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I think it's the analysts writing these slides.
Stockholm Syndrome then?
> Rectifying The Situation: 80 hours per week should be considered max capacity That's not tone deaf or anything.
Lol. That is an incredible bullet point. Someone actually decided okay we need to draw a line in the sand where anything more is excessive. That line is at 80 hours. After that is too much. God I hate late stage capitalism.
I burnt out of this industry but if anyone made a spreadsheet like this they woulda been laughed off the boat and probably subject to all sorts of bad behavior.
Not saying this justifies any of it just adding some perspective. There's plenty of industries where this goes on and most of them don't involve making huge piles of money.
But with that said, junior banking is an incredible brain-drain - when you look at the average banker credentials at top investment banks, compared to the actual work they do there.
I guess that is the price you have to pay for prestige. Dedicate your youth to chasing a rat-race, then when you're finally done with your MBA, maybe you get to work on genuinely interesting stuff - more than just being a spreadsheet jockey, or correcting font-sizes in PP.
in any cycle of abuse, bad treatment is a feature and not a bug.
"Oh they're a bunch of predatory people anyway." How you create predatory people: pressure, unfairness, stigma on soft feelings, and a hierarchy you can fight your way up.
1. They are all lying. They are not working productively for 95 hours a week. At most they are *present* for 95 hours a week. It is not humanly possible to maintain mental focus for that long. Everyone who says it is telling macho lies. It might be possible to get close to it for a week or two with stimulant drugs, but eventually you will have to pay the piper. 2. It is no secret that Goldman expects self-destructive…
The end outcome is that it hurts the employee. The survey was for 13 people, but it still saddens me to see that they unanimously agreed on having negative relationships with friends/family due to their work. Those are harder (and sometimes impossible) to repair...
The burn out and churn is intended. Big 4 accounting is the same way, recruit individuals straight out of college, work them 80+ hours a week, burn them out and have them move on. It’s a win-win, the employee gets a stamp on their resume which opens many doors and the employer gets cheap labor and less people moving up the ladder.
also, I spoke with a junior analyst at a bulge bracket recently and apparently he had signed for his next job in PE before he even started his analyst job...
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"Oh they're a bunch of predatory people anyway." How you create predatory people: pressure, unfairness, stigma on soft feelings, and a hierarchy you can fight your way up.
While simultaneously telling them that the abuse is justified because it produces superior beings such as themselves.
I'm not sure what the best enforcement mechanism would be, but this should be addressed through national legislation. Perhaps mandatory overtime and/or some kind of business-level tax for anyone working more than 40 hours a week? Nobody should be "exempt" from earning overtime.
Germany has this. They’re not a poor country.
I wonder what they actually "do" for 95 hours a week. There is no way it can be productive work for all that time over such long periods.
Since they mention "junior bankers", i'd say most of it is: - re-formatting presentations decks - re-formatting booklets - checking numbers - being available The first two to three episodes of HBO's Industry ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_(TV_series) ) reflects this well, and darkly. It is also fairly accurate w/r/t what my banker friends experienced.
According to family who worked in finance: the reformatting has to do with any errors.
If there is one small error, somewhere, then how do you know there aren't more? These banks are making million or billion dollar transactions, so a small rounding error can cost fantastic amounts of money. So start from square one and do it over, and make sure it's right.
Additionally, they need a lot of collateral. Appendices of research, citations, crunching other numbers -- most of which will never be looked it. But if the customer does want to see them, they have them, they know they're right, and they're able to answer any questions johnny-on-the-spot style. Again, with billion-dollar deals at stake, you'll do the due diligence, even if it means no one will ever read that info -- the "just in case they ask" risk is high enough to justify it.
That all translates into long, grinding hours for documents that no one may ever read.