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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

#191

Post by rodgerd »

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

Yes, and that's why my doctor friends have given me a bunch of times of week where they won't go to hospital unless they're literally about to die. Any amount of pain/worry/discomfort is, for them, better than seeing a colleague at the end of their shift if they want their problem fixed.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#192

Post by jdbernard »

superuser2 wrote: post #159
jdbernard wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is my problem with people like you pulling out their study reference lists against every anecdote: results drawn about people in aggregate do not necessarily mean much for this specific person in this specific situation. "I am not the exception" is a good principle to live by, but it is also important to note that sometimes you are the exception, you are in exceptional circumstances, or you can become the except…

Okay, but driverdan was saying "people can adapt to less sleep" not "I have adapted to less sleep." As if it's reasonable to expect that from people in general when, empirically, it's not.

Fair enough.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#194

Post by sklivvz1971 »

rayiner wrote: post #179
iyulaev wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not have team members work shifts? Get 24 hour coverage in the office without having frazzled people making poor decisions. Besides, the people making the decisions aren't these banking interns nor the junior associates. The more junior guys and gals are, from what I understand, mostly just doing grunt work.

Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off? Juniors don't make decisions, they do analysis to support the decision makers. If a decision maker proposes something in the afternoon, he wants the analysis by morning to make the decision.

Programmers do work in shifts. They are not crazy like bankers...

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#195

Post by refurb »

tanzam75 wrote: post #166
rayiner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon valley types are the devil to the unwashed San Francisco hippies. As an investment banker you also provide a service. When Google buys a startup for $50 million, that transaction doesn't make itself happen.

No -- but the banks are overcompensated for their work on M&A. You could hire a strategic consulting firm -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG -- to do M&A due diligence for half of what the investments banks charge. They hire from the same pool of 25-year-old Ivy League graduates. I doubt they'd do a worse job than the banks. IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is ho…

90% of what you're buying when you bring an IB firm to help with your IPO is the name. Why? Because the name has value, it helps sell stock.

I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it".

It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#196

Post by refurb »

tanzam75 wrote: post #166
rayiner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon valley types are the devil to the unwashed San Francisco hippies. As an investment banker you also provide a service. When Google buys a startup for $50 million, that transaction doesn't make itself happen.

No -- but the banks are overcompensated for their work on M&A. You could hire a strategic consulting firm -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG -- to do M&A due diligence for half of what the investments banks charge. They hire from the same pool of 25-year-old Ivy League graduates. I doubt they'd do a worse job than the banks. IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is ho…

90% of what you're buying when you bring an IB firm to help with your IPO is the name. Why? Because the name has value, it helps sell stock.

I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it".

It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#198

Post by sklivvz1971 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #116
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…

I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.

This is most certainly _not_ capitalism, nor it's a friction-free economy. Banks' purpose should be making money go around, not sucking more and more of it off the rest of the economy...

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#199

Post by rdtsc »

rayiner wrote: post #179
iyulaev wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not have team members work shifts? Get 24 hour coverage in the office without having frazzled people making poor decisions. Besides, the people making the decisions aren't these banking interns nor the junior associates. The more junior guys and gals are, from what I understand, mostly just doing grunt work.

Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off? Juniors don't make decisions, they do analysis to support the decision makers. If a decision maker proposes something in the afternoon, he wants the analysis by morning to make the decision.

> Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?

Good point. That's a good way to put it. Depending on task, unfortunately not everything is parallelizable.

But quite often, culture is the problem as well. If performance bonuses are large enough, people will compete with each other and will be at each other's throats over control of projects. Machismo and cowboy-like behavior is to be expected in some environments. I personally think those environments are toxic.

Anyway I see the a point about some tasks not being easily de-composible, but I think culture plays a significant role here as well.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#200

Post by refurb »

saalweachter wrote: post #131
rayiner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Putting up with banking hours is all about the pay-off 7-10 years down the road.

If you can put up with the hours until you end up as a director or higher, you can pretty reliably makes over a million dollars per year (with continuous increases in salary) putting only 50-60 hrs a week.

People do banking because it's one of the lowest risk ways to becoming rich.

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