasonable for an engineer or an IB, I imagine) that's at least 2 years of off time you buy with each year you work. Not that crazy, if you can control your spending :)
I made good money for my region, but it wasn't extrodinary given the hours I worked. By the end of the my two years I had enough to live (without any income) for at least 2 years as a single guy - so a good little nut. :-)
But I really didn't need that much to start my business - time to work was what was most important. I started my business (drop shipping eCommerce) with $1,500 and did sweat equity for the rest. I wanted to save that money to live on so I had maximum time to invest in bootstrapping.
What exactly are they doing during those 100+ hours a week? Fiddling with MSFT Excel? It's easy to imagine a programmer working 100+ a week, since there's never a real end-point to software. It can literally go on forever if you please.
But...finance? I can't imagine even Black–Scholes required that kind of crazy dedication.
Finance is weirdly disorganized. Everything I hear is you have a long empty period during the day and then a work dump whenever the MD goes home that you scramble to do. You wind up throwing out a lot of work halfway through because someone didn't bother to check whether it was the right thing to be doing or even relevant, just handed you an assignment. Everything's last minute and disorganized, but no one cares because the gaps always get filled with heroic efforts from the interns and junior people.
This sounds like the definition of the next place for software to eat an industry. I guess the number of domain experts is too small, or the knowledge changes too quickly to build into some extremely profitable process management software?
I think there are a bunch of fields, like medicine, medical research (except doing some software simulations of stuff), finance (the process management, not the calculation part), politics and law etc. that are inherently hostile to revolution by software - most competent programmers run away screaming after contact with any such domain and only the dumb ones remain, churning dumb software that doesn't actually solve the problems. And the few good ones that stay become dumbed down and only work at ~40% of their iq and productivity because their minds basically choke on the sheer amount of disorganized domain specific knowledge they have to absorb.
I think if we were to make an analogy of "information as alcohol", a programmer's mind is like an installation that only works well with very "distilled" information (say "vodka" and "whisky" :) ) and may work ok with "wine", but it completely sluggs down if you give it "beer" (completely undistilled information). In some domains (medicine is one that I know of), information is so undistilled, diluted and corrupted that it's basically the analogue of "beer with piss in it and rats swimming in the kegs" ("the rats" are my analogue for the "mud minded" people that "just don't get it and never will" and prevent smart geeks from actually doing their jobs)... that's why I wouldn't touch it with a 100 foot pol and I imagine lots of people feels the same about these areas. I imagine this part of finance is a similar "beer pool".
Bits of the business are being replaced slowly. But a lot of it is essentially sales which is harder to replace. Profit margins are extremely high. Best to build a replacement externally that is not very good then improve it. Don't underestimate the regulation though which is anticompetitive too.
Speaking of Fischer Black, while he worked quite a bit because he enjoyed it and was given a lot of flexibility due to his reputation, he took great pride in having the smallest percent ownership in Goldman Sachs out of any of the partners while he was there.
He was not a banker himself, and was known to play Super Mario Bros. in his office and spend his evenings at comedy clubs. And he had a bigger impact on finance than arguably any banker since JPMorgan, without working their hours.
Perry Mehrling wrote a great biography of Black which I can't recommend enough.
In an internship it's all about the face time of proving you can work hard enough to survive an associate position or 2 year analyst stint. The competition is amplified because firms don't want to hire someone who got rejected from their prior place of employment.
The reason such a strange system exists is the top positions are so lucrative but it's hard to screen for the right abilities so they base it on brute work ethic.
That's not an answer to the question, though. I'm also genuinely curious. What do people "in finance" actually do on a day to day basis? My naive understanding is that the industry is highly automated already, so what activities are these 100 hour weeks spent doing?
I've spent most of my career servicing the financial services and investment industry. While I've enjoyed much of it, I also found a lot of it surprising to say the least.
What many people in finance haven't realized is most of the industry is an IT problem. Much of the work I see involves ingesting data, analysing it, and reporting on it. Most everything else is sales.
Most of the people doing this work come from a finance background and only have a rudimentary understanding of IT or programming. Many know Excel and PowerPoint pretty well, and those tools are pushed to extremes.
The work I see being done by junior analysts is often manual IT work. You wouldn't believe what goes on behind the scenes assembling the statements and reports that are sent to clients. It can be surprisingly difficult to sell software in this environment, because many stakeholders would rather get another junior analyst than solve the problem with software. There are some enlightened firms when it comes to technology, but I would say that is the exception.
Ultimately what I think is going to happen is that companies that are built from the ground up around a technology infrastructure will become more efficient and win business from traditional companies. It will take a long time to displace the bigger players, but it will happen. WealthFront is a good example of a financial company that is built around technology. Eventually these types of firms will win out in the market.
Update: Here is an example of the type of work I see analysts doing:
Manually copy data from 5 different systems into a spreadsheet at the end of the month. The data always has flaws, so go back and validate the data and resolve the issues. When the data is clean, do some processing on the data in the spreadsheet and create some graphs.
Then cut and paste output from the Excel spreadsheet into 150 client PowerPoint presentations, and combine that with commentary saved in an Word document from another department that is stored on a network drive.
At the end of the month an analyst will work 80 hour weeks to complete this in 3-5 business days. This type of workflow is not uncommon.
The cynic in me wonders if the inefficiency and inaccuracy that comes with using humans to crunch numbers gives them more room for error. It's pretty hard to pressure a computer to make the numbers work in your favor, but it's pretty easy to push a low level employee to do something unethical.
It might happen, but at least in the segments of the industry I work in, I don't think it is common. What is more common is human error. Most of the businesses I deal with are highly regulated, and they wouldn't risk fudging the numbers. In fact much of our business these days is related to enforcing compliance regulations.
If you knew how dirty most financial data is when it is released, you would probably be checking your statements more carefully.
Investment bankers are masters of Excel, Powerpoint, and Word and they're messing around in one of those all day long. Mostly building financial models and writing or formatting presentations. The work to do is endless, and if it's not the senior members of a team will make something up for you to do.
A huge part of what i-bankers do is pitch - either pitch to a company that you'd like to bring on as a client, or pitch to potential buyers of your client (and variations of that). Junior guys basically make the presentations for those pitches. There's generally horrible project management going on at the senior level as well, and senior team members have no qualms about making you make pointless updates to a presentation (for example, update the numbers in the presentation for the stock price today even though nobody will see the presentation for a week, and you'll have to update it then anyway). In fact, it's sort of part of the deal.
I guess showing them a live data source for the stock price in the presentation would just make their heads explode. I thought that was a reasonably out-of-the-box Office feature?
Unlikely, most data points in presentations are specifically given to paint a certain view! Last weeks figure will be last weeks low or high, not some arbitrary figure pulled from the middle of a session...
Speaking of what many consider classic investment banking, or Mergers & Acquisitions:
- Senior People (Managing Directors and Senior VPs) meet with clients during the day, figure out what to pitch, and what deals need to be done.
- Mid-level Managers (VPs) divide up the work ("create this pitchbook", "model this stock price", "come up with values of comparable companies"), do some of it themselves, assign work out, and check it.
- Low level folks (Analysts & Associates) spend a lot of time waiting for work, and then execute it until it's done.
- Interns try to impress that they have the stamina to get a lot of work done.
There's a lot of waiting implied in this for the juniors that are doing 100 hour weeks. For up to half the day they're goofing off, surfing the net, and looking busy. Then they crunch spreadsheets, and write pitch books.
Other divisions have similar hierarchies, but a little less busywork. Research spends a lot of time writing models and coming up with research papers, pitching trade ideas.
In trading, the hours aren't necessarily that bad, though they can be for juniors. Trading hours are 8-10 hours a day, but the jobs are hard to get so juniors spend a lot of time trying to look and impress.
1. Excel work. Valuing companies or modeling a merger or acquisition or financing. Sometimes it goes beyond this, but that’s the bread and butter of what you do in Excel.
2. Writing (PowerPoint or Word). For pitches you’ll write slides on industry trends, executive summaries and explanations of your analysis… for deals you will create marketing documents that “sell” your client in Word or PowerPoint.
3. Research. This can be finding reports for senior bankers, doing industry research, or Googling for hours on end trying to find the adoption rate of cell phones in a southern province of Kazakhstan.
4. Administrative Tasks. I hope you like scheduling meetings, taking notes, and sending out status updates to your team, because you’ll be doing a lot of that.
I worked a couple of years in a company called BlackRock. There's a group there called PAG (Portfolio Analytics Group), made up of mostly fresh college graduates. In the beginning, the head of the program would feed us the Kool-Aid about how the long 16 hour days would be so worth it after a year or 2. Sure, we'd be half-awake when we came in at 6 AM, and half-dead when we got to leave at 10 PM.
The kicker was he told us while it'd be tempting to just go home and sleep after we left, we should instead head straight to the GYM and workout for 30 mins, then go to the bar for a few hours because it would keep our "sanity". Hah.. sure, you know what else would keep you sane? QUITTING and working elsewhere.
The banking culture...how can such idiotic counterproductive mores dominate the allocation of capital...or more colloquially...how does bullshit still rule. we as makers, innovators, and inventors have to topple the inefficient stupidity of the system, as is. I honestly believe we are the only ones on the planet that can correct this stupidity of the suits.
Indeed, this is a very hard problem that needs to be solved. I just learned of JAK bank, IMHO it's a step in the right direction. Constantly accelerating systems are not natural or sustainable. Hopefully we can find solutions to money, banking and investing that are sustainable and productive without being predatory to parasitic towards most of humanity.
I don't know about that. Sure the perception is that "technology" is constantly accelerating. But if you look at it a more finite, measurable sense, for eg. Steam Engine/Steam Propulsion technology (I picked an arbitrary one, based on my assumptions, so apologies if this technology is "accelerating"), can be said to have decelerated. In this sense, the constant "acceleration", IMHO is more of a perception thing.
However, companies setting higher and higher sales forecast no matter what, is the type of acceleration that is quantifiable and not quite sustainable indefinitely. There are limits. You can keep profiting till you've got a monopoly on EVERYTHING... and then you just make all the minions work harder, or make people produce more babies so there are more consumer? That type of acceleration is unsustainable and quite frankly, absurd.
Consider software. No matter what new tools and amazing techniques to reduce and control complexity, everyone is still operating at or beyond the limits of the human mind to manage that complexity. That pretty much defines the state of the art in any technical field. I'm sure that applies in finance, too. And whoever invents more effective tools to manage complexity will be richly rewarded, on average.
Just think of all the GDP that's tied up in investment banking. We'd probably all be better off without a stock market. Imagine if those people had to actually introduce wealth into the economy for a living instead of just pocketing percentages.
We'd probably all be better off without a stock market.
Would you care to describe the mechanism by which middlemen get less of the economy without a public market? Because that is not the experience of assets without public markets. (And, indeed, this is why investment banks make most of their money away from "the stock market.")
To use an example which many HNers are intimately familiar with, if you happen to have $100,000 to invest towards your retirement and decide to park it in an index fund, you will pay approximately $150~$500 a year for the privilege. If you were to invest it via a venture capitalist (who specialize in making markets between people who have money and people who have companies in the absence of public markets which can connect them), it would cost you $2,000 a year and 20% of your investment gains... in the unlikely event that your VC of choice had positive returns. Also, you wouldn't be allowed to invest in the first place, because the VC model does not include talking to poor people like yourself.
It's a system that depends on the next generation buying into the idea of what a company is worth at a higher value. What happens when the next generation has no interest in buying into the idea of what a share of a company is worth? What happens to the last generation that has no one to sell shares to? Why does retirement depend on the young effectively giving the elderly money with wall street taking a percentage?
We used to have pensions in this country before the 401k loophole was exploited. 401k was never intended to be a middle class retirement vehicle. Instead of just pocketing the matched 401k funds, it is required to go to wall street where they take a percentage. Built in customers, even though 75% of managed funds perform worse than index funds. It's a joke.
Well, clearly the answer is put a price on the lives of the sweet young things who are so eager to throw themselves into the jaws of Moloch. I mean that would be the Capitalist solution; and it would make banking into an heroic activity once again; and if telecast would surely outrank many other reality shows...
Think of a nine-week show called The Bankers Ordeal that would use go-pros to record every moment of the grueling work schedule that would not stop until one of the contestants fell. A riveting tribute to the allure of capitalism, how heart rending to see the contestants lined up at the start; one of them sure to die in the service of the only god our society worships unreservedly. Truly it would be a revival of the ancient tradition of the sacrificial lamb.
Another point no one has mentioned...banking summer interns almost never do anything critical. If he needed to work 70+ hours straight, he probably was really slow at whatever shit work he was doing. (Young bankers reading this, learn all the Excel shortcuts!)
Good bankers know how to manage expectations. Who knows what this kid was working on, but it's easy to ask the graphics department for presentation help, the India team to pull some data, other bankers for help with numbers, etc. There's literally nothing he could have been doing that someone else in his firm hadn't done before.
Erratic hours are part of being an investment banker, but what this kid was doing to himself sounds completely unnecessary.
I spent two years working as an analyst at a "bulge bracket" (ie top 10) investment bank in NYC (plus a summer as an intern). It seems that a lot of HNers are unfamiliar with the world of I-Banking, so here's the my view of what it's like, or at least what it was like in my group at my bank (though I believe my experience generalizes fairly well):
Analyst jobs are extremely competitive to land. It's an intensive interview process, and the vast majority of analysts do an internship first and are then hired on full time for the following year. As you might imagine, the job pays very well. Market rate at a bulge bracket firm for a first year analyst is $10k signing bonus, $70k base salary, and anywhere from $0 to ~$85k in bonus, though typically bonus is in the $55k - $75k range, depending on individual, group, and bank performance. As a second year, base and expected bonus each receive a $10k bump. Plus dinner is paid for every night, and lunches as well on weekends, which adds up to about another $10k. Most banks have a two year analyst program. A small percentage of analysts stay for a third year if offered (maybe 10%), and maybe 50-75% of those continue on to become associates, which puts them on track to eventually become a senior banker. Most associates were never analysts, but were instead hired in after doing an MBA.
After putting in the time as an analyst, a host of other opportunities await. Those with bulge bracket investment banking experience get all sorts of attention from recruiters. Many go on to work in private equity or for a hedge fund, both of which tend to pay significantly more than banking but with much more sane hours and a far better quality of life. Others do things like biz dev or take other misc finance roles. A very select few decide to go the startup route (eg this guy).
The combination of perceived prestige, high pay, and quality exit opportunities draw legions of juniors and seniors to apply. Senior bankers know that the role is in extremely high demand, and therefore they tend to be very tough on their analysts. If one analyst burns out, there are hundreds more frantically trying to network their way in to take their place.
There's a very clear divide between what a senior banker does and what a junior banker does. Senior bankers are glorified sales people. Their job is to maintain relationships (and develop new ones) with clients so that when the client decides to do a deal (any sort of M&A, financing, or restructuring), they'll hire the bank that employs said senior banker to execute/advise on the transaction. A junior banker's job is to do anything and everything that senior bankers tell them to do.
Junior bankers have very little control over their own lives. They're staffed on many projects at once (at one point I had 12 different projects I was juggling), and usually have minimal say on what projects they're assigned. These projects are generally all with different sets of people. Each senior banker tends to have a sub-industry and group of clients they cover, but junior bankers get shuffled around to work on any project that needs staffing. This staffing is determined by a "staffer" (usually a semi-senior banker), which is entirely discretion based. They try to make an effort to make the distribution of work equitable, but they have their job to do outside of being a staffer, and being a good staffer doesn't advance their career in the slightest, so they're not incentivized to really get this right. The work generally goes to the analyst that looks/seems the least busy.
I can't begin to describe how fucked up of a dynamic this creates. Insidious, underhanded politics. Analysts essentially forced to stay at the office until everyone above them has left the office regardless of whether or not they have anything to do. If you leave before the staffer leaves, you're guaranteed to get hit with the next staffing. If you leave before everyone above your level has left, they'll be bitching the next day about how they're working so hard even the analysts are leaving before them. Analysts subtly dropping hints to senior bankers about how much harder they're working than the other analysts, both in an effort to get staffing diverted away from themselves and because analysts all get ranked against each other at the end of the year, which determines their bonus. Analysts are ranked on a bell curve against each other, and bonus payouts among them are a zero-sum game. Recruiters and interviewers will ask you point-blank what your ranking and compensation was.
Analysts carry a blackberry with them at all times, and a staffing can blow up their next two weeks literally at any moment. You live in constant fear that that little red light blinking on your blackberry isn't another staffing or fire drill (ie "emergency" work that needs to be done immediately). You can't plan anything. Being too slow to respond to emails, including at midnight on weekends, is grounds for getting sat down for a stern conversation in a conference room. My blackberry was never more than 20 ft away from me for two solid years.
My average day was about 9:30am - 12:30am on weekdays, and about noon to 6pm on weekends. I didn't have my first day off, including weekends, until 4 months into the job. Sometimes it was as light as 50 hours per week, and sometimes as bad as 110+. Some of the time you actually have so much work to do that you're eating every meal at your desk and working solid the entire time, especially if you're working on a live deal, but a lot of the time you're just waiting around for other people to get back to you. They give you some work to do on a document or presentation, you spend a few hours doing it and get it back to them, and then you wait for them to get it back to you for another round of edits. You'll usually be doing this with 4 or 5 projects at a time, all with varying levels of complexity and urgency. This is one good part about the job. During the "day shift", life usually isn't so bad. A lot of times you can get away with long lunches and frequent starbucks runs without anyone really noticing. But then after a fairly leisurely day, come around 5pm or so, the "night shift" starts. You'll get edits to do for all of your projects at once and occasionally end up pulling an all nighter, even when the majority of the work you're doing involves formatting charts, transcribing pages of handwritten notes, and various other trivial, mind-numbing tasks.
You'd be amazed at how much effort we'd be asked to expend on some task relative to the benefit that that task could possibly hope to provide. Like put together this 10 page weekly update for every company in X industry, including what research analysts said about them that week, what the media has said about them, individual product sales, graphs of their stock price movements and their valuation multiples, etc. All painfully slow, manual work. There were 40-50 companies in this industry. For an update that was sent to a single client. Unsolicited. When the CFO hated the senior banker who ordered the update and would never do a deal with him in his life. Doing mind-numbing work is one thing, but spending hours and hours doing it when you know it's all for nothing is an indescribable feeling. I wanted to bash my head in with a stapler. It took me THREE MONTHS to finally convince the staffer to tell the senior banker it wasn't going to happen anymore. All sorts of absurd shit like this was thrust upon us in the name of potentially winning business.
I could keep going and probably fill several volumes about how horrible of an experience it was, but I'll stop there. The best day of my life to date was the day I turned in my blackberry and walked out of the building for the last time. I don't think that the people I worked with were inherently evil or anything like that. All else equal, they'd be senstive to our well being. But at the end of the day, we were just another class of indentured servants, like the many classes they'd seen before us and the many they'd see after.
When I would describe my life to friends and people I'd meet that weren't a part of the finance world, they would literally think I was making things up. The idea that someone would be willing to subject themselves to such insanity, or more accurately that an employer would demand it, wasn't part of their world view. I assure you, it was really that bad. I'm a pretty stable person, but there were a couple times where I came very close to coming unglued. Somehow we managed to convince ourselves it was all worth it. The jury's still out on that one.
What bugs me as an outsider is that the people who "survive" this and come out on the other side as powerful senior bankers are then also very likely to be powerful outside of the banking profession. It might be that they fund political activity or advise policymakers or maybe just socialize with them.
Can you imagine what damage such a person can do if they succumb to survivor bias? If they use all that is in their power to propagate their life choices as the right life choices for everybody?
No wonder the social contract is being ripped to shreds.
I imagine this post took some time to write up, so I want to say thank you for sharing your experience. I don't know much about the banking world so I found your story fascinating.
This story sounds not too different from a story a typical programmer would write about 5-7 years ago working for a company like Electronic Arts. The pay would be MEH. The bonus would come in only post launch, and it's all based on the success of the game (no matter how you worked, if the game is shit, it won't matter).
And somehow everyone was convinced this was the right way to go about things.
This is/was also frequently true of startups. In fact my founder did this sort of working binges. You may say "BUT she owns the company" and I say "yeah, but at the same time the chances of a big exit (we didn't get a Instagram exit) are really really small, not to mention the failure rate.
I also worked full time and had a startup on the site (which failed) for like 6 months. And somehow I convinced myself it was all worth it.
I think the moral of this story is: No matter the industry... ITS NOT WORTH IT!
Great story, thanks for sharing, but there seems to be an obvious remaining question: why in the world did you do it for so long? What could you possibly do with $165k a year that is worth such pointless torture?
Ha, good question. In my first year, I learned an absolute ton. A huge portion of the work I'd be doing was mindless, but there was some really interesting stuff interwoven. I now know how to build complex financial models. I have a deep understanding of corporate finance. I know how the sausage is made for both public and private financing (including IPO) and M&A transactions. I got to have conversations with CEOs and CFOs of major companies about their businesses.
The second year was very different. I stopped learning new things. I started thinking about what I wanted to do next, but all of the traditional exit ops seemed like more of the same bullshit to me. I started thinking about doing venture capital, then realized I'd rather just start a startup myself. This all took several months to figure out, and I needed income (I have massive student debt), so I stayed in the job in the meantime. I also didn't want to prematurely cut ties with the people I was working with (leaving before your two years are up is highly frowned upon). I spent any downtime I could find reading about startups. In late winter/early spring, I convinced a couple friends to work on a startup with me, and we used applying to YC as a means to focus our work. We actually got invited to interview, but didn't get funded. At that point, it was May, so I only had two more months to go to finish out my two years and get my bonus, so I trudged on and closed it out.
Maybe it's a stupid question, but why they don't hire two guys to work 10hrs for $80k instead of a one working 16h+ for $160k? Especially since you mention working on multiple unrelated projects simultaneously. This is just insane for me.
Leaving a job, even a crappy one, is never easy. On top of that you have the psychological "sunken cost" effect plus all the other stockholm-syndrome-like effects that make people stay in hellish environments.
I finished my two year stint last June. Since then I've worked on several different startup projects and have been teaching myself how to code. I've been working on a personal finance site for the past few months that's getting close to MVP status. I'm running out of money though, so I'm considering joining a hedge fund for a while and continuing to work on the site on the side. The new coding skills would definitely come in handy.
Your story was fascinating, thanks for sharing. If you ever want help with learning to code or looking over your projects, feel free to email me (I wouldn't charge).
It's tough learning how to code out of school, and we could use more business-oriented people who grok technical stuff.
Thanks for sharing, I had heard stories like this, but never knew it was that bad.
This is only one department of the bank - Investment Banking. I don't think being an intern in Sales and Trading is as intense. Also, working in technology for a bank is nowhere near as bad.
I have seen many of the patterns around mind numbing work with no tangible benefit in the (nominal) startup world as well. There seems to be a certain sort of person who just doesn't care what they waste as long as they have excuses to give further up the chain. Thanks for this great writeup of the phenomenon.
I had a roommate who worked in the banking industry and kept similar hours. Her "day off" was an 8 hour work day on Sunday. One (late) night we had a drink together and figured out that while she made twice my salary annually, I made three times her's hourly.
> In Japan, there’s a word for it. Karoshi refers to death by overwork, a legal term that allows surviving family to petition a judge for compensation for damages [..] we have no such legal designation of protracted corporate suicide.
Is suicide really the word that should be used here?
>Is suicide really the word that should be used here?
I don't think there is a right word for it. Its not really murder because the employee more or less did it voluntarily. And its not really suicide because there was no intention to kill oneself.
Death by overworking is about as good as it gets imo.
How is it not manslaughter or some form of negligent homicide? The company created a culture that celebrated unhealthy work practices. It's no different than if a company were paying its employees to smoke cigarettes.
Should a site like HN get taken to court if someone dies from working 100 hour work weeks at their startup? Reading through many articles makes me believe that's what I need to do to succeed.
It's one thing to internalize something you've read and apply it to your life. It's quite another to fear a) not getting a job or b) losing your job because the company allows ridiculous work practices to run rampant. They knew what was up, and the shame is on them.
Only, I doubt the premise. Productivity will fall at some point. And in your startup you only care about productivity, not about impressing people with your actual hours. (You might want to impress people with tales of your alleged hours..)
Perhaps not, though if you intend to commit suicide, and the difference between a gun and overwork is massive compensation to your family, then there probably is some sort of motivation to die at the office.
Can you even choose to die by overworking? I mean, you can overwork yourself and inadvertently die. But you would never know if you were going to die, or just wake up really tired and go home the next morning.
Jumping off a bridge is one thing, jumping off your office building is another. But going into work and seeing if you can grind yourself out, that takes motivation. You'd have to feel the need to perform your job well, which gives you the feeling of stress. It doesn't strike me that a suicidal person would knowingly choose their work as an avenue of death.
Well, lack of sleep causes epilepsy seizures. Not to mention a bunch of other health problems in people who don't have epilepsy.
It's ridiculous to expect people to work this long, and saying people choose to be put in the situation is just irrelevant. We have workers rights for a reason. All of the people who have died doing manual labor over the last 1000 years 'chose' to be in that position as well but that didn't stop us putting in protections for them. Doesn't mean people don't do dangerous shit we just make sure they're well trained, aware of the dangers, given the best safety possible and not forced to do things that are gratuitously dangerous. That happens in the army too. It definitely doesn't happen in IB.
I don't know a single McKinsey consultant who regularly pulls 100+ hour weeks. Those are definitely an exception in MC. 80 hours maybe, but definitely not over 100 regularly if you're not in IBD.
Startup founders worth their salt? I doubt that too. I just don't think 100+ is productive. Pulling 3 all nighters in a row is just ridiculous. You need to get a sense for the difference between even 4 hours sleep (which is really not enough to be near productive) and 0 hours sleep (which just ruins a person).
Nobody's saying people shouldn't work 80 hour weeks, there just has to be limits in place. Nobody's asking for a 40 hour a week cap, just don't make someone work 3 all nighters, simple.
You're mistaken on workers rights being a response to asymmetric information, it's a response to asymmetry in power. However, whether or not an IB worker's power position is exploitive is more arguable.
You don't need any all-nighters to pull 100 hours a week. Live next to the office, work while you eat, take 2 hours off and sleep 8 hours a day - work the rest, and you're at 100 hours.
I'm saying people shouldn't work 80-hour weeks. I'm asking for a 30 hour a week cap. The data is pretty clear that your judgment starts going downhill after that, and much faster than you subjectively think it does, and as you say, the data is also pretty clear that this area is a market failure.
>If somebody chooses to literally work themselves to death, that's their own damn fault
You need to read up on employment law. The Employer/Employee relationship is more complex than a contracting agreement. By law, (at least in my jurisdiction) the employer is legally liable for on the job injuries. (there are some exceptions, depending on jurisdiction.) But generally speaking, if one of my guys tries to lift a server he can't handle and ends up crushing his foot? that's my problem. Of course, I'm insured against that (in my jurisdiction, not having workers compensation insurance is a criminal offense)
I mean, I have had guys who won't wear earplugs, and will use ladders that are breaking. Most employees will do moderately dangerous things if you let them. I think that giving the employer a financial reason to say 'no, throw out that broken ladder and buy one that isn't broken' is a good thing, personally, but good thing or not, it is the law.
This is a huge deal for construction companies, and the primary reason why there is such an emphasis on safety in construction. This insurance is a huge portion of the cost of a construction worker. Workman's comp for desk workers is... a trivially small amount of money, and most of my folks have been desk workers most of the time.
Now, I don't know if the death was related to work or not... but if it was related? legally (and personally, I think ethically) the employer is certainly liable.
> And that's bullshit because in each of these cases, the person CHOSE to be there and CHOSE to undertake those risks. That doesn't mean we have the right to regulate what they choose to endure.
I'm honestly flabbergasted at your response. Your profile says you have been a program manager at Microsoft. I can't imagine you're stupid, how can you have such a naive view of people?
For someone fresh out of college, in a highly competitive environment (IB is more competitive than anything you've likely ever done), there is huge pressure to perform and succeed. You really expect a young kid to make rational choices about his well-being in that sort of situation?
You're right, my comment was extreme and definitely naive and not ubiquitously true. I was simply suggesting that we not place sole responsibility of that on his employer.
I've deleted my original post because in hindsight I feel that it was disrespectful.
If you have a work environment that only kills the marginal...then you have a work environment that kills the marginal. You need to start thinking about physical requirements and medical examinations before hiring, much like the military. Or maybe you need to think about putting a stop to a system that is really about hazing instead of getting stuff done.
The second might improve other things about the efficiency of your business as well. That will have economic consequences not just to you and your employees, and is therefore a thing of proper public scrutiny.
For every Wall Street banker working 100+ hours a week, there is a startup founder on Hacker News that also works for 100+ hours a week.
Who's providing more value is up for debate (I'm inclined to side with the founder of a tech startup :) ), but it's bullshit to chide only one industry for putting too much pressure on employees.
I was a Google intern, and I had plenty of colleagues (including myself) that put in 100+ hour weeks. And that was no one's choice but our own.
If the argument is that quasi-mandatory long hours in tech should also be scrutinized, fully agree. Working hours in the game industry, one of the areas where it's most prevalent, have been getting some scrutiny for the past 4-5 years, and I believe the tide is slowly turning there.
There's a big difference in expectation though. Sure, you CAN put in 100 hour weeks at lots of companies, but at IBanks you're admired for it [and mocked/disrespected/sabotaged if you don't]. I have a lot of friends in banking internships, and whenever I manage to pull one to dinner at 9pm on a friday night they tell me "I had to take so much shit to make it to this!"
Just look at all the press (and the initial forum threads) around this death; notice how everyone's describing him as "one of BAML's best interns"? Why do you think they called him that? Because of the quality of his work, or because of the hours he pulled? I'll give you a hint: IBanking work, at least at the intern level, is really easy.
I don't think there's anything inherently awful about 100+ hour work weeks (in that I would never want to do them, but people know what they're getting into when they join a BAML internship), but anecdotally the culture of working long hours at an IB is much more destructive than, say, working long hours at a hospital -- there's a much more pervasive drug life, and the long hours are borne much more out of showmanship and capriciousness than actual necessity.
It's a pretty shitty industry that attract specific personalities, but it's not going to go away anytime soon -- mainly because of the massive amounts of money.
> Most articles I've read say he had epilepsy. If that's the case, he could have had a fatal seizure in the shower on any given day, regardless of work schedule.
Uhh no.
> Sleep deprivation is the second most common trigger of [epileptic] seizures. In some cases, it has been responsible for the only seizure a person ever suffers
Usually the first time you realise you have a form of epilepsy like Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy is when you pull an all nighter in college (perfect hat trick of bad lighting, drinking and sleep deprivation at the age when symptoms are likely to first appear).
What just seems like clumsiness or aloofness in your personality develops into traditional seizures.
How is it voluntary if everyone else is pulling crazy hours and you need to keep up (or pull ahead) to stand a chance of making the jump from Intern to Real Employee?
Directly from the article:
“Sure, you may not be achieving much by midnight, but do you really want to be one of the first in the team to leave your desk?” George Herbert at PolicyMic asks. “If you’re always the one who leaves first will your boss question your commitment when it comes to calculating your annual bonus or deciding whether to take you onto a regular contract?”
American culture does not yet recognize this as a problem. It should. "Hard work" is severely overvalued and even dangerous. The Japanese even have a word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
Whenever someone like Moritz pulls 8 all nighters, there is some greedy, selfish, entitled, son of a bitch, benefiting from that.
When are we going to realize that capitalism is not the ideal and "free" system we idealize it as?
... which was in the article, for those of us who read it.
>Whenever someone like Moritz pulls 8 all nighters, there is some greedy, selfish, entitled, son of a bitch, benefiting from that.
Yeah, that greedy, selfish, entitled, son of a bitch was Moritz Erhardt. You don't get this kind of internship by accident, nor are there press gangs roaming the street looking for people to force into investment banking.
>When are we going to realize that capitalism is not the ideal and "free" system we idealize it as?
You have an odd notion of freedom. Did B of A keep him chained to the desk, you figure?
Literal chains are not the only ones that exist in our society. Unfortunately, you can't expect all the world's type A personalities to suddenly stop throwing themselves on the line like Moritz did.
The only way to create a safe working environment for everyone is to legislate it. Look how effective OSHA was. All I'm suggesting is to legislate that companies could not assign work to employees beyond what human capacity can handle.
To you, it is "freedom" to allow the corporation to oppress the worker. To you, "freedom" is to say "do whatever you want", and allow the corporation to oppress the worker by controlling his income. To me, freedom is not just "do whatever you want" the government will stay out of it. Freedom is being able to live like a human who is not constantly enslaved by some master, whether it be a corporation or a government. To achieve that, we need to keep corporations in check, since they will always have their claws around every worker's lifeblood, which is more than enough to take someone's freedom away instantly.
Working more than 8-10 hours a day is crossing into dangerous territory.
Your assertion that if someone doesn't like it they could just get up and leave is naive, since the problem will always be perpetuated by thousands of other oppressed workers in line to take his place.
>Literal chains are not the only ones that exist in our society. Unfortunately, you can't expect all the world's type A personalities to suddenly stop throwing themselves on the line like Moritz did.
Well, your twisted definition of the word aside, that's what freedom is. Nobody had a gun to Ehrhardt's head (unlike you, I wasn't on a first-name basis) - he was doing what he did for his own benefit. Would I have done it? No.
But he wasn't a child. He was an adult capable of making his own decisions. There's no need for legislation, particularly in light of the fact this is news because it's highly unusual.
>To you, it is "freedom" to allow the corporation to oppress the worker.
If by "oppress" you mean "allow the employee to decide for himself what he's willing to do", then yes. That's freedom.
>Your assertion that if someone doesn't like it they could just get up and leave is naive, since the problem will always be perpetuated by thousands of other oppressed workers in line to take his place.
With his skills he would have had no trouble finding a job that didn't require more than 40-50 hours a week. We're not talking about unskilled labor here.
I've done much the same while both working and going to university. Still do. Is not the tech industry just as competitive? It might not force labor on you but however indirectly, long hours of coding with 0 sleep is considered a badge of honor. Freenode channels are full of users claiming they only slept x hours.
I'm amazed the banking industry puts its interns to work right away - it looks like they have no difficulty coming up to speed very quickly if they're working this hard. What exactly is it that banking interns are doing?
It always struck me from my personal interactions with them that lots of what tech industry interns do is have a good time...
Banking interns are the cream of the crop, they will usually have done a lot of self study and be fully competent in financial modelling, research etc... These kids beat out 1000's of applicants for a handful of spots.
Usually though IBD/Corp Finance Summer work consists of assisting with pitches which includes menial work like powerpoint design, spreadsheeting, pitchbook creation etc. If they are on a live deal work may include due diligence etc.
Let's not overstate their qualifications. You could take any smart STEM major with a good attitude and train them to be a good summer intern in an afternoon.
I doubt that. I'm going to school right now for finance. At the school I attend, it seems every serious finance student not only knows the basics (Excel, Bloomberg, Powerpoint), but also statistics packages (R, Minitab), and several programming languages (everyone knows SQL and VBA, most know at least one of Python, Java or C++). Knowing how to create trading algorithms is required knowledge.
On top of that, everyone knows how to do a sales pitch, most are comfortable in a suit talking to execs, and classes in marketing, management, accounting, and computer science are all mandatory.
Finance courses at a proper business school are highly demanding, and the technical abilities of the students who attend are on par with any STEM major...
I did M&A at a well known IB, I speak with first hand knowledge. I wonder if you have done a banking internship yet? It doesn't sound like it, because if you did, you would know how the work interns actually do differs from all of the qualifications that you mention. I have no doubt most of your classmates are exceptionally bright and hard working, that describes most kids entering banking out of college.
Reread my comment, I could take a kid with a "good attitude and train them to be a good summer intern in an afternoon." In fact, I have actually done that. Let's define what I mean by "good." Week 1: a good summer intern needs to know how to make PIBs, bind books, spread comps, use Google, learn from mistakes, and most importantly, know when to ask questions. Of course, as they get real experience and prove themselves, they get more responsibility -- just like with any other job. For example, I've had superstar interns building merger models for live deals after a couple months.
Knowing the "basics" (Excel, Bloomberg/FDS/CIQ, etc) isn't that important on Day 1 since they'll learn those things. I mentioned STEM students, in particular, because they can usually speed up the learning curve.
And remember, I'm talking about banking. Trading is a whole different animal.
I have a STEM education (PhD in Organic Chemistry) and consider myself a bright person (you are free to disagree). The guys that I knew that were good at banking were very skilled and intelligent. There is no way I could spend an afternoon in training and perform at their level.
I didn't say you could train for an afternoon and perform at the level of experienced bankers. That would be ridiculous. But I was referring to the training of a banking summer intern, and for that narrow job requirement, I stand by my statement.
And compared to your intelligent banker friends, you could absolutely be up to speed in six months, in terms of technical skill, industry knowledge, product knowledge. If you can master o-chem, you can master corporate finance. Check out the rest of this thread for more descriptions of the work...your qualifications are way overmatched for what the work actually is.
Having interned within these exact environments myself (BBIB), interns are students that are absolutely top of the game. So I also have to disagree. Being a "good" summer intern wont get you hired. You need to be exceptional. You dont become that in an afternoon... Most interns are incredibly well qualified and have very unique and strong backgrounds.
On my first day of work (FT, not internship), a director pulled me into his office, closed the door, and said, "Look, this job really isn't that hard."
And he was right.
Attitude is what separates good bankers from bad bankers.
>Attitude is what separates good bankers from bad bankers.
I don't disagree, although arguably M&A requires less specific domain knowledge for a new starter than say what might be required within structuring or DCM teams. Also I'm curious as to why you left banking?
It's hazing. They don't need to accomplish things, they just need to work hard. A banking intern acquaintance of mine recently bragged to me that he was up until 5am printing and binding things.
No comment on banking interns, but I occasionally mentor developer interns. We always have real work for them to do. Usually prototyping something using a new technology that we're considering. Or, prototyping a new product that hasn't been resourced yet.
They work a normal work week. 40-45 hours/week. No clue what we pay them, but they are paid and provided housing. We usually hire a few of them full-time when they finish school and they're generally very successful employees.
I assume they have a good time. They're 20-21 years old; I hope they do. Stressing at a desk sounds like a pretty lame way to spend your 20s.
They do not have them do terribly important things, but there is always a lot of work. It is usually research. Usually pulling information from various sources and collecting it in Excel spreadsheets.
It does not have to be something important. The person requesting the research may hardly look at it. But there is always work to be done. When you think about it, there is so much information in the financial world that there are a million things one may want to see researched.
This is just insane, and sadly mirrors the experience of everyone I know interning in finance.
But do they also treat their tech/engineering employees like this? I can't imagine an engineer working 80 hours on Wall St. when they could make quite good money Facebook, etc. as well.
there's probably some 'thinking fast, thinking slow' decision substitutions going on in the industry ie, i don't want to acknowledge that i'm vastly overpaid for doing something that is likely to have net-zero value (or massively negative in the long term) so my brain switches to thinking that my salary is justified if i work absurd hours. that plus a chase the cheese mentality for all those alpha personalities.
Such a shame that people are willing to literally work themselves to death at a task that delivers no true value to society.
Not really related, but it's also extremely scary how much of this industry relies on convoluted, fragile excel spreadsheets.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss. Are there shitty practices screwing things up and misaligned priorities? Certainly, but fundamentally banks and investors make capital and investment much more fluid and simpler.
Are you sure about that after reading the rest of the thread? From what I can tell, banks are where they are not because they're good at what they do but because they're solidly entrenched.
> Not really related, but it's also extremely scary how much of this industry relies on convoluted, fragile excel spreadsheets.
Why single out this industry? Every company I've worked for large enough to have an accounting department lives and breathes by those evil spreadsheets.
I have cousin who worked for Nomura in London and 100+ hours per week are normal thing in IB industry. I doubt that all-nighters were mandatory for interns, but it is very competitive environment and there are dozen of other interns/students waiting for opportunity and ready to do it.
Someone wrote its for the face-time but nobody pulls all-nighter for face time.
One thing to remember is that a lot of those 100 hours are sitting around waiting. Not to say they don't put in a lot of hours, but a friend of mine (banking intern) was told a 7pm to wait for a signed document to be signed and faxed in.
It eventually came at 4am. He basically sat around for 8hr waiting for it.
Generally people work ridiculous hours because they want to. They do it because the environment is highly competitive and the rewards can be huge. It is not the place for sensitive people, or indeed people with ethics and morals. It is all about the buck$ and screw the rest. People that can make money are Gods, even if their decisions only make money in the short term, no-one cares - all that matters is the next quarterly result and the annual bonus.
There is a reason that Merrill Lynch is now called Bank of America Merrill Lynch, their short term decisions came back and bit them in the ass and they got bought out. I doubt that any lessons were learned. Lots of lip service but I would be beyond stunned with surprise if any meaningful changes have taken place - the fact of this intern's death probably means I am correct, although of course nothing has been determined as to any link or otherwise.
I am probably over dramatizing here but if you value your soul, stay the heck away from Big Investment Trading & Commodities Houses.