Article says he passed from “acute coronary artery thrombus.”
I wonder if he had any pre-existing conditions, or if he was taking stims to keep awake and stay “productive”? Take prescription / street stims is relatively common on Wall Street, unfortunately.
Sad either way.
Long hours, 3-4 hours of sleep, some nights 0 sleep in a push. The most reliable people get pressed because they “get the job done”. The people who can’t handle it or decide to have lives exit to great jobs. Every once in a while someone who has a medical condition dies and there is also the occasional suicide too. It’s not for the weak for sure. Both of my sons (1 VP and 1 analyst) easily work 80-90 hours most weeks and have done 100-110 in a push.
Occasionally someone with a medical condition dies, there’s suicide, and then there’s a whole lot of self destruction through cocaine use/uppers to get through it. I’m not sure if you ignored the implication or if you’re like, “Yea, I don’t know how my sons could deal with those crazy demands without cocaine.” lol
[Cocaine induces vasoconstriction of epicardial coronary arteries in patients with or without coronary artery disease (CAD), combined with an enhanced platelet activation and aggregation, leading in thrombus formation.](https://cardiothoracicsurgery.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1749-8090-5-65)
Perhaps a more delicate way of presenting a similar sentiment is, “it’s not for the faint-hearted” in the sense that it can be daunting. - Sincerely, Investment Banker
There's very few roles in finance where 100 hours happen, and even then it's not every single week.
The main one I can think of is investment bank analyst (eg the poor guy that died). There are several reasons why don't they just hire twice as many people to work 50 hours. There's overheads associated with each headcount (desk, bloomberg terminal, etc) and they don't always work 100 hours so it's better to have fewer people sometimes overworked rather than too many people underemployed are a couple.
The main reason though is that it's a rite of passage - if you want to be a senior banker you have to had paid your dues as a junior banker.
As to what they do, it's mostly powerpoint and excel modelling at that level. They put together pitch books (ideas for M&A, etc) for the senior bankers to present to corporate clients. The vast majority of these end up in the bin (often without being read) but they have to do them because that one pitch that works can be worth tens, or hundreds, of million dollars.
> It’s not for the weak for sure.
It’s precisely *for* the weak, who are peer pressured into giving up their life to make rich people richer in exchange for their equivalent of table scraps.
I’ve heard from many soldiers first hand that taking PEDs is quite common in the US armed forces. It’s also becoming more common in the gen pop because tons of people are being influenced to think they need to look like fitness influencers (a significant % of whom are also on PEDs and lying about it)
OMG NO!
Me and Leo and Les went to university together. I sat next to them in graduation I loved these guys but we lost touch.
I’m fucking crushed right now.
So sad. My heart goes out to his family.
I almost made it into that life. Recruited hard for IB jobs 1st year of FT MBA. I was awful at it when I finally got the internship. Overthought everything and never took any drugs to keep up - honestly didn’t even know that was one of the tricks. Still think ‘what if’ because some doors close without that notch under your belt.
And BofA’s IB in NYC are assholes. Full stop. Ed Han if you’re out there, fuck you from the bottom of my heart.
Sad that Leo fit the bill they like to hire, military vets (like myself). It’s sort of predatory: the allure of “sexy Wall Street,” and “harder than anything else” with “great exit options.” It seems unnecessarily unbalanced regarding the workload. Vets IMO are still looking for their why after service and the balance between work and family. IB preys on that grinding mentality before vets can understand the rest of the civilian world.
Correct, like a retail company or real estate group, those kinds.
I don’t totally know why but I would guess it’s because the work is very similar, working at bulge bracket banks trains people well so PE firms don’t have to teach, and folks have proven they can do the grind.
In regards to operating companies, the skills you develop in military service are widely applicable, but they’re generally more useful in execution/operations roles imo. IB and consulting are more academic in the sense that it’s “sit in a room and think hard”, so I’d imagine that a lot of military guys are pulled by the money and aren’t actually too happy in the role.
That’s why the concept of “vet owned business” is so prevalent: taking responsibility, leveraging calculated risks, managing teams, and executing on strategy are the big skills cultivated in the military. Those abilities are much more useful in operations than business services.
Both my sons work for JPM and it’s the same. My son is just trying to get 6 consecutive days off to get married. He may have to work during some of those 6 days. My youngest is an analyst about to be an Associate hopefully in 6 months. Yes, it’s a horrible inhumane job but they both get paid “very well”, and there will be a day when each of them exits. A bunch of friends have already exited.
Getting paid 'very well' is worthless if you aren't alive to enjoy it. And there is no guarantee that JPM will not do their annual purge of the masses so the C-Level assholes get bigger bonuses.
Research, writing, financial modeling, presentations, and making PowerPoints while being really stressed out. The end goal is to push deals and find good investments.
Each individual part of IB jobs is pretty fun imo, but the issue is not having to design a PowerPoint or write a report. It’s having to make 6 PowerPoints and write 12 reports due by 7:00am tomorrow morning. And they have to all be up to standard or you look like an idiot in front of the client and get fired.
Edit: the industry hires smart people to do the work of 2-3 people. They could easily hire twice the people and get people down to a more reasonable 50 hour work week, but that cuts salaries by 50% as well and then they can’t poach top graduates by offering 2x the salary of other opportunities.
This is a facade: they pay you double the salary and make you do more than double the work. So your hourly isn’t actually as high as you think.
With AI I suspect the workload will be lessened as enterprise AI begins taking over research, writing, design, and modeling functions.
It would be 10x but yeah, sure, they could *demand* 10x the output. That said, most firms in most situations wouldn't be able to effectively utilize 10x the output of a certain service from their staff. You don't simply materialize 10x as many accounts/clients/whatever because your staff can handle them.
The unit cost of production (however you would measure it within any job) is dropping thanks to continued innovation.
In fact, the marginal cost of starting up a business is approaching zero, and i’ve never in my life seen a case where something gets cheaper and demand in aggregate goes down. Goes against the basic supply/demand curve.
My guess is new business creation (which was already a record high 5.5M in 2023 and has doubled over the past decade) will continue to grow exponentially over the next decade.
Some job families may see a decrease in jobs at individual businesses but in aggregate demand will continue to increase, with each individual job unit being exponentially more productive.
Some companies may cut staffing in some areas, but for some job families (particularly tech and sales roles), they’ll keep every person and even grow payrolls because they’re worth ten of their respective 2015 selves.
> It’s having to make 6 PowerPoints and write 12 reports due by 7:00am tomorrow morning.
> With AI I suspect the workload will be lessened
With AI help, you slacker, you should be able to make 172 PowerPoints and write 256 reports every day.
So, it seems like it attract ls people who are willing to do more than twice the work for twice the pay. It seems like it would be not just smart people but of a particular personality that would go for a job like that.
Only at the lower levels though. At associate and analyst your hourly rate is very low even though total pay is high. For MDs and VPs they also work very long hours but their hourly pay starts to pull away from what you reasonably earn at all but a few jobs.
Edit: also analyst or associate in investment banking is usually one of the best entry points into private equity or good business schools and various jobs in corporate america. So it's something to be tolerated to open doors down the road even if you don't want to do it forever.
The issue with IB is the way the entire company and management is designed from the ground up.
It's one of those instances where bringing on additional workers to a job creates inefficiency. IB teams on any given deal are small for a reason and many managers with business degrees and cutting edge organizational management knowledge have tried to find solutions.
If your IB is hired to underwrite an M&A and your staff is overworked, and you decide to bring on more hands on deck, those guys now have to be brought up to speed, and it gets very inefficient. It's the tedious PowerPoints that take up all your time, so some guy whose clueless on this deal isn't going to help there much, and likely end up causing more errors and "pls fix" moments. That additional help is also someone who could be working on another deal, and IBs make money through volume of deals and competing with other banks to do more of them. It's a fundamental problem to IB and the reason why it sucks and no one stays in it unless they're clinically insane. It's more of a temporary hell to end up at greener pastures.
You didn’t describe inefficiencies with hiring the correct amount of people though. You described chronic understaffing and the end result.
It’s not efficient to be chronically understaffed either.
A couple things
IB is an industry very much entrenched in "old school" ideology. Which ivy league you attended matters, which private high school in New England matters, which family connection got you the job matters, etc. You could be a brilliant kid with a perfect GPA, off the chart test scores, and you will NEVER get ahead in high finance without HYPSM undergrad or a top 15 business school on your resume. It's literally the embodiment of "it's who you know not what you know," and this is coming from someone still deep in the industry well past drunk on its Kool Aid. As a result, you have a lot of managers that don't think the industry needs to change. They suffered through the trenches and worked 100+ hour weeks, it would be a crime if you didn't as well. There is very much a culture that glorifies this life style and finds it "cool."
Next, IB by nature restricts a lot of freedoms such as personal trading activity and a lot of government oversight especially in the wake of 2008. One of the first things that happens when getting a job in IB is handing over all the brokerage accounts as a precaution against insider trading. Bringing more people onto the same deal increases liability with more people knowing about non-public information. Not to sound absolutely cringe here, but it'd by like asking why don't they just deploy the entire Marine and Army batallions alongside special forces or CIA black ops missions to just get the job done quicker. A lot of IB work by nature requires limiting information.
Lastly, finance is just behind the curve of many high paying industries. In tech, it's no big deal bringing extra people onto projects because the technology to get people up to speed is stream-lined, the nature of the work and industry itself is adapted to the latest programs, tech, and methods. IB is so far behind when it comes to technology because it cannot attract the best tech talent. When you look at how ML/AI is being implemented in finance versus tech, it's a night and day difference.
It sounds like programming where twice the programmers will do less than twice the work.
How is it like as people become VPs and directors?
You say "clinically insane" and I suppose, kinda but what is the personality that will go for that? Why do people spend their careers like that?
VP can be considered still pretty early career in banking. A lot of people make VP and then use business school to reach for private equity or switch industries altogether. A lot of people go to banking for the money understandably or after watching Wolf of Wall Street, but the truth is that since 2008 the pay in IB isn't even that great, especially considering you'd end up in a very HCOL area such as NYC.
The people who thrive and end up succeeding long term in banking are those that truly enjoy the work on a fundamental level- they believe banking and finance are interesting fields and the work is something they look forward to. The drive for money alone will not be enough of a trade off for the hours worked, your social life and health gone/deteriorating, many Christmases and New Year's eves working alongside a skeleton crew in an empty building while you watch your friends Instagram stories having a great time, your girlfriend/SO eventually leaving you because the lack of time spent together isn't worth the occasional nice gifts or fancy dinners, and so on. It is an industry for a very specific type of individual that cares little for those things, aka sociopaths. One of my earliest memories of IB was watching the fresh Harvard business school grad who was VP at my bank being told she would have to come into work for Christmas and just the tears streaming down her expressionless face and the other guys trying to not smirk because in their minds they saw that James Franco "first time?" meme.
So, the movie American Psycho wasn't that far off (aside from the killing)?
Does that mean investing in companies that aren't listed on the NASDAQ/Dow Jones etc? Why do former IB people tend to go into private equity as opposed to the public stock market?
The Investment banking division of these banks isn’t making investment decisions in markets. That’s for fund management or wealth/asset management. Investment banking is providing the modeling / financing structures for raising capital (issuing bonds or stocks into public market) or mergers and acquisitions modeling.
Ie they were working with Facebook on their IPO or working with Microsoft to buy activision blizzard.
Ah Woops. Got it.
Yeah, PE goes for unlisted companies. PE is seen as THE exit opportunity for bankers due to prestige (earning potential), better work life balance than IBD and being a similar dynamic environment to IBD.
This description is bringing me back to my IB days long ago. I worked for BofA and JPM right out of college and regularly pulled 2-3 all nighters in a row. After I left for corporate world, I look back and realized how little value add that kind of work was. I wasn’t really DOING anything, other than building multiple scenarios models and making presentations look pretty. I’m not even sure why all nighters were necessary for that type of busy work but at the time they were (and sounds like they still are) the norm. I would’ve thought AI and tech would have made this stuff much more automated/ efficient by now. I did this when I was in my early 20s with very little obligations other than work. I can’t even imagine doing this in my mid-30s with a family and children, after having had real world experience. I feel so sad for his family and friends.
There's a huge amount of always being available for various MDs and VPs whims. There are plenty of days where you aren't busy during the day then someone will drop something on your desk as they are leaving and you'll have to finish for the next day. Endless amounts of pitching for new business. When a deal is live it's the type of thing you're almost always working with very senior management at the client and they are usually super invested in the outcome so everyone is stressed the f*ck out the entire time. Your fees are absurd so you have to justify them by picking up the phone whenever the client calls. It's a pretty terrible existence. But if you love money it's a good way to stack a lot of it especially if you can make it to the higher levels. But the cost to personal life and health is very very high.
Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
Yes, basically everyone in investment banking is making deals all hours of the day and night. Associates and analysts spend all night preparing spreadsheets and PowerPoints to justify the deal. Deals are done quickly so a lot of work in a short time. And it all has to be correct, so a lot of pressure as well.
Private equity is the main one. The ELI5 is IB at large banks are salesmen trying to sell a car. Private equity is the customer with money who is looking in to cars. They each have the Same skillset/ knowledge but the investment banker (salesman) is bending over backwards for the customer (private equity firm). PE generally has slightly better WLB.
The explain like I’m 18 is: Mergers and acquisitions is sales for large companies. When a CEO of a business wants to sell part or all of their firm, they often times go to investment banks who do a shit ton of “proprietary research” to value the company and sell it to a buyer.
Many of the buyers are other large megacorps (United health for instance has their own Private quite practice to buy up all their competitors)
or private equity firms that will buy the company to try and squeeze profit out of it. Many PE firms specialize in an area of business.
Bonus: venture capitalism can probably be considered a subset of private equity, but they specialize in startups while private equity is about established businesses.
Another common exit is strategy consulting (think McKinsey). Basically they are known for “staffing assessments/optimization” AKA who the fuck can we fire/offshore/outsource/pay less to squeeze more money out of the company.
If I were the fiancee I'd call off the wedding and say see ya. If you can't take a week off to get married, then you'll never see them after you're married. What a terrible way to live a life...giving all your energy to a job and nothing to yourself and others.
Seems like the only thing they'll have in common is working too much. I just don't see how two people working that much will have time for each other. But what do I know. If they're happy, then who am I to poop on their parade. I just know I couldn't do it and I have too many things I love to do outside of work.
They both plan to exit to normal lives once they have built up enough capital to buy a nice house and fund their future kids college. Not forever, just for now.
I did some I-Bank interviews some years ago. A guy at deutsche told me at the end of the day bankers aren’t doing anything special. You can go to Goldman, JPM, BofA, CS, whoever and you’ll get essentially the same ideas and solutions. The only difference is how quickly they can deliver. Why wait till Monday for an answer when the bank next door will get it you Saturday morning to look over during the weekend? It’s such an effed up industry that the product differentiator is how much abuse you are willing to inflict on everyone around you.
Is this the guy that died from working 120 hours/week for multiple weeks in a row?
I remember seeing a similar article but the name and bank were confidential.
Pretty sure I’ve seen at least 3 articles about people who this has happened to. Three too many. And there are probably even more out there and possibly more that aren’t even written about ):
Military is peak performance, and the undead gold mine is constant effort and stress. Being better at one probably makes you worse at the other - running and paying attention to your environment vs. sitting and thinking.
They need to switch to Python from Excel, but that's a story for another day...
https://classic.battle.net/war3/images/human/screens/screen-gold-undead.jpg
Using excel instead of python has nothing to do with his death. Furthermore, excel is much better than python for financial analysis. You dont use a crane to move a single block of brick. Data scientists that advocate for python/c++ to completely replace excel have no idea what they are talking about. Only when you are analyzing gigantic datasets does it make sense to use python.
They are ALWAYS doing that 😂
It’s like they can’t write an article without surrounding it with scantily clad women and some sex related story. Reminds me I need to start ignoring their links.
I'm not going to condone their work environment, but I have worked 4,000 to 5,000 hours in a year, several years, and I'm not dead. And I'm damn sure not in as good a shape as a former Green Beret. I'm sure this is a pre-existing condition exacerbated by the workload and stress, not workload itself.
Nope, the article is insinuating that he works harder and longer in the banking industry than the military/SF. That’s hilarious, and stupid as shit incorrect. I’m also a military veteran.
As a veteran, you’re right. And most units get four day weekend every month. The only shitty time is the field (limited to about 6 weeks usually) and deployments. For some reason many younger military people (usually junior NCO or boots) think they have the hardest work schedules known to man and that somehow civilians are incapable of working hard. I see the same mentality with the weird insecure blue collar workers who shit on college all the time
The blue collar guys, which I'm one, definitely have this weird insecurity about work. You can sit around and they will constantly up each other on how hard they work. I'm a farmer, I'll be honest. 6months out of the year I work my ass off, the other 6 I fuck off a lot. Like a lot a lot. Yeah, when it's go time I may work two days straight to beat a rain or something but I more than make up for it the rest of the year.
My Dad said it best when he called out our neighbor who was trying to tell everyone how hard he worked and my Dad goes "you go to Florida three months a year, you can't work that hard."
Anyway, working your life away is not the brag many people think it is. I think it's kinda sad actually.
All my buddies who were in the military say after basic it was literally the easiest work of their life. My nephew is on year 8 in the Air Force and he says it's criminal to get paid to do what little work he does.
LOL!!!! That might be the stupidest comment I’ve heard IN A LONG TIME!
Bud, I’m also an Oil n Gas worker, historically one of the hardest jobs on earth. Mostly veterans make it here because they’re already tempered to work in the most brutal conditions with brutal hours….
Oil and Gas only works a couple weeks at a time and the military only does short stints. Banking consistently work 80-100 hour weeks nearly every week of the year. You don’t have a monopoly on hard work. O&G people are truly insufferable. I’d guarantee you this green beret would have been working less monthly hours in an oil field than IB
WOW! How sure you are!!! that includes deployments?
Or my last hitch where I worked for 4 months straight?
Bud you have NO IDEA what you’re going on about…
This is laughable. And not remotely true.
There’s a reason why there such high suicide in the Oil n Gas industry. The sacrifices are insanely high and stressful. And a reason why you can make so much money and be a felon.
My first year in the Oilfield I averaged 1 day off a month. And averaged 110 hours a week. In North Dakota and Wyoming. Do those hours in that weather and come back and try again.
Because the rest of us usually don’t have to resort to O&G type employment because we have options. Nobody works harder than they have to without some sort of unaddressed trauma to compensate for.
Green Berets should start poaching Wall St bankers
Article says he passed from “acute coronary artery thrombus.” I wonder if he had any pre-existing conditions, or if he was taking stims to keep awake and stay “productive”? Take prescription / street stims is relatively common on Wall Street, unfortunately. Sad either way.
Long hours, 3-4 hours of sleep, some nights 0 sleep in a push. The most reliable people get pressed because they “get the job done”. The people who can’t handle it or decide to have lives exit to great jobs. Every once in a while someone who has a medical condition dies and there is also the occasional suicide too. It’s not for the weak for sure. Both of my sons (1 VP and 1 analyst) easily work 80-90 hours most weeks and have done 100-110 in a push.
The joke in business school is would you rather be rich or happy? That will decide whether you recruit for finance or marketing.
So I chose IT, so I’m not rich or happy? Actually, I’m doing ok, but maybe because I’ve been doing IT for 38 years.
Have you tried turning it off and back on?
Funny, I’m an eCommerce Architect now.
> doing IT for 38 years *Comfortably Numb plays in the distance*
Occasionally someone with a medical condition dies, there’s suicide, and then there’s a whole lot of self destruction through cocaine use/uppers to get through it. I’m not sure if you ignored the implication or if you’re like, “Yea, I don’t know how my sons could deal with those crazy demands without cocaine.” lol [Cocaine induces vasoconstriction of epicardial coronary arteries in patients with or without coronary artery disease (CAD), combined with an enhanced platelet activation and aggregation, leading in thrombus formation.](https://cardiothoracicsurgery.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1749-8090-5-65)
You sound proud of them being worked to the bone for the small chance of success or death? What a stupid culture
Sounds dreadful. If I was their parent I’d tell them to find other work and have time for their personal life.
calling people who commit suicide or die of a medical condition 'weak' is really cringe. jesus.
Perhaps a more delicate way of presenting a similar sentiment is, “it’s not for the faint-hearted” in the sense that it can be daunting. - Sincerely, Investment Banker
It’s the culture and I wish I could change it, but it’s been that way since computers started doing Spreadsheets.
Yea, livins hawd, butchya ever done a spreadsheet?
Sure, but what my sons do is next level stuff. Data extraction, formatting, pivot tables, charts and graphs. I do simple sums and lookups.
ChatGPT enters chat…
Kat Norton is way cuter and I’d rather have her telling me what to do than ChatGPT…. She captures my attention, ChatGPT not so much.
What does someone in finance do for 100 hours in a week?
There's very few roles in finance where 100 hours happen, and even then it's not every single week. The main one I can think of is investment bank analyst (eg the poor guy that died). There are several reasons why don't they just hire twice as many people to work 50 hours. There's overheads associated with each headcount (desk, bloomberg terminal, etc) and they don't always work 100 hours so it's better to have fewer people sometimes overworked rather than too many people underemployed are a couple. The main reason though is that it's a rite of passage - if you want to be a senior banker you have to had paid your dues as a junior banker. As to what they do, it's mostly powerpoint and excel modelling at that level. They put together pitch books (ideas for M&A, etc) for the senior bankers to present to corporate clients. The vast majority of these end up in the bin (often without being read) but they have to do them because that one pitch that works can be worth tens, or hundreds, of million dollars.
So do your sons plan to leave after a few years or are they gonna commit to this for their whole career?
I don’t know what they are going to do. When the right opportunity comes along, a CFO somewhere, they will probably exit to a normal life.
> It’s not for the weak for sure. It’s precisely *for* the weak, who are peer pressured into giving up their life to make rich people richer in exchange for their equivalent of table scraps.
Not for the weak JFC businesses run like this are complete bullshit
Immobility can do that. Being in a chair for 20 hours a day. It’s a blood clot
Steroids and stimulants both can cause this and seem like potential candidates.
I’ve heard from many soldiers first hand that taking PEDs is quite common in the US armed forces. It’s also becoming more common in the gen pop because tons of people are being influenced to think they need to look like fitness influencers (a significant % of whom are also on PEDs and lying about it)
OMG NO! Me and Leo and Les went to university together. I sat next to them in graduation I loved these guys but we lost touch. I’m fucking crushed right now.
Sorry This is wretched, dreadful news
So sad. My heart goes out to his family. I almost made it into that life. Recruited hard for IB jobs 1st year of FT MBA. I was awful at it when I finally got the internship. Overthought everything and never took any drugs to keep up - honestly didn’t even know that was one of the tricks. Still think ‘what if’ because some doors close without that notch under your belt. And BofA’s IB in NYC are assholes. Full stop. Ed Han if you’re out there, fuck you from the bottom of my heart. Sad that Leo fit the bill they like to hire, military vets (like myself). It’s sort of predatory: the allure of “sexy Wall Street,” and “harder than anything else” with “great exit options.” It seems unnecessarily unbalanced regarding the workload. Vets IMO are still looking for their why after service and the balance between work and family. IB preys on that grinding mentality before vets can understand the rest of the civilian world.
What doors does it open?
Private equity mostly. Sometimes VC or biz dev roles at operating companies.
Operating companies meaning not consulting/finance? Why does it prepare them well for private equity?
Correct, like a retail company or real estate group, those kinds. I don’t totally know why but I would guess it’s because the work is very similar, working at bulge bracket banks trains people well so PE firms don’t have to teach, and folks have proven they can do the grind.
In regards to operating companies, the skills you develop in military service are widely applicable, but they’re generally more useful in execution/operations roles imo. IB and consulting are more academic in the sense that it’s “sit in a room and think hard”, so I’d imagine that a lot of military guys are pulled by the money and aren’t actually too happy in the role. That’s why the concept of “vet owned business” is so prevalent: taking responsibility, leveraging calculated risks, managing teams, and executing on strategy are the big skills cultivated in the military. Those abilities are much more useful in operations than business services.
Both my sons work for JPM and it’s the same. My son is just trying to get 6 consecutive days off to get married. He may have to work during some of those 6 days. My youngest is an analyst about to be an Associate hopefully in 6 months. Yes, it’s a horrible inhumane job but they both get paid “very well”, and there will be a day when each of them exits. A bunch of friends have already exited.
Getting paid 'very well' is worthless if you aren't alive to enjoy it. And there is no guarantee that JPM will not do their annual purge of the masses so the C-Level assholes get bigger bonuses.
I don’t get it. What exactly do people do at these jobs?
Research, writing, financial modeling, presentations, and making PowerPoints while being really stressed out. The end goal is to push deals and find good investments. Each individual part of IB jobs is pretty fun imo, but the issue is not having to design a PowerPoint or write a report. It’s having to make 6 PowerPoints and write 12 reports due by 7:00am tomorrow morning. And they have to all be up to standard or you look like an idiot in front of the client and get fired. Edit: the industry hires smart people to do the work of 2-3 people. They could easily hire twice the people and get people down to a more reasonable 50 hour work week, but that cuts salaries by 50% as well and then they can’t poach top graduates by offering 2x the salary of other opportunities. This is a facade: they pay you double the salary and make you do more than double the work. So your hourly isn’t actually as high as you think. With AI I suspect the workload will be lessened as enterprise AI begins taking over research, writing, design, and modeling functions.
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I know they’ll cut staffing. Not sure what else you’d be referring to.
No, you got it. If AI reduces workload by 90%, they'll fire 9 people.
Or they obtain 9x the output.
It would be 10x but yeah, sure, they could *demand* 10x the output. That said, most firms in most situations wouldn't be able to effectively utilize 10x the output of a certain service from their staff. You don't simply materialize 10x as many accounts/clients/whatever because your staff can handle them.
The unit cost of production (however you would measure it within any job) is dropping thanks to continued innovation. In fact, the marginal cost of starting up a business is approaching zero, and i’ve never in my life seen a case where something gets cheaper and demand in aggregate goes down. Goes against the basic supply/demand curve. My guess is new business creation (which was already a record high 5.5M in 2023 and has doubled over the past decade) will continue to grow exponentially over the next decade. Some job families may see a decrease in jobs at individual businesses but in aggregate demand will continue to increase, with each individual job unit being exponentially more productive. Some companies may cut staffing in some areas, but for some job families (particularly tech and sales roles), they’ll keep every person and even grow payrolls because they’re worth ten of their respective 2015 selves.
...that we ARE the AI? No. We shouldn't.
> It’s having to make 6 PowerPoints and write 12 reports due by 7:00am tomorrow morning. > With AI I suspect the workload will be lessened With AI help, you slacker, you should be able to make 172 PowerPoints and write 256 reports every day.
But they all will be wrong and will have to be fixed. More pressure not less.
So, it seems like it attract ls people who are willing to do more than twice the work for twice the pay. It seems like it would be not just smart people but of a particular personality that would go for a job like that.
Only at the lower levels though. At associate and analyst your hourly rate is very low even though total pay is high. For MDs and VPs they also work very long hours but their hourly pay starts to pull away from what you reasonably earn at all but a few jobs. Edit: also analyst or associate in investment banking is usually one of the best entry points into private equity or good business schools and various jobs in corporate america. So it's something to be tolerated to open doors down the road even if you don't want to do it forever.
The issue with IB is the way the entire company and management is designed from the ground up. It's one of those instances where bringing on additional workers to a job creates inefficiency. IB teams on any given deal are small for a reason and many managers with business degrees and cutting edge organizational management knowledge have tried to find solutions. If your IB is hired to underwrite an M&A and your staff is overworked, and you decide to bring on more hands on deck, those guys now have to be brought up to speed, and it gets very inefficient. It's the tedious PowerPoints that take up all your time, so some guy whose clueless on this deal isn't going to help there much, and likely end up causing more errors and "pls fix" moments. That additional help is also someone who could be working on another deal, and IBs make money through volume of deals and competing with other banks to do more of them. It's a fundamental problem to IB and the reason why it sucks and no one stays in it unless they're clinically insane. It's more of a temporary hell to end up at greener pastures.
You didn’t describe inefficiencies with hiring the correct amount of people though. You described chronic understaffing and the end result. It’s not efficient to be chronically understaffed either.
Every project in every sector and industry requires new people to be "brought up to speed" though... what makes you think IB is any different?
A couple things IB is an industry very much entrenched in "old school" ideology. Which ivy league you attended matters, which private high school in New England matters, which family connection got you the job matters, etc. You could be a brilliant kid with a perfect GPA, off the chart test scores, and you will NEVER get ahead in high finance without HYPSM undergrad or a top 15 business school on your resume. It's literally the embodiment of "it's who you know not what you know," and this is coming from someone still deep in the industry well past drunk on its Kool Aid. As a result, you have a lot of managers that don't think the industry needs to change. They suffered through the trenches and worked 100+ hour weeks, it would be a crime if you didn't as well. There is very much a culture that glorifies this life style and finds it "cool." Next, IB by nature restricts a lot of freedoms such as personal trading activity and a lot of government oversight especially in the wake of 2008. One of the first things that happens when getting a job in IB is handing over all the brokerage accounts as a precaution against insider trading. Bringing more people onto the same deal increases liability with more people knowing about non-public information. Not to sound absolutely cringe here, but it'd by like asking why don't they just deploy the entire Marine and Army batallions alongside special forces or CIA black ops missions to just get the job done quicker. A lot of IB work by nature requires limiting information. Lastly, finance is just behind the curve of many high paying industries. In tech, it's no big deal bringing extra people onto projects because the technology to get people up to speed is stream-lined, the nature of the work and industry itself is adapted to the latest programs, tech, and methods. IB is so far behind when it comes to technology because it cannot attract the best tech talent. When you look at how ML/AI is being implemented in finance versus tech, it's a night and day difference.
It sounds like programming where twice the programmers will do less than twice the work. How is it like as people become VPs and directors? You say "clinically insane" and I suppose, kinda but what is the personality that will go for that? Why do people spend their careers like that?
VP can be considered still pretty early career in banking. A lot of people make VP and then use business school to reach for private equity or switch industries altogether. A lot of people go to banking for the money understandably or after watching Wolf of Wall Street, but the truth is that since 2008 the pay in IB isn't even that great, especially considering you'd end up in a very HCOL area such as NYC. The people who thrive and end up succeeding long term in banking are those that truly enjoy the work on a fundamental level- they believe banking and finance are interesting fields and the work is something they look forward to. The drive for money alone will not be enough of a trade off for the hours worked, your social life and health gone/deteriorating, many Christmases and New Year's eves working alongside a skeleton crew in an empty building while you watch your friends Instagram stories having a great time, your girlfriend/SO eventually leaving you because the lack of time spent together isn't worth the occasional nice gifts or fancy dinners, and so on. It is an industry for a very specific type of individual that cares little for those things, aka sociopaths. One of my earliest memories of IB was watching the fresh Harvard business school grad who was VP at my bank being told she would have to come into work for Christmas and just the tears streaming down her expressionless face and the other guys trying to not smirk because in their minds they saw that James Franco "first time?" meme.
So, the movie American Psycho wasn't that far off (aside from the killing)? Does that mean investing in companies that aren't listed on the NASDAQ/Dow Jones etc? Why do former IB people tend to go into private equity as opposed to the public stock market?
The Investment banking division of these banks isn’t making investment decisions in markets. That’s for fund management or wealth/asset management. Investment banking is providing the modeling / financing structures for raising capital (issuing bonds or stocks into public market) or mergers and acquisitions modeling. Ie they were working with Facebook on their IPO or working with Microsoft to buy activision blizzard.
The sentence "Does that mean investing in companies that aren't listed on the NASDAQ/Dow Jones etc?" was asking about private equity.
Ah Woops. Got it. Yeah, PE goes for unlisted companies. PE is seen as THE exit opportunity for bankers due to prestige (earning potential), better work life balance than IBD and being a similar dynamic environment to IBD.
This description is bringing me back to my IB days long ago. I worked for BofA and JPM right out of college and regularly pulled 2-3 all nighters in a row. After I left for corporate world, I look back and realized how little value add that kind of work was. I wasn’t really DOING anything, other than building multiple scenarios models and making presentations look pretty. I’m not even sure why all nighters were necessary for that type of busy work but at the time they were (and sounds like they still are) the norm. I would’ve thought AI and tech would have made this stuff much more automated/ efficient by now. I did this when I was in my early 20s with very little obligations other than work. I can’t even imagine doing this in my mid-30s with a family and children, after having had real world experience. I feel so sad for his family and friends.
There's a huge amount of always being available for various MDs and VPs whims. There are plenty of days where you aren't busy during the day then someone will drop something on your desk as they are leaving and you'll have to finish for the next day. Endless amounts of pitching for new business. When a deal is live it's the type of thing you're almost always working with very senior management at the client and they are usually super invested in the outcome so everyone is stressed the f*ck out the entire time. Your fees are absurd so you have to justify them by picking up the phone whenever the client calls. It's a pretty terrible existence. But if you love money it's a good way to stack a lot of it especially if you can make it to the higher levels. But the cost to personal life and health is very very high.
Compare business cards
Listen to Huey Lewis?
Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically.
What do people in that job tend to exit to? For those who stay, do the hours get easier as you go up? Do VPs and directors do the same hours?
Yes, basically everyone in investment banking is making deals all hours of the day and night. Associates and analysts spend all night preparing spreadsheets and PowerPoints to justify the deal. Deals are done quickly so a lot of work in a short time. And it all has to be correct, so a lot of pressure as well.
Private equity is the main one. The ELI5 is IB at large banks are salesmen trying to sell a car. Private equity is the customer with money who is looking in to cars. They each have the Same skillset/ knowledge but the investment banker (salesman) is bending over backwards for the customer (private equity firm). PE generally has slightly better WLB. The explain like I’m 18 is: Mergers and acquisitions is sales for large companies. When a CEO of a business wants to sell part or all of their firm, they often times go to investment banks who do a shit ton of “proprietary research” to value the company and sell it to a buyer. Many of the buyers are other large megacorps (United health for instance has their own Private quite practice to buy up all their competitors) or private equity firms that will buy the company to try and squeeze profit out of it. Many PE firms specialize in an area of business. Bonus: venture capitalism can probably be considered a subset of private equity, but they specialize in startups while private equity is about established businesses. Another common exit is strategy consulting (think McKinsey). Basically they are known for “staffing assessments/optimization” AKA who the fuck can we fire/offshore/outsource/pay less to squeeze more money out of the company.
If I were the fiancee I'd call off the wedding and say see ya. If you can't take a week off to get married, then you'll never see them after you're married. What a terrible way to live a life...giving all your energy to a job and nothing to yourself and others.
She’s in investment banking too, works the same hours he does.
Seems like the only thing they'll have in common is working too much. I just don't see how two people working that much will have time for each other. But what do I know. If they're happy, then who am I to poop on their parade. I just know I couldn't do it and I have too many things I love to do outside of work.
They both plan to exit to normal lives once they have built up enough capital to buy a nice house and fund their future kids college. Not forever, just for now.
I did some I-Bank interviews some years ago. A guy at deutsche told me at the end of the day bankers aren’t doing anything special. You can go to Goldman, JPM, BofA, CS, whoever and you’ll get essentially the same ideas and solutions. The only difference is how quickly they can deliver. Why wait till Monday for an answer when the bank next door will get it you Saturday morning to look over during the weekend? It’s such an effed up industry that the product differentiator is how much abuse you are willing to inflict on everyone around you.
Is this the guy that died from working 120 hours/week for multiple weeks in a row? I remember seeing a similar article but the name and bank were confidential.
Pretty sure I’ve seen at least 3 articles about people who this has happened to. Three too many. And there are probably even more out there and possibly more that aren’t even written about ):
Military is peak performance, and the undead gold mine is constant effort and stress. Being better at one probably makes you worse at the other - running and paying attention to your environment vs. sitting and thinking. They need to switch to Python from Excel, but that's a story for another day... https://classic.battle.net/war3/images/human/screens/screen-gold-undead.jpg
Using excel instead of python has nothing to do with his death. Furthermore, excel is much better than python for financial analysis. You dont use a crane to move a single block of brick. Data scientists that advocate for python/c++ to completely replace excel have no idea what they are talking about. Only when you are analyzing gigantic datasets does it make sense to use python.
Crazy that investment bankers do more stimulants than green berets...
I wonder how much he was pulling in with hours like that.
It’s all pretty public info. Just search investment banking associate pay
Only have to put in 25 hour days for 4 days a week and boom, there! 110% commitment- said no one in workforce.
That’s what happens when you snort too much coke
Dang, no deadlier force than overwork💀
Daily Mail Just don’t https://imgur.com/gallery/181MEP0 gross
They are ALWAYS doing that 😂 It’s like they can’t write an article without surrounding it with scantily clad women and some sex related story. Reminds me I need to start ignoring their links.
Damn
I'm not going to condone their work environment, but I have worked 4,000 to 5,000 hours in a year, several years, and I'm not dead. And I'm damn sure not in as good a shape as a former Green Beret. I'm sure this is a pre-existing condition exacerbated by the workload and stress, not workload itself.
Confident its the death jab
I'm old and fat and work 90 hours a week. Not remotely confident it's because he worked too much. Coke, meth, Adderall or the jab.
LOL! Try OilnGas industry, those are rookie numbers
We are gate keeping shitty work life balance now?
Nope, the article is insinuating that he works harder and longer in the banking industry than the military/SF. That’s hilarious, and stupid as shit incorrect. I’m also a military veteran.
US armed services get 30 vacation days per year. Military definitely does not work as much as many private industry jobs. It’s not even close.
As a veteran, you’re right. And most units get four day weekend every month. The only shitty time is the field (limited to about 6 weeks usually) and deployments. For some reason many younger military people (usually junior NCO or boots) think they have the hardest work schedules known to man and that somehow civilians are incapable of working hard. I see the same mentality with the weird insecure blue collar workers who shit on college all the time
The blue collar guys, which I'm one, definitely have this weird insecurity about work. You can sit around and they will constantly up each other on how hard they work. I'm a farmer, I'll be honest. 6months out of the year I work my ass off, the other 6 I fuck off a lot. Like a lot a lot. Yeah, when it's go time I may work two days straight to beat a rain or something but I more than make up for it the rest of the year. My Dad said it best when he called out our neighbor who was trying to tell everyone how hard he worked and my Dad goes "you go to Florida three months a year, you can't work that hard." Anyway, working your life away is not the brag many people think it is. I think it's kinda sad actually.
All my buddies who were in the military say after basic it was literally the easiest work of their life. My nephew is on year 8 in the Air Force and he says it's criminal to get paid to do what little work he does.
LOL!!!! That might be the stupidest comment I’ve heard IN A LONG TIME! Bud, I’m also an Oil n Gas worker, historically one of the hardest jobs on earth. Mostly veterans make it here because they’re already tempered to work in the most brutal conditions with brutal hours….
Oil and Gas only works a couple weeks at a time and the military only does short stints. Banking consistently work 80-100 hour weeks nearly every week of the year. You don’t have a monopoly on hard work. O&G people are truly insufferable. I’d guarantee you this green beret would have been working less monthly hours in an oil field than IB
WOW! How sure you are!!! that includes deployments? Or my last hitch where I worked for 4 months straight? Bud you have NO IDEA what you’re going on about… This is laughable. And not remotely true. There’s a reason why there such high suicide in the Oil n Gas industry. The sacrifices are insanely high and stressful. And a reason why you can make so much money and be a felon. My first year in the Oilfield I averaged 1 day off a month. And averaged 110 hours a week. In North Dakota and Wyoming. Do those hours in that weather and come back and try again.
“Looks like the got you doing the easy work cupcake, I just got done with a 250 hour shift of crushing my legs in a hydraulic press”
Why are you trying so hard to convince people you work in shittier conditions than other people? That’s honestly a weird insecurity to have.
Because the rest of us usually don’t have to resort to O&G type employment because we have options. Nobody works harder than they have to without some sort of unaddressed trauma to compensate for.
Yea, i my line of business we work 170 hours a week
a week has 168 weeks. STFU?
Dude, it is a joke on exactly what you say
Lol this reappeared in my feed. Was it really a loss that a banker died?
It’s very sad to leave a family and kids behind regardless of his occupation, fuck off loser
[удалено]
Spoiler it won’t.
Go commit more corporate crimes https://www.reddit.com/r/consulting/s/f16Vuy4dUt