What I find most intriguing is that the whole banking intern hours thing is that it's not the result of a resource constraint - they have plenty of money and plenty of intern applicants.
It's also not about getting particularly difficult work done - intern-level spreadsheet and PowerPoint work isn't the sort of thing that only a select few can handle.
It's entirely about filtering for people who will submit to abuse.
The point of an internship is to give candidates an idea of what the job is really like. At the analyst level, bankers will be subject to abuse. Not because of resource constraints, but because the job itself is demanding. Deals are fragile creatures that need to be completed quickly, and F500 C-suite executives are demanding clients. They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday. That's what leads to having less people work more hours and the extreme focus on availability.
> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday.
Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done.
I find it hard to believe that working so much that your faculties are diminished brings something valuable to a job. It's more likely that this has something to do with social dynamics. It could be just a convention that was needed to please those who decide on your promotion, a way to signal your dedication, or a way to protect yourself against what others could do to you when you're not here. Finding a way to get rid of this would surely benefit all. This seems obvious now that one worker died of it.
Of course deals would get done if bankers couldn't work at night, but they'd take longer. To put it in programming terms, it's about latency not bandwidth. In many cases, reducing latency will make tasks complete faster even if it comes at the cost of bandwidth.
Deals involve a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, changing deal terms, changing financing details, etc. Bankers could simply go home at 6 pm and get to requests the next day, but that would make deals take longer. While a deal is in progress, it's fragile. Parties can decide to back out, prices can go up, third parties can swoop in. That's the sort of thing that causes shareholders to get pissed, lawsuits to get filed, etc, and is generally to be avoided. Also there are the usual deadlines of corporate life: we want to get this off the books this quarter, we want to get the merger done this fiscal year, etc. All that results in C-suite execs picking bankers who will turn things around as quickly as possible.
So why not have team members work shifts? Get 24 hour coverage in the office without having frazzled people making poor decisions. Besides, the people making the decisions aren't these banking interns nor the junior associates. The more junior guys and gals are, from what I understand, mostly just doing grunt work.
Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?
Juniors don't make decisions, they do analysis to support the decision makers. If a decision maker proposes something in the afternoon, he wants the analysis by morning to make the decision.
> Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?
Good point. That's a good way to put it. Depending on task, unfortunately not everything is parallelizable.
But quite often, culture is the problem as well. If performance bonuses are large enough, people will compete with each other and will be at each other's throats over control of projects. Machismo and cowboy-like behavior is to be expected in some environments. I personally think those environments are toxic.
Anyway I see the a point about some tasks not being easily de-composible, but I think culture plays a significant role here as well.
> Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?
We sorta do in some cases. If you've ever worked closely with an outsourced team (in my case, India) handling support cases, this ends up being almost exactly like working in shifts. We make sure to commit our code and update the bug/client ticket before leaving. Then someone on the India team can pick up the work from where we left off.
Of course, this was only used specifically for high priority cases that came directly via a client rather than a normal bug fix or feature request. But I think this reflects exactly how and when shifts should be used. Work that can wait until tomorrow doesn't need to be handed off to someone. Work that is urgent can be handled in shifts.
They would take less time because people involved would be getting adequate amounts of sleep and as a result would be able to function normally.
People who insist that other people work absurdly late hours are demonstrably not interested in efficiency or thoroughness and are actually interested in making themselves feel powerful and important by forcing other people to adhere to irrational standards.
This reasoning is suspect: repeatedly pushing oneself to work to exhaustion as a form of training for real work where you need to work longs seems unlikely to offer more than diminishing returns. How often do bankers need to work three straight day and nights? Are you positing a physiological process where the more "three nighters" one does the stronger you get?
It seems more likely that the treatment of interns is an expression of sublimated rage on the part of their supervisors. But I suppose they can laugh all the way to the bank.
Instead of rationalizing unnecessarily poor behavior, why don't you try not rationalizing unnecessarily poor behavior? It might turn out to be something you enjoy not doing.
Right for the job is very general. It's specifically the willingness to submit to abuse that makes someone right for the job. At least from the perspective of this kind of banking culture.
Personally I'd feel safer if deals involving lots of money were conducted by well-rested, sane people. These kind of insane hours do not help your judgement, analytical thinking or productivity.
It's entirely about filtering for people who will submit to abuse.
Sort-of, but not entirely. You have the typical corporate exponential bottleneck (~25+% per year attrition) and extremely competitive people, but the work isn't intellectually difficult, so people need to compete on something, and it comes down to conformity and availability. It turns out that some people can take that to an extent that would kill many of us. We're good at our stuff; they're good at theirs.
I don't think the intention is to subject analysts to "abuse" at any level beyond the abuse that comes from clients. Sure, there's a bit of hazing and testing that goes on, but it's there for a reason: when shit really does hit the fan, even the MDs (who usually have a 9-to-5 existence if they want it) are working 24/7. You can't be a front-office banker if you can't deal with those kinds of hours-- even into your 40s.
This is all really, really wrong. I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. Working days and nights and for what? Even if you do become rich, then what? You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream. When you're on the patio of your beach house with your high blood pressure, anxiety and depression, what have you accomplished? Is reality like the dream you once chased?
So the article is describing investment banking, which is particularly demanding because it's a service job. You're helping a client do a deal, and clients are demanding and deals are time-sensitive.
People generally do not go into investment banking expecting to make a career out of it. A few-year stint as an analyst is a great way to get into HBS/GSB/Wharton, and from there into a CFO-track position at an F500. It's also a good way to get into a PE/VC firm or a hedge fund. Because those firms do their own deals and have a lot of autonomy from their "clients" (LPs), the jobs aren't quite so demanding. Finally, some people just want to stick it out for 8-10 years, save up a couple of million dollars, and do something else after.
You said: "You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream."
Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America and ideally a bunch of money saved up.
For the majority of people who aren't looking to be career bankers, it wasn't "chasing a dream" but rather using a job as a stepping stone.
The problem is that you typically build your habits in your first few years in your 20s. Many (not all) investment bankers build the habit of being consumed by work, neglecting exercise, eating unhealthily, and substituting money for happiness.
I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again."
My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)
"Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. "
That's an incredibly broad statement to make for the whole population. Everyone is different and have different tolerances.
I would agree with you to the extent that people are able to know their tolerances and stop, but that doesn't seem to be the case for banking.
I always say, Money (and hence career) is a solvable problem. Health less likely. You can't always solve away your chronic health issues by working harder, spending more money on it, etc.
It would be nice to ask all those people with chronic back pain, chronic insomnia, etc. that isn't easily fixable if the "opportunity" was worth it.
Before saying that your health is unlikely to suffer from a few years of banking hours, look at the sidebar in this exact article. It notes that four years of banking tends to produce chronic pain, auto-immune disease, and depression among other disorders.
It's not missing fingers and hands like you might have encountered in an early 20th century factory, but that absolutely sounds like long term health problems from a few years of banking work to me.
If you believe in the liberty of people to live life as they choose, it makes it a ton less wrong. They are living life with goals in mind. Some of these goals might even be, dare I say, valid.
If you think the goal of society is that every single individual satisfies your aesthetic preferences for what makes a good life, then you're right, it doesn't make it any less wrong.
This is an important point, and I think most people in IB would agree. However, some of that agreement would stem from déformation professionnelle. If those people had some way of stepping outside their current situation and evaluating the overall course of their employment, they might well choose differently. Of course, only old folks are really capable of that, and at that point they can't do much to fix it, so it's not as if the bankers have it worse than the rest of us.
I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much.
We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.
Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism.
So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government.
That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them.
Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take.
The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.
Only if you've redefined "capitalism" to mean "any economic system including individual/institutional holdings and trade", in which case you've successfully and retroactively redefined all economies ever as having been capitalistic. A net that catches every fish names none.
"A net that catches every fish names none" is an interesting turn of phrase. Does it come from somewhere? Nets don't usually name things; the net that catches only 2 fishes also doesn't name them.
No, my brain just mixed metaphors stupidly. It just sounds interesting because it alliterates, which is also by accident.
I was thinking about how tuna fishermen cast dragnets that often catch many other things, up to and including sharks and dolphins. Hence, you couldn't really call such a net a "tuna net", since it more just catches tuna by coincidence of catching everything even remotely fish-shaped.
I think you missed the "free" part of the definition. The trade between the North Korean death camp guard and a prisoner is between individuals but that doesn't make it capitalistic (because of that "free" part being absent).
I don't think a free market and capitalism are exactly the same thing. Mostly, I think there should be some kind of limitation on ownership (especially of large entities), since with ownership comes social responsibility. Maybe we should just put an end to the limitations on liability for people who own a company.
Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others.
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
This is most certainly _not_ capitalism, nor it's a friction-free economy. Banks' purpose should be making money go around, not sucking more and more of it off the rest of the economy...
It might sound wrong to you, but that's fine. You can do something else. There are plenty of people who love working in banking with this sort of culture (and the financial rewards it brings). There's nothing wrong with different people having different goals.
It is clear that perverse incentives exist in some industries, and that those industries have failed to self-regulate. They now need regulation forced upon them.
Luckily, in the UK, we have the European Working Times directive, and so interns should not feel forced to work 70 continuous hours.
The problem lies not in the rules, but in their enforcement.
I can't speak for the UK but in France it is not allowed for an intern to work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstances, yet in many industries you still see 60+h workweeks as a standard for interns...
Because by any means, an intern subject to this kind of unacceptable working conditions will not speak up since that would annihilate his chances to get a job at the end of his internship (and might even discredit him at other companies in the same industry)
The guy says that he wasn't doing any work. He was just a warm body.
Thus "You'll have to be at your desk for insane hours. You won't be doing much work. You increase the chance of fat-finger[1] errors. We know you'll probably have to take illegal drugs to stay awake that long. We're borderline illegal. We're opening ourselves up to serious legal liability (eg, causing harm to our workers). But hey, you'll get a shitton of money. (Where shitton is not that much, and less than you'd get from other more normal jobs)"
It's a perverse incentive because there's money slopping round in banking, and there are not adequate controls on how that money makes its way from A to B to C.
The bank does $SOMETHING, and the customers are happy and pay, and the bank pays $BONUS. But there's randomness in the system and often the $SOMETHING has very little to do with actually making any money.
The guy says that he wasn't doing any work. He was just a warm body.
Why do you care? In particular, why do you care enough to force the employer and the employee into a different understanding?
People do all kinds of things that I don't want for myself. I wouldn't want to be a boxer since I don't like having people punch me in the face repeatedly.
Doesn't mean I would want to forbid others from being boxers.
Let people have their freedom and stop trying to control everyone else's lives and choices.
The article described a life where interns basically stayed up for no reason.
And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.
Through a startup, most times at least you can say you provided a service (like Dropbox). With banking, you're pretty much a devil in a lot of people's eyes and you're working purely for the profit of your employer.
Silicon valley types are the devil to the unwashed San Francisco hippies. As an investment banker you also provide a service. When Google buys a startup for $50 million, that transaction doesn't make itself happen.
No -- but the banks are overcompensated for their work on M&A. You could hire a strategic consulting firm -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG -- to do M&A due diligence for half of what the investments banks charge. They hire from the same pool of 25-year-old Ivy League graduates. I doubt they'd do a worse job than the banks.
IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is how Google itself went public. It's true that the investment banks have access to a larger pool of investors. But that's circular reasoning. If the investment banks didn't exist, then these capitalists would be investing in IPOs through a Dutch auction like OpenIPO.
Structured products? The investment banks earn a 50% profit margin on structured products. The people who buy structured products could double their returns by constructing their own structured products on the options and future markets. And if they're not sophisticated enough to do that without an investment bank, then they probably don't understand what they're buying!
Theoretically, the main reason to prefer traditional IPO's to dutch auctions, is the auctions in general may not give sufficient rewards for "price discovery". That is, everyone is relying on everyone else to research the firm and discover its true value. That's not to say there is NO incentive for price discovery in auctions, just not as much as through the traditional process.
In my corporate finance class they described how some countries (I forget which) had experimented with auctions instead of using i-bank underwriting, and in the end they had all gone back to using i-banks.
I don't know anything about M&A, but on structured products I agree they are just for customers who don't know any better.
"for what?" I don't think you are a measure of what is meaningful for other person and what's not. If I choose to work 12 hours it's my free choice, not affecting you, and I may have my own reasons.
If I don't want to do so I will find another job. If there are more capable people like me employers will have to change conditions to attract talent. But I won't modify my reasons to other peoples ideas about what is meaningful and what is not.
I think part of the complaint is not that people have different goals and motivations for doing things; it's that they often engage in behaviour that is actively counter-productive to achieving their stated aims.
I agree with you, many peoples acts are not in harmony with their values but I am not sure society can solve this in an effective way, without imposing limits. If your acts are not crossing the boundaries of another's rights then in my opinion as long as you have options to make a change then this battle is for everyone to win by themselves.
When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk.
"For my first five years at Google, I pulled an all-nighter every week," Mayer said in a recent talk at New York's 92Y cultural center. "It was a lot of hard work."
I'm sorry but that's bullshit and unsustainable imo. I say that as someone who has worked nearly 100 weeks of 80+ hours over my career and has worked 100 hour weeks for a month or two.
It's not believable that Mayer worked 130 hours per week for 5 years.
Mayer apparently has the gene that makes you not require (much) sleep. About 3% of the population carries a genetic mutation that means they only need about 3.5-4 hours of sleep a night. I had a friend back in college that was like this (her father was too), and apparently a number of famous achievers have "suffered" from this.
That is so false, and if it's true is unbelievably stupid. It means that your work is so useless you can do it completely sleep deprived and burnt out.
Wow, a great contribution to a company.
I'd think that a company that needs to perform at the highest level should do so with smart people giving their best hours and resting appropriately so they can be sharp.
The number of hours is irrelevant. Great people are great because their contributions are of great value, not because they contribute mediocre work three times as much as everybody else.
What makes this comparison not applicable is that the interviewed intern said that they were really just adding warm bodies. I am sure Mayer added far more than that.
I somehow feel that when your company is growing 1000% a week and you have lot of equity in that company, somehow you find strength to work that many hours without breaking sweat. I believe thats more enjoyable experience than just work.
Where "somehow you find strength to work that many hours" actually means "somehow you find self-deception to blind yourself to the fact that you're harming your company, not helping it". If you came into work every day drunk, would you expect to be lauded as a hero or would you expect to get a warning followed rapidly by dismissal? Working excessive hours has about the same effect on your judgment, and should be treated the same way.
These comparisons never work for me. There's literally no amount you could pay me that would make me willing to be a plumber or electrician, and I'm grateful every day that there are a subset of people out there who will do those jobs competently without completely bankrupting me.
I would much, much rather be a plumber or (especially) an electrician than something like a dentist. I'm really grateful there are competent people willing to become dentists, because I could never do that.
There is inherently nothing wrong with those jobs; both give you adequate skills one needs to not only survive in a company, but also strike out on one's own. In addition, both are positions that will always and forever be needed for as long as women have long hair that clog drains and men build houses with electricity without killing themselves.
However, both jobs are stigmatized against by major corporations and government precisely because how necessary yet independent they are. People with money and power are constantly in need of more peons to help them maintain stability and so brazenly flaunt their fabulous wealth in front of us, alluring us with the hope that we too can become like them if only we'd go submit ourselves to their devices. Blinded by this hope and seeing only so many other young brilliant people doing the same, we find ourselves pursuing careers in finance, STEM, business, etc., oblivious to the fact we're playing right into the hands of the corporations.
Oh no doubt they'll treat us well, the people at the top are generally good kind folk, but the fabulous wealth, dazzling fame, etc., that they seeded into our imaginations will never materialize in our realities... and before you know it, you're 30+, married with children, and you've come to accept the fact you'll only ever live an (upper) middle class life and the only thing still meaningful in your life is watching your kids grow up and providing for them.
Well the thing is, not everyone can be fabulously wealthy and dazzlingly famous. What you're really talking about is a form of zero-sum social status. Think of how nearly everyone today is literate, whereas 150 years ago anyone who could read and write at our level belonged to the elite intelligentsia.
To which I say: fine! Why should we ever claim that a person has no right to call themselves successful unless they've managed to beat X% of other competitors in a zero-sum competition? The whole point of societies is positive-sum collaboration in the first place.
What's wrong with having a world-class standard of living (ie: upper-middle class First Worlder with social services available as back-up), a good relationship with your partner, a good job, and children? I personally could never stand the suburban white picket fence, but I don't get why being a reasonably successful professional with a family is failure.
First, I want to say I have an amazing amount of respect for the skilled plumbers, electricians, mechanics, etc. I had to use someone's service recently and I had to tell him ... "I have a PhD but I am in awe of the total mastery you have of your craft. My skill in my field cannot compare to yours." He told how he'd been doing the same thing for 35 years and had seen every possible situation under the sun for that job. He also told me that he has a lot of physical pain to get over in his line of work. Anyways ... hats off!
One problem with both occupations is lack of enforced regulation. My impression (but don't have any supporting data) is that these occupations have a number of immigrants who may not be legal working in them. I've also heard of "cash discounts", which might mean taxes are not being paid. As a straight and narrow guy, I would hate working in such a profession - it would be impossible to compete.
Risk of shock/electrocution (pity we don't have pictures of my electrician grandfather's blackened arms) and/or falls. Physical problems from extended time in awkward positions. Boiling hot or ice cold attics. Dead animals or worse in walls and crawlspaces. God knows what in the insulation you're elbow-deep in. Every small-business problem you've ever heard of, plus coordination with other contractors who lie to each other every bit as much as they do to their customers. And you can top it off with inspectors who don't actually have the first fucking clue what code is, or think it's both a minimum and a maximum (12 gauge on a 15-amp circuit? NOPE! That's not code, you've gotta use that little 14 gauge crap instead!).
I'd imagine it's not that much different per hour than the average person who decided to become a banker 2 years into college.
To make an accurate comparison we would need to consider a number of facts I'd rather not take the time to compile. Such as:
% of people who drop out of college in year 3-4
# of people who never get a job in banking, but still have the student loans
% of interns who wash out
% of bankers who never make it past an entry level position
Then we take the small number of people who made it through the funnel and distribute all those 120hour work weeks over their annual compensation. We'll be generous and not also add the 'keeping up with the social circle' expenses that would be necessary as well.
Given all of those factors the averages are probably slightly higher for the bankers. Still not as much as you would think. Also not a deal I would seek out in general.
Personally I'd rather work 25 hour weeks for 50k than 50 hour weeks for 100k. Definitely not 100 hour weeks for 200k.
Isn't this all just a matter of supply and demand? There are a lot more young people willing to work in this industry than there are positions, so those people who actually get the jobs have to put up with all kinds of stupid shit.
I've never understood why these employees (who are clearly quite intelligent) don't just pursue another career where they have more leverage. After all, I don't think they have any particular love for banking. Being on HN, the obvious suggestion would be software development (not a bad choice, considering the current state of the market), but there are a lot of other options out there as well.
In that industry bonuses will increase your salary by double or more... Junior analysts in a big bank/hedge fund can expect to make as much (or slightly more) than a senior programmer in Silicon Valley.
I work in that industry, and that's not quite the case any more. Bonuses for junior analysts can reach up to around 50% (which nearly every other profession could never expect), but they would never exceed base salary.
Anybody saying otherwise has been reading too many tabloids.
You can find out more details about salaries in this area by using a site like glassdoor.com. This 100%+ bonus culture is simply not true (now).
According to people working in the industry in NYC that I talked to, a lot of the bonuses dried up after the financial crisis. Nowadays, the income for someone starting out (not an intern, but as a full time job after college) is only $80-90k.
That's not a bad salary for an intern position, especially if there are bonuses involved. In a lot of industries, internships are unpaid or very poorly paid. Software development pays rather well, but I certainly didn't make that kind of money on summer jobs.
It was probably the same salary for the internship minus bonus's - the IBD interns here are all on 45k + 1k signing, grad is normally about 5k signing and a bonus guaranteed by HR at at least a set level.
> The obvious suggestion would be software development
Looking anecdotally at friends in software and in finance (I went to a school with a great reputation for both cs and business ) , a good software engineering (at a good company) is not trivial to get into. On the flipside, banking was what you did if you had no discernible skills.
Well, we could remove their existing optout from the Working Time Directive. As to the "but they'll just leave for the Third World!" claim below:
1) it's a networking-based industry. Everyone would have to move at once, or at least a very large chunk.
2) They would have to move to somewhere in the same time zone (finance has outposts in NY, London and Singapore/HK that cover the day in 3 8-hour trading days). I suppose that's less relevant if you're working 20 hours a day.
3) They'd have to move to somewhere similarly cosmopolitan to London. No point in making all that money if you can't walk out the door and find somewhere to spend it in your few precious hours off. That rules out much of the African continent, although there are expat clusters in Angola and UAE.
Regulations seem to me a lot less magical than the free market. I live in a country with a lot of regulations when it comes to working time and it does not seem to harm. It is one of the strongest economies in the world. I guess the market can live with it.
There are strict limits for extra hours. As an employee working more than 48 hours per week is allowed only as an exception and working more than 60 hours per week is simply put illegal. Extra time has to be balanced with free time. We also have a minimum of 24 payed vacation days. Most people have more.
And don't forget, if your regulations are too difficult to conform to, these banks and hedge funds will simply move operations to somewhere less stringent.
There are regulations (European working time directive). The problem is that employers will ask you to waive the rights afforded to you by that directive...
In continental EU legislation (AFAIK unlike USA), no contract can waive rights provided by legislation.
If a job contract includes provisions that explicitly give up some of basic job limits (say, no vacation, unpaid overtime, limits of shift/week length, etc) - then, barring very few exceptions (listed in the same legislation), those parts of agreement are null and void. It's the same as it's everywhere for minimal wage - even if you sign a contract that you'll work for $0.05/hour, then that provision anyway means $[minwage]/hour.
I've never understood why these employees (who are clearly quite intelligent) don't just pursue another career where they have more leverage. After all, I don't think they have any particular love for banking. Being on HN, the obvious suggestion would be software development (not a bad choice, considering the current state of the market), but there are a lot of other options out there as well.
If you fail in software, then you're just an out-of-work programmer. If you fail in banking, you take a two-year timeout at Harvard Business School and raise a search fund before you're 30.
The upside of software is arguably better (fatter rightward tail, more interesting work, more impact, less tied to NYC and London) but the insurance is not there.
First, I'll quibble with the definition of all-nighter: "I ended up doing an all-nighter in my first week as an intern, which is when you start work at nine, you stay until five or six the next morning, you go home, have a quick shower and then head back into the office and continue working."
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC), that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Third, he's leaving out the part where a deal dies and you find yourself with nothing to do for days. You may not experience that as an intern, but once you're actually working the 100-hour weeks will be interspersed with very dead weeks.
* Three hours of sleep - if that - is far, far too little for any normal human being to function normally. Also yes, working until 6 AM is an all-nighter, it's dawn then.
> Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Never. I don't get why people do it either, it's not like it makes you a better student. If anything, having to pull all-nighters for college can, in my limited and breezing-through-school opinion, mean only a few things:
* You only started to work on an assignment / study for an exam at the very last moment.
* The US school system is terribly broken and puts a disproportionately and unhealthily high workload on its students, turning it into a Chinese sweatshop instead of a nurturing educational facility.
In software methodology, there's an expression called 'Sustainable Pace' [0]. When building software, it's pointless to go and do 'crunch time', since, one by one, your people will start underperforming or even outright crashing, leaving the remainder under duress to compensate. Doesn't work.
I don't know what these 'deals' are, but I can't see how they'd require anyone to work 21-hour workdays for any duration of time.
Personally, I work a 9-5 job as a software developer / consultant, and I close the door behind me at 5. I resist my colleague's excitement over DOING ALL THE THINGS!11one, simply because I know I can't deal with it. I've seen enough colleagues (and my superiors, lol) work too much and unable to let go of their job and becoming unfit for work. So yeah, I like to dramatise this a bit, and not allow myself to fall into the same traps. It's not like I'd gain anything from it, anyway.
College students who pull all-nighters do so two reasons:
1. They tend to be terrible at time management and prioritization. They procrastinate until the last minute and then have no choice but to cram.
2. They do it to create a narrative that can protect both their ego and their image. "I failed the exam despite pulling an all-nighter - it was just crazy hard!" sounds a lot better than "I failed the exam because I'm dumb" or "I failed the exam because I didn't start studying until the last minute."
I'd like to disagree - at least for my university, which to be fair is notorious for being brutal in terms of workload. It's not unusual for me and many of my friends to have so much work for classes and extracurriculars over the course of a week or month that there literally isn't enough time to do all of it and also eat and sleep in the 168 hrs/week that you have.
Allowing that there may be exceptions such as your own case (assuming you are properly assessing your situation), would you still agree that the generalization holds for the vast majority of cases?
Not at my university, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat true generally. I think a valid comparison might be between a hard sciences student at a top school who's also involved in a lot of extracurriculars and up at all hours just to stay on top of everything, and someone working on an early stage company where there's always something burning. The opposite end of that would be the investment banking intern spending 100+ hours a week at the office spinning their wheels or college student who does nothing all week and then stays up to make themselves feel better about failing the exam. That's sleep deprivation for the sake of appearances.
There's that, yes, but I think there's a point to be made for workload. I remember back in college all the courses would inevitably pile the workload on at the same time.
Around the same 2 weeks during a semester the profs will load up on all the projects, labs, and other must-dos, across all your courses. Taken separately these workload increases are modest, but as a whole you literally start running out of time.
My coping mechanism back then was to strategically not do some of these things, but then again my only intention going to school was to get a piece of paper that would unlock the Magical HR Gates at companies. My GPA isn't exactly great.
>>Around the same 2 weeks during a semester the profs will load up on all the projects, labs, and other must-dos, across all your courses. Taken separately these workload increases are modest, but as a whole you literally start running out of time.
At least for me, this became an issue only if I didn't do the homework assignments and study the class notes. What would happen is that we would get a large project, and I would realize that I didn't even have a firm grasp of the material. So I'd have to work two or three times as much, first to understand the prerequisite subjects, and then start working on the project itself.
After I figured this out and started to study regularly, projects started to become progressively easier, and as a result took less time. Even when professors loaded up on all of them within a short period of time, I could knock them out quickly because I was already very familiar with the subject.
It's like picking up a new programming language. There's the learning curve of the language itself, and then there's the learning curve of all the tools. But if you are already familiar with the tools themselves, you can learn the language much faster and get projects done much more quickly.
Yes, I see having to pull an all-nighter as a big failure on my part. I did once or twice, but I noticed it's just counter productive. I was adding negative value at 2-6am, it would have been better to sleep and continue the next morning, or just let it go.
I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep. I spent quite a while sleeping exactly 6 hours per night, and then spent about 11 weeks alternating between 3 and 4.5 hours of sleep on weeknights and about 7.5 hours of sleep on weekends. This almost certainly wouldn't be a healthy thing to do for years on end, but for the 11 week period that I did this I felt pretty good (maybe 90-95% mental capacity) and was able to get a ton of stuff done with my ~20 hour days.
Again related to your post, this sparse sleep schedule was caused by college. I go to Caltech (for those who haven't heard of it, its probably pretty similar to MIT in terms of workload/intensity) and have a fairly typical sleep schedule among my peers. I'm pretty sure that every term (10 weeks) that I've been here I've had at least one 40+ hour period with 0 sleep, and had a term where I would sleep from about 7AM to 10AM every weekday (and then at least 10 hours/day on weekends). These longs hours are mostly caused by problem sets + studying, and things get a bit worse when you're actually too busy working to have time to go to class (which is a common occurrence).
As for why students do it, its to get everything done. Typical courseload is 5 courses/term, and starting in the middle of sophomore year most people are taking courses that would be intro graduate level courses at most institutions. 4 advanced math + 1 social studies/humanities course definitely keep you busy.
Also, among my group of peers, we typically define an "all-nighter" to be where you just complete the planned activities for the following day without any sleep at all. This generally involves staying awake from one morning (10AM) to dinner time on the next day (~5PM), making an all-nighter be ~30 hours. If an all-nighter were defined more leniently, we'd have a depressingly large number of all-nighters.
Note: Most of the above applies to my more difficult terms. I've also had terms where I slept 7+ hrs/night and maybe only worked until the sun rose about 2 or 3 times.
> I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep.
Your opinion has been proven wrong by every single scientific study on sleep. Humans do not effectively adapt to less sleep. Error rates go way up, productivity goes down disproportionally, focus goes down, etc.
Here is my problem with people like you pulling out their study reference lists against every anecdote: results drawn about people in aggregate do not necessarily mean much for this specific person in this specific situation.
"I am not the exception" is a good principle to live by, but it is also important to note that sometimes you are the exception, you are in exceptional circumstances, or you can become the exception (through exceptionally hard work for example, or exceptional stupidity. Being the exception is not always a good thing).
My experience is similar to lightcatcher's. When I was younger, before I was married and had kids, it was common for me to sleep 0-3 hours for a few days while I was working on something and then crash for a few days, sleeping 10-14hrs. Basically I slept when I felt tired, stayed up if I still felt alert. At the time I did not feel less productive and I did not feel like I was putting out lower quality work. Looking back objectively those were the most productive times of my life to date, and the quality of the work was on-par or better with anything else I have done. Temporary sleep deprivation under specific conditions was highly effective by all the objective measures I can think of.
Okay, but driverdan was saying "people can adapt to less sleep" not "I have adapted to less sleep." As if it's reasonable to expect that from people in general when, empirically, it's not.
Although I could have expressed myself better, you still quoted me out of context. I was particularly talking about people dealing with less sleep on a relatively small timescale (less than 3 months). I'm choosing the 3 month window because it replicates the length of a college term and greatly reduces the risk of burnout (which I don't think is as big of an issue in college as in industry, because typical college schedules give at least a few weeks off after each term).
Are there any studies that compare how much people can done in a few months on different sleep schedules? I'm imagining some sort of cognitive task (like reading books and passing a comprehension test, or working through all the proofs in a math book) where the goal of the participants in the experiment is to accomplish said task as many times as possible in a fixed time period. This would be very difficult to design because one needs to decide on cognitive difficulty for the task (if the task was very easy, then less sleep = more time would almost certainly help) and have roughly equivalent ability between the 2 groups. This study wouldn't capture dealing with context switches or retention of information; just how much can be done in a fixed time period.
As far as I know, such a study doesn't exist. Anecdotally, I've seen many people make the decision to trade sleep for more time even while working on cognitively difficult tasks. Personally, I feel like I accomplished more during my terms in school than I could have sleeping 7+ hours/night.
On the other hand, I acknowledge long term sleep deprivation is not good for long term health, and I've personally seen my ability to run with intensity suffer during periods of low sleep.
In summary, I don't doubt the long term effects of low sleep on health, I slightly doubt the negative long term effects of sleep on productivity (know people who have been doing uberman for years and swear by it), and I heavily doubt that people can't be more productive over <3 month window by sleeping less than the recommended 8 hours per day.
Those studies have been performed several times [1][2][3][4]; most of them indicate that moderate sleep deprivation (<6 hours) produces the same amount of cognitive impairment as being legally drunk. Many of them also show that people are unaware that their cognitive function is impaired when sleep-deprived: they may feel like they're productive, but their actual performance is riddled with errors that then need to be corrected.
> I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep.
Fortunately, we have facts about this, so we don't need opinions. Its not true, although it can appear true over short periods of time. More importantly, the amount of sleep a person needs can vary a lot between individuals - you might only need 6 hours/night, but that doesn't make it physically possible for everyone to survive like that.
Looking at the just the productivity aspect of sleeping less, I have yet to see a study that accounts for the extra waking time that people have when they sleep less.
How much you get done = rate of work * time working.
Many studies have shown that the rate at which people can "work" (which means something like respond to visual stimulus) decreases when people sleep less. I haven't seen a study that compares this decrease in rate to the increase in time available for work.
If I have to do a task 1000 times each day and each time takes me 2 seconds longer on 5 hours of sleep than it does on 8, it'll take me 2000s ~= 34 extra minutes to do the task 1000x when I'm on less sleep, but then I still have 2.5 hours left out of the 3 that I decided not to sleep. (Numbers from this inspired by [1])
I acknowledge the health issues of chronic sleep deprivation.
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
It may not have killed you, but somewhere along the way, something you did, or something that happened to you cruelly robbed you of your critical thinking skills. The non-sequitur in the above sentence is so obvious, it's almost shocking that you don't see it.
Also:
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC),
20 minutes? If you live across the street. Or in the same building, maybe.
that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
When he said that all you have time to do is take a shower before heading back to the office, he meant just that.
You aren't just "quibbling" with his definitions here; you're playing semantic head games.
"If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC), that's like 3 whole hours of sleep."
First, as stated, these are interns, which wouldn't have the money to live in NYC. Second, three hours of sleep may help but in the long run it is just as unhealthy. This is shown by the answer to myth #3 on WebMD's "7 Myths About Sleep" (http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/7-myths-about-...).
"Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die."
How many times did take prescription pills to stay awake? Mix that in with lack of sleep and lack of exercise (after all, how are you going to exercise if you are working all of the time) and you have a potential recipe for disaster. Plus, there are the possibilities of health conditions that the individual may not know about or may not want to disclose in this particularly fast-paced and competitive environment.
I've had several friends intern as investment bankers and management consultants in the past couple years. The going rate in NYC is about $60k-80k prorated, I believe -- more than enough for a room in Manhattan (which is where they all lived). Even if that weren't the case, most in that career track come from relatively well-off families anyway.
I still agree it's an insanely unhealthy and stressful lifestyle, which is why I never even considered it, but these interns are certainly able to make it home rather quickly from the office. And judging from Facebook statuses and casual conversation, they often take pride in all the hours they put in. This is a very ambitious crowd.
More than enough for where in Manhattan is the real question. $60K a year isn't a great deal of money in NYC. It's very livable - but not if your criteria is "within 20 min of FiDi". You can probably get a decent room on the Upper West Side or Upper East Side, but then you're nowhere close to being within 20 min from work, especially in the middle of the night.
"They're just not aware of how sleepy they are," says Thomas Roth, Ph.D., sleep researcher at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
I don't mean to disparage the Dr, but how does he know that about those specific people? It seems exceedingly presumptuous to say, basically, that he knows these people whom he has probably never met in person better than they know themselves.
"Wakefulness for 18 hours makes you perform almost as though you're legally drunk," says Walsleben.
This is stated like it is a law of nature, true for all people in all circumstances. Is it though? If I well rested beforehand I know I can go at least 18 hours and still function nominally. "Well, your perception and evaluation of your own performance degrades as well. You just think you are performing nominally." I concede the possibility, but when I look back later (well-rested again) at my work I can only conclude that if the above statement is true then I must be a very high-functioning drunk. Driving particularly is hard to measure outside of a controlled environment--it is easy to over-estimate yourself unless something goes very wrong--but I would be very interested in doing some sort of before and after. Take me when I am well-rested and establish a baseline driving performance. Then take me when I am 18 hours out (after being well-rested, as stated above) and compare the same performance. I would expect to see a drop in performance, but I highly doubt it would be as exaggerated as this claims. I would not presume that I am indicative of the normal population, but I think I would stand as a counter-example to the absolute veracity of that statement.
I am not arguing against moderation in our sleeping patterns, and I am not contesting the results of the many studies published. I just find it hard to swallow when we draw these conclusions and state them like they are universal truths about all people in all circumstances when the reality is that people and circumstances vary far more than the studies account for, especially since we don't really understand the causal relation between sleep and performance.
Doctors in their residency have notoriously awful hours, so bad that they had to legislation was crafted merely to cap the hours at a four-week average of 80 hours (meaning that, yes, they could work 3 one hundred hour weeks and one 20-hour week).
88 hours for neurosurgical residents. And, speaking as someone who is married to one, that hypothetical "20 hour week" never happens.
Also, you are expected to be active researching and publishing and studying for certification; figure another few hours a day outside of the hospital when you're not on call.
Unfortunately the working time directive for doctors in the UK is also averaged over a longer time period. So my wife has just come off an 80+ hour week of night shifts
Back here (Netherlands), GP's (local doctors, they get all the booboos for a certain area) as well as pharmacists would get called out of bed in the middle of the night in case of emergencies. (I was carried off to the doctor at night when I developed pneumonia once, got diagnosed, penicillin from the pharmacy, etc in a matter of an hour or so). I'm guessing that happened frequently, so I'm sure doctors would miss quite some sleep from time to time, especially during flu epidemics and the like.
Nowadays, they have a new system, "Doctor's Watch", where the GP's from a certain area operate at night in rotation. It's a bit more official and less personal, but it does allow those not on rotation to get a proper night's sleep. Pretty sure they'd compensate that by working less hours during the day / week.
Yes, and that's why my doctor friends have given me a bunch of times of week where they won't go to hospital unless they're literally about to die. Any amount of pain/worry/discomfort is, for them, better than seeing a colleague at the end of their shift if they want their problem fixed.
When I started as an intern developing, I could quite easily spend 70-hours a week in the office, plus my whole weekend on my computer at home. Not because I had to, but because I was keen to figure out how everything fit together, why something didn't work and what I was doing wrong mainly.
The banking industry is well known for being able to make a lot of money in, but having to put in long hours. Unfortunately I can't feel sorry for people working in that industry, you have to keep an eye on the long term goals of earning 6-figure salary with bonuses that double that (I know plenty of people doing that who have "put in the time")
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Every single time I have done that, in college or grad school, it has fucked me over far worse than if I had just planned ahead, scheduled my work well, and gotten plenty of sleep like a sensible person.
That's true but also besides the point. As a banker, you can't schedule your work like a sensible person. The client asks a question one afternoon and you work late into the night so you can get him an answer by the morning. It's all about latency, not throughput. The question isn't: is this efficient? It's: will it kill you? And the answer is: almost certainly not.
I did pull a few all-nighters in college, and it was generally the crappiest work I did in my whole college career. I learned the least from it and in general developed a distaste for whatever it was I was doing during the all-nighters
It was also pretty rare. In the vast majority of classes I took, an all-nighter was never necessary so long as you didn't procrastinate. It was just in one or two classes where we'd unexpectedly get assigned huge projects at the end of the semester.
How many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count.
Enough to realize that it's a really stupid idea (for the same reasons everyone else is saying), like a whole lot of other stupid things one does during those years. Like drinking before your midterm, or waking up in bed with someone without being able to remember, for the life of you, how you got there, or why.
If you're a banking intern, it means you're a college kid. If you're in NYC, you can do something like live in NYU student housing for the summer. It's no big deal.
As an analyst, you'll be making over six figures, with a base in the $70-$80k range. You can live 20 minutes from midtown Manhattan on that, though you'll probably have to have roommates (but hey you're 22 so again, no big deal).
You know, if your base is $80k, and you're regularly working 100 hour weeks, your hourly wage rapidly approaches $16 / hour ... which is about what the fast food workers are currently striking for.
I do not think I could be coerced to work 100 hours a week regularly for less than $50/hour of cash and equity, and the lower bound might be closer to $100/hour.
You're not working 100 hour weeks consistently over the year. I'd be surprised if the yearly average is over 75 (in IB; I'd be surprised if it were over 60 in trading). Moreover, you don't take the job for the first-year salary. You take it for the potential of making $500k+ before 30 (if you stick it out), or going the MBA route and getting a cushy $200k 9-6 at some F500 afterward.
What is the success rate like? Do 100% of IB starters make it? 1%? 10%?
If you've got decent odds of hitting the big payoff, that's one thing, but if the expected value is low, it just becomes another lottery, with a few winners, a lot of losers, and a the winners enriching themselves at the expense of the losers.
Putting up with banking hours is all about the pay-off 7-10 years down the road.
If you can put up with the hours until you end up as a director or higher, you can pretty reliably makes over a million dollars per year (with continuous increases in salary) putting only 50-60 hrs a week.
People do banking because it's one of the lowest risk ways to becoming rich.
I worked as a technology intern at a large investment bank for one summer, and my salary was a prorated 80k. The IB kids were making about the same (although they worked many, many more hours than we did). This was 2 years ago.
N.B.: This was awful and I am now safely far, far away from the banking industry.
I worked as an analyst in Investment Banking for a while. To me it seemed that the analysts who worked the really long hours worked on projects in teams, where each team member was responsible for a part of a project. No one can start or continue until that part is done, so they just sit and wait.
There were many times when people just wouldn't respect other people's time. At 5PM I would get an email: "Hey, I need this done for tomorrow morning"..."So why didn't you just tell me earlier? I know you knew about it in advance."
Exactly this. I worked in investment banking in NY and SF before moving over to VC/growth equity (and now a hedge fund).
Not only are bankers by definition terrible managers, but there's absolutely zero incentive for them to try to treat the junior people below them well. Junior people's time is viewed as an consumable resource like an oil well or a coal seam.
As a result, the sort of "pizza-sized team" project management that is the heartbeat of software companies is just a total unknown on the corporate finance/M&A side of investment banks. (Less so in consulting.)
Worse, there is no concern for what we used to call "yield loss:" slides or analyses that we'd create because a senior banker demanded them that were never presented to the client or in which they client had no interest. Countless times I've been the creator of and recipient of extensive presentations of which maybe one slide was relevant. I recall numerous instances of sending such books by messenger or FedEx to hotels/partners' houses, only to learn that they were never even picked up, let alone looked at.
As a VC/private equity guy, the presentations and investment memos that were no doubt largely written between 2 and 5 AM were mostly discarded; I extracted the few numbers I needed and tossed them, as I wanted the raw data from management and not the bankers' glossy sales pitch. I had stacks of these things in my office.
I'm not of the opinion that investment banking adds no value. But I firmly believe that the culture and habits of investment banks result in piles of unnecessary work that just burns out everyone associated with the enterprise and is not in any meaningful way related to the quality or value of the service delivered.
Clients don't care how many hours you worked, they care about the end results.
(I make exception here for situations with real economic deadlines like M&A auctions, but the biggest issues are not usually financial--they're business issues that bankers don't actually help much with compared to strategy consultants--I was one of those for a summer too, and the hours were long but reasonable.)
I created reports that needed to be presented every time a public finance analyst went to visit a client. I built tools in R that sped up the analysis process, but putting everything together took a few hours.
The reason why I said the analysts knew they needed the reports before 5 o'clock is because they were the once who set those meetings up weeks in advance (they are institutional clients, it doesn't just happen last minute), they just forgot to share it with our team.
I actually liked working on deals that needed to be analyzed quickly, it was usually something new and I got to be more creative.
Its not about productivity. the people doing the work are junior and replaced every 3-5 years. they are disposable, in that sense. Since the repsonsibility gets quite steep quite quickly, its more efficient to haze the junior staff, to push them to the breaking point and see how they do, before promoting them. Many people enter banking who are not suitable to it, because of greed or social pressure. It would be a lot worse if those people were not weeded out. it might sometimes seem impossible that banks could be more poorly run, but there are many who would be far worse to put in these positions.
Except that "hazing" arguably selects for those driven by [extreme] greed and social pressure, since anyone smart enough to get into a junior banking position has plenty of more palatable alternatives if they rate "quality of life" higher than "net worth age 30". In theory, if not in practice, ability to rationally appraise alternatives ought to be more important to people making billion pound decisions than energy and sheer bloodymindedness. The only way "hazing" works as a selection effect is if junior analysts' actual work tasks are generally so easy that it won't mentally tax even the below-average ones without sleep deprivation. It's harder to fake competence when you're tired. It's also harder to fake competence if standards are set higher...
The more general excuse for overworking bankers is to limit the number of people accountable for a particular project, meaning no sharing of workload even when it would be efficient to do so.
Interns don't need to be efficient (they're cheap and disposable), and they don't do very intellectually taxing work, in general. Think making powerpoints, not designing investment strategies or coding. There's little incentive for the more senior bankers to treat their interns properly.
That actually makes a lot of sense then. They have an overabundance of interns who are willing to work pointless exhausting hours to prove their mettle allowing them to make bank on man hours.
The question become then, why do clients allow them to get away with it? Do they satisfy their clients to such an extent that they don't care about bloated costs or do the clients just not know?
And for a client, the deadline is more important than the money sometimes. I mean, when you see what these firms bill, it's obviously money is no object for the customer... because damn.
If the job market keeps worsening and huge unemployment/underemployment/unpaid work becomes The New Normal, it will become time to have a hard conversation about hard caps on working hours as a means to improve quality of life for the workers and provide more jobs to the non-workers. You want to put in 100 hours? You'd better be co-owner.
It's sad when the brightest and most competent people end up treated like that, but when they are abused and used against the rest, it's when I start feeling like putting up a guillotine.
I think its sad when anyone is treated like this, and pretending that some people are different with "best and brightest" bullshit just makes things all the worse.
This kind of horrible lifestyle is well-known to everyone applying for a job on Wall Street. Nevertheless, people still apply, and not out of desperation -- all of the successful applicants could get great jobs elsewhere.
There's no deceit here -- the investment banks clearly articulate what the lifestyle will be like, and people sign up for the pay. I know, I did an internship at Lehman Brothers and saw it firsthand -- people staying till 3am just to impress. I managed to keep my weekly hours under 40 by automating my job in Visual Basic, and then decided I wanted to make productivity tools for the general market instead of in-house.
I'm curious which processes you automated in VBA? I'm currently an analyst in an FP&A role. I use VB for a lot of things but I'm not sure I could automate that much of my job. I do a lot of smaller tasks, taking the time to write a macro for each one just doesn't seem to add value. Especially when processes change frequently. Perhaps IB is more suited for VBA automation.
It was pulling in coupon payment data from Bloomberg for an array of securities (by CUSIP number) and aggregating them to create a payment schedule for the combined portfolio.
as an intern, you're almost functionally useless to your desk. You're not really adding anything, you're not really doing anything, you're just one more warm body.
The article makes it sound as if the interns could just play FarmVille all night, as long as they’re at their desk. A lot of people would be doing that anyways at home. Is that a correct assessment?
I've had other interns vary there description between doing loads and not doing anything - people aren't going to micro manage you (or manage you at all half the time...).
Never understood what the obsession is with long hours in finance - I highly doubt it actually leads to any more productivity, and certainly reduces the quality of decision making. Surely the better way to impress is to do 40 hours of great work, not 110 hours of being barely awake.
Naively when I see a job ad asking for a rockstar programmer I assume there will be a supply of coke :P. Asking for a ninja... well that doesn't seem as much fun.
I had a gig once where the manager pulled us into a meeting and with a straight face told that in order to finish this project on time (really a week early) we were expected to work 12 hour days and be on call. If we got a call and had to respond we were still expected to come in and work the 12 hour shift. I politely raised my hand and with a straight face asked if the company health benefits would include meth-amphetamines.
Hahaha, that's the thing, companies expect employees to do whatever they have to for results. In many ways I feel like professional athletes that do the same by doping should get a pass. It's not an even playing field but at the end of the day everyone wants results.
Although his death was a sad fact, the truth is it was his choice. In a free world, every adult is responsible for his/her actions. If he did not feel nice working such long hours, he should have quit.
The real issue is if he was paid for overtime and what was his contract details about overtime. Nowadays, a lot of employees demand overtime from their workers without properly compensating them.
>I ended up doing an all-nighter in my first week as an intern, which is when you start work at nine, you stay until five or six the next morning, you go home, have a quick shower and then head back into the office and continue working.
That really doesn't sound any different from doing field operations the military. Except without the shower.
Computers have increased people's productivity through the roof and still we see people working more than 100 hour/week. Are they working on something that can't be automated or they don't want to automate ? Are they doing something that can't be done by two people instead of one ? Something is not right.
They do small bits of work that would be hard to automate, accompanied by metric shitloads of reporting and process so that the people at the top can look at an oversimplified graph of what's going on.
No one has to be a banker, if they take you in it means you're smart enough to go elsewhere. It's no secret how hard it is.
Why do people feel the need to put down the jobs of others? Is it because they are different? Is it jealousy because they are not smart enough or don't themselves have the will power? I don't get it.
This kind of work in investment banking sector seems quite sad - you are no longer doing work for living, but the other way around.
I have absolutely no experience on what particular type of tasks are done in these positions. Could someone provide more insight? Maybe there could be opportunity to automate this work, at least partially?
It makes sense if you get enough money out of it. You can do that for some time. If you don't get paid enough in correspondence to the shit they throw at you, then you must remember that nobody forces you to be there and you can just leave if you think it's stupid.
This type of environment is not exclusive to banking. Both doctors (during internship and residency) and lawyers (during the first few years at big firms) go through similar experiences.
Working more than 40 hours in a week is not something to be proud of. In fact, people should be ashamed of it because it displays that they seriously lack intelligence or discipline.
Our economy certainly doesn't reward one based on hours worked, however it's clearly implicit in this behaviour that extra hours are expected of people because they make more. Why? Clearly that's nor justified by economics...
Canadian banks aren't too bad from what I hear. In the radio episode referenced by the OP, it's mentioned that the worst offenders are Wall St. Banks, and the worst departments are M&A...
You have to experience working in an IB to appreciate the article. They are very very much swamped down in politics process and paperwork (albeit electronic these days). It takes ages to do small things, forever to do the rest. No one has a long-term view beyond the next quarter, and most believe in doing just enough to grab some bonus and run. You will encounter big swinging dicks who like to lord it over the interns, making them stay late, just because they can. You will see many many unhappy faces everyday, and you will feel a little bit more lost with each day you remain there.
I might sound like a dick here, but I'm just trying to be matter-of-fact about it.
If you have depression, anxiety, or panic disorder, you probably shouldn't consider an analyst program to be a viable career option, just as being a pro basketball player isn't viable for 99+ percent of people. Sorry, but it's just not going to work; those typically manageable conditions become crippling disabilities in the crucible of a 100-hour work week. You should probably find another way; if you're smart, you can do something more interesting than analyst dreck, get an MBA, and move in as an associate-- or, perhaps even better, stick with technology and move in as a quant and have a ~10-hour day.
This person had epilepsy, which is potentially fatal. He never should have taken on an analyst gig.
I'm not saying this isn't horrible and wrong-- obviously, it is-- but I wish in general that young people were more aware of the reality of health risks. It's one thing to go into a job like that knowing what the risks are, but a lot of people have no clue.
It's also not about getting particularly difficult work done - intern-level spreadsheet and PowerPoint work isn't the sort of thing that only a select few can handle.
It's entirely about filtering for people who will submit to abuse.