Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 225 posts

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#51

Post by stephencanon »

jmduke wrote: post #26
JonnieCache wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3 whole hours of sleep >100-hour weeks will be interspersed with very dead weeks That still sounds pretty dramatic man. Would you want your doctor on that schedule? Your bus/cab driver?

Would you want your doctor on that schedule? 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). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_resident_work_hours

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#52

Post by pjc50 »

pc86 wrote: post #25
parasight wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is rather a matter of missing regulations.

And what regulation(s) would you suggest? People always suggest "more regulation!" as if it's some magical panacea.

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#53

Post by danielrmay »

sspiff wrote: post #44
danielrmay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intern was set to make £45,000 / pa (not including bonuses) as an Analyst, but I suppose it opens doors.

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.

This was not the salary for the internship - this is the salary of the position that this guy was about to be offered -- after his internship

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#54

Post by ajmurmann »

jackgavigan wrote: post #48

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." Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/223723

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#55

Post by jetti »

rayiner wrote: post #14

People like to dramatize this a bit, I think. 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 minut…

"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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jetti wrote: post #55
rayiner wrote: post #14

People like to dramatize this a bit, I think. 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 minut…

"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…

[deleted]

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#57

Post by w1ntermute »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #16
danielrmay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intern was set to make £45,000 / pa (not including bonuses) as an Analyst, but I suppose it opens doors.

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.

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#58

Post by harryh »

cliveowen wrote: post #6

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 dre…

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#59

Post by DanBC »

harryh wrote: post #58
cliveowen wrote: post #6

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 dre…

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#60

Post by consultant23522 »

Pxtl wrote: post #33
andrew_gardener wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Edit: changed metal to mettle >_…

FYI, it's mettle. Stupid homophones. 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 m…

Welcome to Bank of NoLife. As a new employee and co-owner, here is your complimentary 1 share of BoN. You now own 0.00000000000001% of the company.
Post reply on HN