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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

#91

Post by bicknergseng »

kenster07 wrote: post #62
jmduke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it intentional or unintentional that your comment also describes the life of entrepreneurs/startup founders?

The article described a life where interns basically stayed up for no reason. And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.

>>if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason

I imagine most of us do it because we think it's for a good reason.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#92

Post by v3rt »

enraged_camel wrote: post #74
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…

College students who pull all-nighters do so two reasons: 1. They tend to be terrible at time management and prioritization. They procrastinate until the last minute and then have no choice but to cram. 2. They do it to create a narrative that can protect both their ego and their image. "I failed the exam despite pulling an all-nighter - it was just crazy hard!" sounds a lot better than "I failed the exam because I'm…

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.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#93

Post by nostrademons »

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…

The problem is that you typically build your habits in your first few years in your 20s. Many (not all) investment bankers build the habit of being consumed by work, neglecting exercise, eating unhealthily, and substituting money for happiness.

I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again."

My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#95

Post by cynicalkane »

gpvos wrote: post #68
rayiner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the article is describing investment banking, which is particularly demanding because it's a service job. You're helping a client do a deal, and clients are demanding and deals are time-sensitive. People generally do not go into investment banking expecting to make a career out of it. A few-year stint as an analyst is a great way to get into HBS/GSB/Wharton, and from there into a CFO-track position at an F500. It'…

All that doesn't make it any less wrong.

If you believe in the liberty of people to live life as they choose, it makes it a ton less wrong. They are living life with goals in mind. Some of these goals might even be, dare I say, valid.

If you think the goal of society is that every single individual satisfies your aesthetic preferences for what makes a good life, then you're right, it doesn't make it any less wrong.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#96

Post by notahacker »

001sky wrote: post #27
marco-fiset wrote: post #2

This is stupid behavior from the banking people. Don't they realize that they are less productive working all-nighters?

Its not about productivity. the people doing the work are junior and replaced every 3-5 years. they are disposable, in that sense. Since the repsonsibility gets quite steep quite quickly, its more efficient to haze the junior staff, to push them to the breaking point and see how they do, before promoting them. Many people enter banking who are not suitable to it, because of greed or social pressure. It would be a lot…

Except that "hazing" arguably selects for those driven by [extreme] greed and social pressure, since anyone smart enough to get into a junior banking position has plenty of more palatable alternatives if they rate "quality of life" higher than "net worth age 30". In theory, if not in practice, ability to rationally appraise alternatives ought to be more important to people making billion pound decisions than energy and sheer bloodymindedness. The only way "hazing" works as a selection effect is if junior analysts' actual work tasks are generally so easy that it won't mentally tax even the below-average ones without sleep deprivation. It's harder to fake competence when you're tired. It's also harder to fake competence if standards are set higher...

The more general excuse for overworking bankers is to limit the number of people accountable for a particular project, meaning no sharing of workload even when it would be efficient to do so.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#97

Post by wutbrodo »

w1ntermute wrote: post #3

Isn't this all just a matter of supply and demand? There are a lot more young people willing to work in this industry than there are positions, so those people who actually get the jobs have to put up with all kinds of stupid shit. I've never understood why these employees (who are clearly quite intelligent) don't just pursue another career where they have more leverage. After all, I don't think they have any particu…

> The obvious suggestion would be software development

Looking anecdotally at friends in software and in finance (I went to a school with a great reputation for both cs and business ) , a good software engineering (at a good company) is not trivial to get into. On the flipside, banking was what you did if you had no discernible skills.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#98

Post by nilkn »

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…

I did pull a few all-nighters in college, and it was generally the crappiest work I did in my whole college career. I learned the least from it and in general developed a distaste for whatever it was I was doing during the all-nighters

It was also pretty rare. In the vast majority of classes I took, an all-nighter was never necessary so long as you didn't procrastinate. It was just in one or two classes where we'd unexpectedly get assigned huge projects at the end of the semester.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#99

Post by avenger123 »

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…

"Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. "

That's an incredibly broad statement to make for the whole population. Everyone is different and have different tolerances.

I would agree with you to the extent that people are able to know their tolerances and stop, but that doesn't seem to be the case for banking.

I always say, Money (and hence career) is a solvable problem. Health less likely. You can't always solve away your chronic health issues by working harder, spending more money on it, etc.

It would be nice to ask all those people with chronic back pain, chronic insomnia, etc. that isn't easily fixable if the "opportunity" was worth it.

Re: Pushed to the limit as a banking intern

#100

Post by bonemachine »

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.

It may not have killed you, but somewhere along the way, something you did, or something that happened to you cruelly robbed you of your critical thinking skills. The non-sequitur in the above sentence is so obvious, it's almost shocking that you don't see it.

Also:

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),

20 minutes? If you live across the street. Or in the same building, maybe.

that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.

When he said that all you have time to do is take a shower before heading back to the office, he meant just that.

You aren't just "quibbling" with his definitions here; you're playing semantic head games.

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