I keep reading about these poor young investment bankers working long hours. What are they actually doing at 10:00 PM on a Friday at the office? Or 9:00 AM on a Sunday. Been a while since I was in the rat race, but I can recall tools hanging around just so they would be the last one to leave. If I was done at 4:00, I went home. Maybe that is why I’m not a partner at a large investment bank…
It’s all about face time.
It has to do with the timing of work, in addition to the volume. There is no concept of regular work hours; if your client responds at 7PM, you cannot wait until the next morning to start work - you just stay in the office all night. Of course, this does not excuse you from being in the office during normal hours, since face time is also an important component. Also, your superiors have no respect for your personal time. One person I know was in IB. Her boss calls after 10PM and asks her to fetch documents from the office. She has to go to the office in the middle of the night, get papers, and deliver them to the boss’ house.
This is not a healthy culture, and I am glad that banks are trying to rethink their analyst programs to become more practical and productive.
What the others said – no one legitimately works 100 hour weeks, but they might work 70-80 hour weeks and sit in the office for 100 hours total.
The number of hours doesn’t matter as much as the intensity of the work. 100 hours of sitting around and formatting power point is far less exhausting than 70-80 hours of intense analytical work.
I get the sense there is a lot of downtime where you’re not working that intensely, but then have to be in the office to show your face and quash rumors of slacking.
Then, at 7pm or so, your superiors go home and hand you with the “just one more thing before tomorrow morning” that ends up being a lot harder or more incomplete than it sounds, so you are up until 2 in the morning making sure they are happy when they arrive the next day. That’s when the pain and the grumbling starts.
The other thing is that if you are in sell side research, the days really do tend to be long and intense during earnings season, because there is lots of info coming at you and you have to update lots of different stuff very quickly. It may be a little better on the buy side because you only have to update the info for the companies you are invested in or have on a watchlist (and possibly a few competitors), however it can still be intense because you’ll usually be covering as many companies as you can manage, and they’ll all be reporting.
Makes more sense. Thanks for the responses.
1 in 50 become Itera and the rest come work for corporate folks, tail between their legs, wondering WTF did I waste my twenties on.
The $$$ and exit opportunities better be worth the 10 years lost of life expectancy.
It’s worth it if it’s only for a few years and you save much of the big $$$ you earn so you can retire early. Sure, working that hard may shorten your lifespan but retiring from work earlier might actually increase it so it’s a wash.
Not so sure it works that way. At least, I’ve never seen research that would suggest you could mitigate years of stress and the structural damage it causes by events later in life. It may be possible, but I’m sure its what most think of when they do the pros/cons
Making pitch books or similar marketing materials is the biggest time sink. Nobody may care what’s in them or how much of an impact they have on getting deals, but they have to be PERFECT. Cranking out perfect powerpoints/reports at an irregular, but frequent rate can sap the life out of any analyst.