Pushed to the limit as a banking intern • Hacker News Board

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#161

Post by jdbernard » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:21 PM UTC

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…

I have some issues with that WebMD article:

    "They're just not aware of how sleepy they are," says Thomas Roth, Ph.D., sleep researcher at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

I don't mean to disparage the Dr, but how does he know that about those specific people? It seems exceedingly presumptuous to say, basically, that he knows these people whom he has probably never met in person better than they know themselves.

     "Wakefulness for 18 hours makes you perform almost as though you're legally drunk," says Walsleben.

This is stated like it is a law of nature, true for all people in all circumstances. Is it though? If I well rested beforehand I know I can go at least 18 hours and still function nominally. "Well, your perception and evaluation of your own performance degrades as well. You just think you are performing nominally." I concede the possibility, but when I look back later (well-rested again) at my work I can only conclude that if the above statement is true then I must be a very high-functioning drunk. Driving particularly is hard to measure outside of a controlled environment--it is easy to over-estimate yourself unless something goes very wrong--but I would be very interested in doing some sort of before and after. Take me when I am well-rested and establish a baseline driving performance. Then take me when I am 18 hours out (after being well-rested, as stated above) and compare the same performance. I would expect to see a drop in performance, but I highly doubt it would be as exaggerated as this claims. I would not presume that I am indicative of the normal population, but I think I would stand as a counter-example to the absolute veracity of that statement.

I am not arguing against moderation in our sleeping patterns, and I am not contesting the results of the many studies published. I just find it hard to swallow when we draw these conclusions and state them like they are universal truths about all people in all circumstances when the reality is that people and circumstances vary far more than the studies account for, especially since we don't really understand the causal relation between sleep and performance.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#162

Post by zupatol » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:25 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #126

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 lea…

> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday.

Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done.

I find it hard to believe that working so much that your faculties are diminished brings something valuable to a job. It's more likely that this has something to do with social dynamics. It could be just a convention that was needed to please those who decide on your promotion, a way to signal your dedication, or a way to protect yourself against what others could do to you when you're not here. Finding a way to get rid of this would surely benefit all. This seems obvious now that one worker died of it.

> Deals are fragile creatures

So are we

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#163

Post by gpvos » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:39 PM UTC

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…

Not only health, also social life and stuff. And if your dream consists mostly of money, I don't think it's a good one. But yeah, that's subjective.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#164

Post by rayiner » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:42 PM UTC

zupatol wrote: post #162

rayiner wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday. Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done. I find it hard to believe that working…

Of course deals would get done if bankers couldn't work at night, but they'd take longer. To put it in programming terms, it's about latency not bandwidth. In many cases, reducing latency will make tasks complete faster even if it comes at the cost of bandwidth.

Deals involve a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, changing deal terms, changing financing details, etc. Bankers could simply go home at 6 pm and get to requests the next day, but that would make deals take longer. While a deal is in progress, it's fragile. Parties can decide to back out, prices can go up, third parties can swoop in. That's the sort of thing that causes shareholders to get pissed, lawsuits to get filed, etc, and is generally to be avoided. Also there are the usual deadlines of corporate life: we want to get this off the books this quarter, we want to get the merger done this fiscal year, etc. All that results in C-suite execs picking bankers who will turn things around as quickly as possible.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#165

Post by rayiner » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:49 PM UTC

crusso wrote: post #157

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism. So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government. That…

Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take.

The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#166

Post by tanzam75 » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:50 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #69

coolnow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Through a startup, most times at least you can say you provided a service (like Dropbox). With banking, you're pretty much a devil in a lot of people's eyes and you're working purely for the profit of your employer.

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 how Google itself went public. It's true that the investment banks have access to a larger pool of investors. But that's circular reasoning. If the investment banks didn't exist, then these capitalists would be investing in IPOs through a Dutch auction like OpenIPO.

Structured products? The investment banks earn a 50% profit margin on structured products. The people who buy structured products could double their returns by constructing their own structured products on the options and future markets. And if they're not sophisticated enough to do that without an investment bank, then they probably don't understand what they're buying!

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#167

Post by gpvos » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:50 PM UTC

crusso wrote: post #157

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism. So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government. That…

I don't think a free market and capitalism are exactly the same thing. Mostly, I think there should be some kind of limitation on ownership (especially of large entities), since with ownership comes social responsibility. Maybe we should just put an end to the limitations on liability for people who own a company.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#168

Post by b1daly » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 8:54 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #126

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 lea…

This reasoning is suspect: repeatedly pushing oneself to work to exhaustion as a form of training for real work where you need to work longs seems unlikely to offer more than diminishing returns. How often do bankers need to work three straight day and nights? Are you positing a physiological process where the more "three nighters" one does the stronger you get?

It seems more likely that the treatment of interns is an expression of sublimated rage on the part of their supervisors. But I suppose they can laugh all the way to the bank.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#169

Post by robertha » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 9:06 PM UTC

nickthemagicman wrote: post #132

robertha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I created reports that needed to be presented every time a public finance analyst went to visit a client. I built tools in R that sped up the analysis process, but putting everything together took a few hours.

The reason why I said the analysts knew they needed the reports before 5 o'clock is because they were the once who set those meetings up weeks in advance (they are institutional clients, it doesn't just happen last minute), they just forgot to share it with our team.

I actually liked working on deals that needed to be analyzed quickly, it was usually something new and I got to be more creative.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#170

Post by v3rt » Thu, Sep 12, 2013, 9:18 PM UTC

Cyranix wrote: post #118

v3rt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to disagree - at least for my university, which to be fair is notorious for being brutal in terms of workload. It's not unusual for me and many of my friends to have so much work for classes and extracurriculars over the course of a week or month that there literally isn't enough time to do all of it and also eat and sleep in the 168 hrs/week that you have.

Allowing that there may be exceptions such as your own case (assuming you are properly assessing your situation), would you still agree that the generalization holds for the vast majority of cases?

Not at my university, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat true generally. I think a valid comparison might be between a hard sciences student at a top school who's also involved in a lot of extracurriculars and up at all hours just to stay on top of everything, and someone working on an early stage company where there's always something burning. The opposite end of that would be the investment banking intern spending 100+ hours a week at the office spinning their wheels or college student who does nothing all week and then stays up to make themselves feel better about failing the exam. That's sleep deprivation for the sake of appearances.