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Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#121

Post by driverdan »

lightcatcher wrote: post #105
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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-ni…

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…

> 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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#122

Post by rwallace »

31reasons wrote: post #85
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

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#123

Post by sam_bwut »

millstone wrote: post #106

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...).

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#124

Post by enraged_camel »

potatolicious wrote: post #115
enraged_camel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. M…

>>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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#125

Post by sam_bwut »

rorrr2 wrote: post #28
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…

I think you overestimate how much banking interns make. By a lot.

I'm interning down the road from where he was - I live 10 minutes away and still have money to burn.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#126

Post by rayiner »

No1 wrote: post #113

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#127

Post by OGC »

michalu wrote: post #61
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…

"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 mea…

> If I choose to work 12 hours it's my free choice, not affecting you

That really depends on what you're doing.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#128

Post by yason »

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.
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