Goldman Sachs Tells Interns to End the Late, Late Show • Hacker News Board

Re: Goldman Sachs Tells Interns to End the Late, Late Show

#61

Post by jnbiche » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:31 PM UTC

leroy_masochist wrote: post #31

rdl wrote: post #9

What do investment banking interns (and bankers) do which benefits from such long hours? Lots of manual data processing? Reading? I absolutely benefit from uninterrupted stretches of 12-24h working on problems sometimes, but only infrequently -- usually hit diminishing returns between 4-12h. The only times where I've been useful >24h was when the task was more "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other peo…

Former GS IBD associate here. You basically have two workdays: the client-facing workday, and the preparation-for-the-next-day workday. Client-facing workday goes roughly 9am-6pm. Preparation workday goes from 6pm to anything from midnight (on a good day) to 5am (on a bad day). During the client-facing workday you're spending about 1-2 total hours having meetings with clients, usually on conference calls, occasionall…

Very interesting, thanks for the write-up. I'm currently intensely miserable in the midst of a long string of 12-hour days, so I can't imagine what 16-hour days would do to me. But very interesting to hear what's happening in these situations.

Re: Goldman Sachs Tells Interns to End the Late, Late Show

#62

Post by cpncrunch » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:40 PM UTC

whatok wrote: post #25

rdl wrote: post #9

What do investment banking interns (and bankers) do which benefits from such long hours? Lots of manual data processing? Reading? I absolutely benefit from uninterrupted stretches of 12-24h working on problems sometimes, but only infrequently -- usually hit diminishing returns between 4-12h. The only times where I've been useful >24h was when the task was more "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other peo…

These people are essentially on-call, on-site. There's a lot of money involved with the deals companies are trying to close and bankers are there to handhold clients throughout the entire process. They're not working the whole day but if a client or senior person wants a change to a Powerpoint deck, they're paid to turn that around quickly.

Why not just do that from home?

Re: Goldman Sachs Tells Interns to End the Late, Late Show

#63

Post by jsprogrammer » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:44 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #51

whatok wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people always bring up outsourcing part of the job to some developing country but that would run into the same problem as your third option. Having too many cooks in the kitchen will introduce a lot of operational error while having a few people who know everything about a project will run things smoother even if they are worked to the bone.

Outsourcing to some remote part of some other country, and outsourcing to some remote part of the country you live in, aren't much different. Many large companies are able to maintain a large number of server operators and perform essential functions without needing one person to do everything. With sufficient communication you can avoid the "too many cooks" problem. I've personally lead highly-communicating teams wh…

It's probably not only easier, but the alternative requires having considerable technical expertise. GS and ilk probably identified such expertise as a massive cost center long ago and don't keep much stock in people that could actually execute such an organization.

Re: Goldman Sachs Tells Interns to End the Late, Late Show

#64

Post by jsprogrammer » Sun, Jun 21, 2015, 11:49 PM UTC

whatok wrote: post #29

basseq wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other people or long-running processes" It's exactly this in I-banking, from what I understand. A lot of the day is spent tweaking/waiting. Towards the end of the day, you get feedback from clients/managers, and that's when the "real work" starts. From an external perspective, it's always struck me as horribly inefficient.

A lot of it is ego-driven. Senior people think that because they went through it, all junior people have to go through it too. Companies feel that if they're shelling out huge money in fees that banks should be on-call 24/7. If you're responsible for a deal either from the company or adviser side, , you'd rather have it fixed before anyone notices or at least as quickly as possible. Thus the benefit of junior staff w…

What it really sounds like is that a lot of shit work is being done all over the place. If everyone needs to be on-call 24/7 and most of their time is spent applying fixes to problems that are continually happening, something is probably broken in your organization.