61–70 of 87 posts
The tragedy is that this is unnecessary. If Wall Street compensation can support paying enormous compensation, it can support hiring enough people to do the work. As with medical residents' brutal schedules, it's tradition over rationality.
> You can’t really stand out because most of what you’re doing does not require original thinking. So the only way you can distinguish yourself is by sheer endurance. Several years ago, when I was weighing junior roles in trading and banking, a private equity manager with whom I consulted advised: "nobody became a millionaire by being a grunt". Hard work is important, but it shouldn't be your chief differentiator. On…
What is absurd is that the long hours juniors do in investment banking are terribly inefficient.
First because they spend them on tasks that could be automated or outsourced: compiling financials, formatting powerpoints (Microsoft shares a large part of responsability for their poor UI!).
Second because the more tired they become, the less efficient they are at what they do. It is often the case that they would probably get the same done quicker by calling it a day at 9pm and coming back the next day with a fresh mind. But peer pressure prevents that.
Third because even though they spend their time at the office they actually do not work continuously. Them staying late is more often than not because they were assigned something at 5pm with an unrealistic deadline. In this business managers usually disregard the implications of when in the day they give work or feedback. And I suspect it is often because they have been there, done that, as juniors, and have little sympathy for the juniors' time spent at the office. It's a kind of rite of passage.
The tragedy is that this is unnecessary. If Wall Street compensation can support paying enormous compensation, it can support hiring enough people to do the work. As with medical residents' brutal schedules, it's tradition over rationality.
I've no direct experience of this, but this is my take as well. Can anyone explain why two people doing 50 hour weeks at half the salary wouldn't be better for everyone (the employees, their colleagues, the firms that employ them, their clients, society)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OP but I struggle to sympathize with someone who takes that kind of job. I can't think up any other motivation other than greed or addiction to money/power. A friend of mine just turned down an insanely high paying Wall Street job. She told me that there was no way they could pay her that kind of salary without taking every second of her existence and every joule of her energy. A couple of week ago she went t…
Whether you sympathize or not, saying "meh" to someone's death is a slippery slope with psychopathy at the bottom.
You literally made a "slippery slope argument". You might not be aware of it, but this is a logical fallacy [1]. Psychopathy is not the end result of lacking empathy to a certain person's death.
[1] http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
A lot of good talent is wasted on Wall Street. Fortunately, most (who don't care for the lifestyle/can't hack it) get wise and leave. The hard thing is knowing when to exit.
> A lot of good talent is wasted on Wall Street. Why do you say that? Finance funds most of society's ventures, the 'system' would look much different without the capital and services that the banking sector provides...
I have a friend who is a Market Maker on Wall St. He's very successful makes a lot of money, works very long, but he has a very low self esteem. He tells me "I don't know how to actually do anything of any use in the world." I don't really understand him but I think he ends up feeling like his life is worthless. At the end of the day he could be as rich as Midas but he hasn't figured out what life is worth even to hi…
The funny thing is, when it boils down to it, many jobs in our society are superfluous... We survived without technology, with a less-developed finance sector, without cars and airplanes, yet here we are with entire sectors of the economy that probably aren't 'needed' for a happy life. At least in finance you can get to a number where you can finally say 'fuck it', and go do what you really want to do...
All of this is obvious, but I rarely see it mentioned. We should optimize for meaning in our work, not happiness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't escape the odour of sour grapes in discussions like these, where people who could have gone into finance reassure themselves and each other that they made the right decision to take a less lucrative path through life.
Naturally I agree. The question is better framed thus: who has taken the more lucrative path in living their life? Who has found burgeoning vitality rather than pecuniary richness? Who has traded what is priceless for what can be used to pay other prices?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of good talent is wasted on Wall Street. Why do you say that? Finance funds most of society's ventures, the 'system' would look much different without the capital and services that the banking sector provides...
What should we put as the price tag of 'increased liquidity,' just one of a few of the mantras that the middlemen of finance use to justify themselves? http://www.tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-how-the-financial-secto...
It's finance that funds ventures. Assesses risk. Decides what ventures will have good payoffs. Its' an incredibly important sector of the economy.
Tell me. Take a look at the services provided here and tell me which ones are "bad" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_services
People that say we shouldn't like the financial sector are people that don't understand finance.
I have a friend who is a Market Maker on Wall St. He's very successful makes a lot of money, works very long, but he has a very low self esteem. He tells me "I don't know how to actually do anything of any use in the world." I don't really understand him but I think he ends up feeling like his life is worthless. At the end of the day he could be as rich as Midas but he hasn't figured out what life is worth even to hi…
The funny thing is, when it boils down to it, many jobs in our society are superfluous... We survived without technology, with a less-developed finance sector, without cars and airplanes, yet here we are with entire sectors of the economy that probably aren't 'needed' for a happy life. At least in finance you can get to a number where you can finally say 'fuck it', and go do what you really want to do...
Long ago I traveled to Puerto Rico on business. One of the locals was a refugee from just such a Wall Street job. He had his first heart attack in his early 40s, and a decade later when I knew him it seemed as if all he needed was a loud noise to send him to his final reward. He had come back to PR to be with family, both because he needed help and because that's what you do when your mortality stares you in the face.
Doesn't seem worth it to me. When he was young he worked around the clock - he said some days the only sleep he'd get was the 20 minute cat nap on the toilet at work. When I knew him he had plenty of money but couldn't walk a quarter mile down the street without stopping to rest. What's the point?