My Time at Lehman
nickchirls.com
My Time at Lehman
1–10 of 198 posts
Re: My Time at Lehman
#2fascinating writeup
Re: My Time at Lehman
#3The submitted URL is to the front page of the blog. The URL for the individual post is http://nickchirls.com/my-time-at-lehman
Re: My Time at Lehman
#4"When you’d rather have someone shit on your face than go to work, it’s probably time to leave." sums up the article.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#5I have a strange sense of sadness for my friends who are "stuck" on Wall Street. Strange because it's weird to feel sad for someone making $250k+ per year, but I've heard their first hand accounts of how much they hate their jobs. If you're the type of person who can step back from the ego-driven culture of investment banking I feel like everyone reaches the same meta-conclusions that Nick did. It's just unbelievably hard for them to step away from the money.
I mean, I'd like to think I would be able to make that choice and that purpose and meaning would ultimately trump a large paycheck. But nobody's putting $250k+ in my pocket so it's genuinely hard to say.
Kudos to Nick for leaving. It took guts.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#6some will read this and think: "disgusting. thanks for the honest appraisal of what it's like... and it's disgusting."
Others will read this and think: "holy crap man, the people that are screwed by the company still make just under a million! I totally want to work on wall street. I'll be rich"
It's a jungle out there
Re: My Time at Lehman
#7some will read this and think: "disgusting. thanks for the honest appraisal of what it's like... and it's disgusting." Others will read this and think: "holy crap man, the people that are screwed by the company still make just under a million! I totally want to work on wall street. I'll be rich" It's a jungle out there
When Michael Lewis wrote Liar's Poker he was shocked over the number of people who contacted him, asking for advice on how to get into investment banking.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#8I worked at Lehman from 2004-2008 in investment banking and on the bond trading floor and I think I have a little more balanced view.
Yes, there are people on wall street that hate their jobs. Yes, there are people obsessed with money. That's easy to point out. But there are also some people that are there because they like working with their friends and making big bets, and getting proven wrong or right. It's actually similar to the culture of being a contrarian that I see in SV. And as to the point where the guy felt shorted by a million dollar bonus, wouldn't you feel shorted if you made the company 10x that in profit on your trades, and all your friends at other firms that made 10x got a bigger check than you? That's human nature, not something specific to wall street, even if it's easy to throw up your hands and say how shocking it is because of the amounts involved.
Anyway, I don't mean to be overly harsh on the article. It's possible my additional time there put some blinders on, and I still have a lot of friends that work on the street (a good percentage of whom actually like their jobs). It was really interesting to get Nick's perspective, and it's especially awesome that it's from someone else who has jumped over to startups from wall street. Just throwing my 2 cents in.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#9"Which, it turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople) could buy bonds at the "market" price from intelligent hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same crap at much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally considered "sophisticated") pension funds and insurance companies in middle America. What I discovered, quite starkly, is that the part of Wall Street that I worked in was simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors often teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more sophisticated investors..."
"'We are important providers of liquidity that create stable financial markets. We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t do it, someone else will.' These are the lies that people tell themselves so that they can buy larger homes."
Both of these things are completely true, and that's why American public policy is having such a hard time grappling with Wall Street. We try to rationalize the state of affairs by pointing out all the ways that Wall Street has an "unfair advantage" but the fact of the matter is that: what do you expect in a free market system that rewards every marginal advantage other than wealth to flow from less sophisticated people to more sophisticated ones? We like the idea of letting everyone transact freely, but we are uncomfortable with the "winner take all" implication of that policy.
Wall Street: 1) Hires some of the brighest people in the country (e.g. 40% of the author's class at Yale); 2) Aggressively weeds out that impressive pool by forcing out all but the most promising people within a few years; 3) Trains them rigorously and maintains a level of institutional knowledge transfer that tech companies can only dream of.
Why are we surprised that they disproportionately get the better end of every transaction?
Re: My Time at Lehman
#10The experience reminded me of one as a child when I unfairly sold some worthless items to neighbors at a stoop sale in front of our house in Brooklyn. When my parents found out that night, they made me go from home to home on our block returning the money.
I think I like his parents :-)