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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

#131

Post by saalweachter »

rayiner wrote: post #38
rorrr2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#132

Post by nickthemagicman »

robertha wrote: post #49
nickthemagicman wrote: post #8

What does a banker even do during those long hours? I'm genuinely curious.

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 th…

What did you do as far as projects that would have such a intense timeline?

Was it basically deals going on that needed to be analyzed quickly so they could make a decision?

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#133

Post by nknighthb »

johngalt wrote: post #102

Meanwhile someone who learned to become a plumber or electrician at community college is making more per hour.

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#134

Post by Bartweiss »

rayiner wrote: post #72
gpvos wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that doesn't make it any less wrong.

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…

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#135

Post by lightcatcher »

driverdan wrote: post #121
lightcatcher wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#136

Post by thedufer »

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.

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#137

Post by rayiner »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #119
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…

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#138

Post by randyrand »

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.

"submit to abuse" is one way to put it. "Are right for the job" is another.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#140

Post by johngalt »

tedunangst wrote: post #130
johngalt wrote: post #102

Meanwhile someone who learned to become a plumber or electrician at community college is making more per hour.

What's the average salary for a plumber 10 years into their career?

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.

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