[HN Gopher] Young Goldman Sachs bankers ask for 80-hour week cap
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Young Goldman Sachs bankers ask for 80-hour week cap
Author : wheybags
Score : 260 points
Date : 2021-03-20 09:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| ykevinator wrote:
| It's not abuse it's a choice
| the_only_law wrote:
| Are the companies really getting much out of driving employees
| like this? I've had myself a few hours with sleep deprivation and
| it doesn't take long before my productivity significantly
| collapsed and my thought streams are borderline delusional and
| erratic.
| eschaton wrote:
| They should get together and form an organization that can
| negotiate with the bank on their behalf, all "unified" if you
| will.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| I think what they should have is a salary cap. A maximum-wage, in
| addition to a minimum wage ... there would be less and less
| incentive to make an extra buck, fewer alpha males strutting
| about, and no chance of too-big-to-fail. Sorry, my cynicism
| talking.
| FizBack wrote:
| Funny to assume this has anything to do with squeezing
| productivity out of young graduates: it's rather a rite of
| passage institutionalized at the scale of the industry with more
| senior people abusing junior analysts because "they've been
| through that" and earned their pay/status raise.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| Easy solution. Fat finger a couple of 0s into my account please
| and tell them to Foff.
| monster_group wrote:
| I find it amazing that people are willing to sacrifice their
| health and relationships for more money. Even if I was offered a
| million dollar salary I wouldn't do it. Aren't these grads from
| top notch business schools supposed to be smart and see that it's
| not worth it?
| cletus wrote:
| It's really no different to being a medical resident in THE US.
| 8 years of college, $250k in student loans and you make $25k
| salary working 80+ hours a week for 2-6 years. Why do that?
| Because at a later point you're a specialist or a surgeon who
| can make $300k-1m+ (depending on specialty).
|
| These investment bankers are all trying to get promoted from
| being an associate. By the time they're 30, assuming they've
| survived that long, they'll likely have 7 figure salaries.
|
| Back in the mid 2000s I remember reading about top Wall Street
| traders taking home $50m annual bonuses.
|
| So that's why they do it. What's wrong with that?
|
| Is it really any different to working 100 hours a week on a
| startup for nothing, possibly for years?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| " By the time they're 30, assuming they've survived that
| long, they'll likely have 7 figure salaries."
|
| well, depending on the survival rate, that could still be a
| rotten deal.
|
| Also I find it amazing that people trade away their health so
| cheaply, it you consider how much it's actually worth and
| that you cannot buy it back,
| cletus wrote:
| People trade their health and risk their lives all the
| time.
|
| What about those who work on oil rigs, or in mines, or on
| fishing boats, or providing humanitarian services in a war
| zone?
|
| All of those do it for a whole lot less, at least in terms
| of financial rewards.
| chefkoch wrote:
| >What about those who work on oil rigs, or in mines, or
| on fishing boats, or providing humanitarian services in a
| war zone?
|
| Most of the people working on boats or in mines don't
| have a chance to risk their healt in finance. It's the
| best paying opportunity that is possiple for them.
| cletus wrote:
| That's my point: people risk their lives for a lot less.
| Is it any surprise that people do it in finance?
| chefkoch wrote:
| As long as your young and healthy you don't think you are
| going to be the one having problems before it's too late.
| And even then it often takes a long time to admit to
| yourself that you have a problem.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > Back in the mid 2000s I remember reading about top Wall
| Street traders taking home $50m annual bonuses.
|
| Does a 50m bonus generate 1000x more happiness than a 50k
| salary? What's wrong with that is that it seems pointless and
| myopic.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Depends, if I could work 80 hour weeks for a year in my 20s
| and emerge with a 50m bonus, that would be great, nice easy
| retirement after a year.
| jac241 wrote:
| Glad someone brought up the residents. Guarantee any IM or
| surgical resident taking care of you at SF general, Columbia,
| NYU, Mass Gen, UPMC, etc. is spending at least 80hrs/week in
| the hospital and probably at least 10 more a week studying
| when they get home. They even grind the pediatrics residents
| into dust and there is no payout on the other end for
| pediatricians who only make 180k on average.
|
| Hospitals are hiring more and more nurse practitioners, who
| study for 18 months, part time, online while working full
| time as nurses, who are only required to get 500hrs of
| "clinical experience" aka shadowing (only 3mos at 40/wk...),
| and have somehow managed to get independent practice to harm
| you in >20 states. Schools have no requirement to be a nurse
| beforehand (not that experience being a nurse is the same as
| coming up with treatment plans as a doctor...) and have 100%
| acceptance rates. A quarter to a third of the credit hours
| they take are courses that boil down to how to lobby state
| governments for independent practice. Hospitals love them
| because, to make up for their complete lack of experience,
| they order a ton of imaging, labs, and referrals which all
| generate more $$$ for the hospital at your expense (and they
| don't know how to interpret). You pay the same for an MD/DO
| vs an NP/PA, but only one group is trained well. All of this
| is to say, that the payout at the end of residency is going
| away quickly for a lot of specialties, particularly ones like
| peds where mismanagement isn't as obvious to lay people as it
| is in neurosurgery.
|
| Resident salaries are more like 55-70k nowadays but minimum
| wage at $15/hour would mean a pay raise for a lot of
| residents.
| qaq wrote:
| There was a discussion on fintech and one of the HN users
| chipped in that he was making 7 figures but at the end of the
| day he never had time for family/kids and now sitting in huge
| empty house was reflecting that this was pretty sad way to
| approach life.
| wojciii wrote:
| This is actually a valid point. I don't care about money as
| such. It's nice to have and being able to buy luxury is
| great. But being able to buy stuff for your wife and
| children and _having_ the _time_ to spend with them is even
| better.
|
| Loneliness sucks. Even with lots of money.
| cletus wrote:
| So part of getting on the ride at Six Flags is knowing when
| to get off.
|
| How much money is enough, exactly? To cover your needs and
| a comfortable life, that'd be $2m of even lower.
|
| If you're making 7 figures, you could make that pretty damn
| quick and then get out if you wanted to. Some people do
| this. I've seen stories about people who quit finance by
| the time their 30 because it's not what their passion is,
| they want to spend time with family or whatever.
|
| But money can be a trap. If you're making $5m/year, it's
| easy to think that if you stay another year you'll walk
| away with another $2-3m (after taxes). I bet that's hard to
| walk away from. Also, people's standard of living often
| rises with income so you might be making $5m/year but now
| you have to pay the mortgage on a 4000 sq ft apartment
| overlooking Central Park, your house in Southhampton, your
| 4 cars and a boat.
|
| Anthony Levandowski was a classic example of this. Paid
| $120m+ by Google. That's more money than any reasonable
| person needs for a lifetime. But he got greedy. Think about
| that. Why get greedy when you have more than you could
| possibly need?
|
| For some I suspect it's not to much the money but it's the
| power and the ego. You like being seen as a huge success.
| You like the attention that gets you.
|
| So I have no issues with business grads seeking to make
| their fortune in investment banking (even though I think
| that industry as a whole adds pretty limited value to
| humanity; but that's a separate topic). But if you can't
| get out and lose everything else as you chase even more
| money... well, that's on you.
| closeparen wrote:
| These guys presumably see present ambition and future riches as
| a net benefit to their dating lives. Also it is easy (if wrong)
| to take a similar mindset towards intense knowledge work as
| towards endurance sports: cultivation and display of manly
| virtue, stamina, prowess, etc. Once trapped in this mindset, it
| is normal working hours that will seem unhealthy: lazy, weak,
| entitled, etc.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Beats me why an investment bank needs workers working at all?
| unixhero wrote:
| Spinning plates.
| caoilte wrote:
| To weed out the non-psychopaths
| hx2a wrote:
| Around 2003 I worked at Merrill Lynch, on the IT side supporting
| investment banking. Our users were creating Pitchbooks, which are
| these 100 page PowerPoint presentations that contain a lot of
| financial data taken from various financial statements. The
| junior employees toil for hours putting these things together for
| senior managers.
|
| We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much
| of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial
| statements and generate complete decks. What previously took
| dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the
| junior employees an enormous amount of time.
|
| The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted
| their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That
| was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the
| sake of work.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| I'm sure there are practical issues for not doing this, but at
| that point if it's not too much trouble I would just make and
| release this project to the junior employees without telling
| the managers. What, they weren't that fast when they started?
|
| In all seriousness I'm convinced this comes from people putting
| too much value on the institution. It's Merrill Lynch, not the
| army. What's so bad about people doing their work better? Why
| do they feel it invalidates some specific, all-important
| experience?
| hx2a wrote:
| We wouldn't have been able to build it without some kind of
| approval and agreement of who we would bill our time to.
| Although I should point out that "vigilante projects" (as I
| call them) do have a place in investment banks, and people
| who can write code on their own can do a lot to improve their
| situation. I remember a different job where myself and one
| other person each created vigilante projects that later
| turned out to be absolutely critical for properly monitoring
| internal systems. Vigilante projects are created in defiance
| of the incompetence of upper management.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the
| incompetence of upper management.
|
| This is where you should anticipate the upper management
| saying no and then just never ask, using an excuse that
| "you thought that wouldn't be such a big issue"
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Nothing stops them using the software to build the prototype
| of the presentation to start their work from and then add
| some human language on top. 90% hours off that, and nobody
| will ever tell too.
| cynusx wrote:
| M&A work is mostly speculative work (pitching to potential
| buyers), the more opportunities you find and present properly the
| more money you make. As a consequence, there is an infinite
| amount of work that can be done and a pool of hungry junior
| analysts that is willing to do the maximum amount of work they
| can to promote into the few positions that actually talk to the
| clients.
|
| When a deal is actually in the works the buyer, the seller and
| the investment bank want to close it as soon as possible putting
| all the time pressure on the lawyers and investment bank analysts
| to finish everything as soon as possible. In this case you need a
| team that's used to work 100 hours a week to deliver. There's a
| saying that "time kills all deals".
|
| Adding more analysts is not going to "fix" that periodically the
| team needs to have no personal life.
|
| It's only a small step to go from this level of commitment 15-25
| times per year, to fill up all their remaining time with
| speculative work that could bring a deal to the table.
|
| The work they do is not specifically high-skill, most university
| grads can do it and the starting pay is higher then other options
| so they get ambitious, money-oriented grads willing to churn and
| burn for a while in the hopes of promoting.
|
| Now let's consider what happens when HR decides to institute
| normal working hours. Letting them work like normal employees
| goes directly against your bottom line (less profit, less bonus
| for the MD's) and come crunch-time if a deal fails because your
| clients are waiting for a junior analyst to do his work, your
| clients will +hate+ you and tell everybody.
|
| Personally, I never thought getting into that line of work is
| worth it but nobody is forcing those analysts to work there. The
| slavery is entirely voluntary, they can and often do leave for
| more normal jobs. They are very easily replaced for an equally
| skilled worker.
|
| Add that investment banks are riddled with zero-empathy
| psychopaths and you get a perfectly toxic culture that attracts
| and retains precisely the types of people that are willing to
| work in and perpetuate such an environment.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Seems ripe for automation and some AI.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/typical-ma-exper...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I don't think this is a matter of getting lots of speculative
| work. I think the analysts in the survey knew they were getting
| in for crazy hours during crunch times. The problem is that
| there are a lot more deals than usual being done this year so
| there are no longer any non-crunch weeks.
| hogFeast wrote:
| The issue is not anyone alleging that staff are being forced to
| work there. The issue is: analysts are often told they won't do
| 100 hours, and that most of these people will leave and do
| something else which isn't a good outcome for the employer.
|
| Adding more analysts does fix it. The amount of work does not
| increase exponentially as you add more analysts, it is
| unchanged (that is why they are hiring more people, no-one
| expected this to be such a big year for capital markets...most
| places just haven't hired enough). Same amount of work, more
| analysts, less work per analyst.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _come crunch-time if a deal fails because your clients are
| waiting for a junior analyst to do his work_
|
| There is a solution to this: a coordinated global team. FX
| traders manage this just fine.
|
| The problem is, at its root, that high finance is insanely
| competitive across almost every dimension. One of these is the
| ease with which senior bankers can leave and found a boutique,
| taking a good share of their clients with them. That limits how
| much banks can rein in their rainmakers. It also makes bankers
| protective of their relationships. The former makes it
| difficult to add staff to teams. The latter adds friction to a
| banker in New York trusting a colleague in London with their
| prized relationships.
|
| As you say, at least in my time, it was made _abundantly_ clear
| that if you go into banking, you won 't have a life for a few
| years. After that, you will have a gold star on your resume. It
| will enable you to leave for a better work-life balance. Or
| stay for more money.
| riffic wrote:
| Perhaps they should form a union and collectively bargain for
| better working conditions.
| catchmilk wrote:
| Throughout my professional career, I've worked as an engineer for
| the buy-side (arguably better work-life balance compared to sell-
| side, i.e. banks). More often than not, I was working under a
| manager/team lead that made it abundantly clear to the team that
| one "will not progress in the company if they think they can
| leave everyday at 5pm". I've also had a manager who was
| speechless to find out that we did not, in fact, sign waivers
| that meant we give up regular working hours and can therefore be
| forced to work long hours every day or on the weekends.
|
| Funnily enough, I can't count the number of times I had an
| interview and the interviewer described the company as the
| 'Google of Finance', with an emphasis on work-life balance. It
| couldn't be further away from the truth in my experience.
| Management in the financial industry is unfortunately still
| plagued with people who think that more working hours is
| perfectly correlated with more productivity.
| jasim wrote:
| I once worked for a German company (remotely) who made it clear
| that working beyond 6pm wouldn't lead to much progress, and my
| lead consistently logged out at just the time. So I had to
| follow his example and couldn't potter around after. I still
| love the team for that. But we consistently did a solid day's
| worth of work everyday and there wasn't much juice left to
| continue after.
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes, they're not stressing out the team, perhaps they have
| long term growth in mind.
|
| > But we consistently did a solid day's worth of work
| everyday and there wasn't much juice left to continue after.
|
| I find that a bit much, one is to expect some downtime so
| employees switch modes a bit, maybe do research on their own
| on the company time, say, maybe 4-5 hours a week. Squeezing
| up to the last drop, even if it's paid and within the normal
| 40 hours a week, is not the best way to let your employees
| grow.
| globuous wrote:
| My dad was working for a big oil company. He once told me a
| pretty funny story. The company had just switched CEOs, and
| the new CEO was walking around the office around 7:30pm,
| knocked on my dad's door and asked him "sir, are you bad at
| your job ?" My dad was surprised because he thought he had a
| reputation of being pretty good at it. The new CEO then asked
| him "so if you're good at your job, why are you still in the
| office at 7:30pm ?". The ideo being that someone good could
| finish his workload soon enough to be back home with his
| family by 7:30. That contrasted so much with the "stay at
| work as long as you can to show you're working hard" culture
| so many companies have.
| standardUser wrote:
| That practically brings a tear to my eye. We need a world
| with a lot more of those bosses.
| vbtemp wrote:
| I love this.
|
| First time I was a engineering lead, things were going
| great, to the point we simply weren't busy... Long lunches,
| chill days, making good friendships. The younger staff
| became worried that they weren't busy and didn't have
| anything to do, because they were so used to always having
| backlogs of bugs and other random assignments to do. I
| simply said, this is what life is like when you're good at
| what you do - you reward good work with pleasantness
| instead of more work!
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This. This is good management.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| This is what I do (French company). I then do basically the
| same thing afterwards (coding and learning tech) but for my
| pleasure.
|
| Then I have time to check with the kids, have dinner and
| watch a movie or go biking (well, the latter got complicated
| with our covid measures).
|
| And the next day I am happy to be back at work.
|
| The big, big difference is that I am in France and cannot be
| forced to many things, this could just have an inpact on my
| career (which it does not and I could not care less anyway)
| kazen44 wrote:
| in my experience this is the norm in most european companies.
|
| If you need to do overwork to reach the good levels of
| productivity something is seriously wrong in your company.
| Sure, moments of overwork happen, but in my experience it is
| usually seen as a failure in management if this happens
| regularly.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I think it's often less about productivity than it is about
| instilling a sense of allegiance. Certain companies like it
| when their employees have no life outside of work because they
| are less likely to cause trouble and more likely to do what
| they're told.
|
| Management in these places wants to own your time and wants you
| close so they can keep an eye on you.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it 's often less about productivity than it is about
| instilling a sense of allegiance_
|
| Note that the senior people at these firms are usually
| pulling, while not 80+ hours, at least 60 a week ( _e.g._ 6AM
| to 6PM Monday through Friday).
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of the commentary here is (correctly) on the
| associate "hazing." But, yes, partners certainly don't just
| cruise in for a few hours a day either and there's
| definitely a hierarchy of partners. In my experience, with
| investment banking there's a fair bit of high-end FIRE with
| at least some of those who stick it out retiring in their
| 40s or so.
| Frost1x wrote:
| It's also about ekeing out any additional labor because the
| employer pays a flat rate. It doesn't matter if 20-40 of the
| hours after 40 hours only gain 10% additional work relative
| to the 90% done in the first 40 hours. That's still a 10%
| gain for the business at no cost. Employees are going to
| cycle out anyways naturally looking for better opportunities
| so who cares if they get burnt out?
|
| Exempt positions shouldn't be an option in any industry, in
| my opinion. As they become the norm everywhere they become an
| excuse to abuse labor for whatever reason the employer
| decides.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Except that every productivity study shows the exact
| opposite. For a week or two, you can spend more hours to
| produce more. On any longer timescale, the extra hours
| decrease your productivity/hour so much that the total
| output goes down. It's not just abusive on the part of the
| employer, but is also just plain stupid.
|
| Definitely agree on overtime-exempt positions. The
| terminology is also really messed up. Normally, being
| exempt from something is a good thing. Here, "non-exempt"
| and "exempt" should be referred to as "paid for overtime"
| and "screwed for overtime".
| 1123581321 wrote:
| An "up-or-out" pyramid structure doesn't see as much of
| that longer-term effect because it creates a selective
| environment for people who can work longer hours, and
| because it is overworking a stream of new interns and
| graduates who don't stay for as much of the low
| productivity period as employees would in a traditional
| organization.
| MereInterest wrote:
| How long does it take to get promoted out of the initial
| hazing? Productivity at 40 hours/week beats productivity
| at 60 hours/week over any time scale longer than a month.
| I sincerely doubt that the turnover/promotion rate is
| only a month long.
|
| I do agree that there is a misalignment of incentives. An
| employer is not financially responsible for the burnout
| that they induce. If it takes the employee an extra 2-3
| months between jobs due to recovering from that burnout,
| that is a financial hit to the employee on top of the
| emotional hit, even though they were not responsible for
| causing the burnout in the first place.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes, they're around longer than an extra month, but as
| these organizations see it, they would never get the
| valuable work they really want out of the eventually
| promoted juniors who burn out that quickly, anyway,
| regardless of work hours. The shortened tenure just
| reduces the cost of their process to find people who will
| thrive when they are given seniority and staff on top of
| their ability to work long hours well.
|
| If you want to put math on it, something like this might
| be the model:
|
| Value of low stamina junior employee, overworked: x
|
| Value of low stamina junior employee, 40h/week: 2x
|
| Value of high stamina junior employee, overworked: 1.5x
|
| Value of low stamina junior employee after seniority: 4x
|
| Value of high stamina junior employee after seniority:
| 5-10x
|
| This gap trend continues to widen up the ranks, up to the
| top, since the top executives of these companies still
| have to close deals with the most significant clients.
|
| My opinion is that up-or-out is a worse model for most
| organizations than a flatter model that promotes and pays
| ICs and technical leaders accordingly and doesn't assign
| outsized prestige to deal closers--but I can't deny these
| organizations are effective at selecting the right people
| for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| It depends on the role as well. Organizations bring on
| junior sales people--admittedly often in lower impact
| inside sales positions--and they hit their numbers or
| they don't. And, if they don't, well sales managers don't
| have any trouble firing people. And this applies even to
| companies with good ladders for tech people.
| watwut wrote:
| It does see exact same effect. The people are not fired
| after the few weeks before productivity is down. It takes
| much more time.
|
| People who can work long hours long term dont produce
| more lomg term. They just dont quit and work long hours
| with lower hourly productivity.
| evgen wrote:
| The long hours also serves as a sort of hazing ritual that
| can increase bonding to a particular world-view. If you are a
| company like GS you know you can pull in the cream of the
| crop by dangling huge payouts at the end of the
| apprenticeship period. The apprentices will eat entire pies
| filled with shit day in and day out until they can't take it
| anymore and quit. Those who survive are now much more closely
| bonded to both their peers and upper-management (who endured
| the same thing in the past) and are more likely to take the
| company world-view as axiomatic from that point onward. You
| see this in finance, medicine, elite military units, and more
| close to home you see it all over the startup world.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _You see this in finance, medicine, elite military units_
|
| And in distinctly non-elite units too:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-56406948 in
| fact this is probably a result of that unit trying to
| emulate what they imagine real units do
| chii wrote:
| But the question is whether this sort of hazing produce
| better outcomes (for the company)?
|
| You point out elite military units, and medicine. Both of
| these fields tend to have highly competent, highly
| motivated individuals, and thus their work is quite
| valuable. If it were better to not have such hazing, then
| that implies that these units are not operating optimally.
| But then if they aren't, why hasn't a better optimal system
| replaced it?
| evgen wrote:
| I guess I would assume that it produces better outcomes
| from the company perspective but honestly can't think of
| a good counter-example to use as a comparison. After
| enduring the hazing it is much easier to convince you to
| do things that might be a bit morally questionable (e.g.
| shifting your personal ethical Overton window) by
| reminding you in subtle ways of what you endured to reach
| this point, what it means to others that have endured
| with you, etc.
|
| I would assume that in certain adversarial environments
| it is better to have a small team that will focus on a
| goal without question than one in which either the goal
| or the means to accomplish it are ever up for
| questioning, but someone with any knowledge of academic
| research on leadership and team dynamics can probably
| answer better than I.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _it is much easier to convince you to do things that
| might be a bit morally questionable (e.g. shifting your
| personal ethical Overton window_
|
| Same reason that executives like to go to strip clubs
| together, it creates a sense of "if I go down you go down
| with me".
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| It creates loyalty and trust. Important when doing
| dangerous or illegal things.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > But then if they aren't, why hasn't a better optimal
| system replaced it?
|
| Because we're not living at the limit of infinity and
| this discussion is there to change this fact
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I recall this being a topic of interest in social
| sciences in general. My general impression[0] is that
| hazing rituals are very important in creating and
| maintaining group cohesion. The rituals evolve towards
| being _tough enough_ in terms of pain and self-esteem:
| enough to filter out people with weak desire to join the
| group[1], and enough to do some lasting - but not
| debilitating - damage[2], but not enough to be seen as
| abusive by the group members[3].
|
| The driver of evolution of these rituals is just group
| survival: very bad ones will self-destruct a group, good
| ones let the group be more effective and outcompete less
| effective rivals[4].
|
| Here are some predictions from this view, which I think
| all pan out:
|
| - Groups that survived for a long time have such rituals.
| They evolve towards less tough/abusive if the group isn't
| in fierce competition. They may ultimately become
| painless, effortless, make-believe rubber-stamping, but
| at that point the group is dying.
|
| - When new groups form around some domain, some may go
| overboard with their rituals - it takes time for groups
| to self-destruct or be outcompeted.
|
| - Groups overlap, and the demands of supergroup may
| temper the hazing rituals of subgroups. The most obvious
| example: the laws of your nation will put a ceiling on
| what kind of hazing can happen in groups that exist under
| its jurisdiction.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Not a social scientist, have no sources to cite,
| going from memory of all the stuff I read in books and
| blogs over the last decade of procrastination.
|
| [1] - In cases where joining is voluntary - e.g. a
| fraternity. Contrast that with tribes, where everyone
| born to in it is expected to go through a coming-of-age
| ritual.
|
| [2] - The group wants its members to contribute fully to
| its goals, so rituals will not threaten that - unless
| there's a steady stream of candidates that needs to be
| filtered anyway, in which case surviving the ritual
| unscathed becomes a filtering criterion. On the other
| hand, scars - be it physical or emotional - are
| encouraged, if they're not compromising performance. Such
| scars serve as a reminder of the commitment, in-group
| identifier, and (particularly with scars gained post-
| hazing) can confer social status in the group.
|
| [3] - The goal is to boost group cohesion, so having new
| members harbor resentment towards the group is
| counterproductive.
|
| [4] - Note that when talking about market players, the
| "group" here isn't equivalent to a company. A company is
| a different intersubjective entity, largely independent
| from a group of people. In a company, people are
| fungible. A group can form in a company, or across
| companies, and can easily move from one company to
| another, retaining its members and rituals. Groups cycle
| its members too (e.g. people die, or retire from service,
| or quit the industry), but it's a different lifecycle.
| raverbashing wrote:
| What do you mean by the buy-side exactly? Investment funds?
| Galanwe wrote:
| Financial jargon.
|
| Buy-side are traditionally firms that are the "leaf" of the
| system: investment funds, hedge funds, etc. These are buyers
| of services.
|
| Sell side refer to firms that are selling a service for the
| buy side, brokers, banks, etc.
| phyalow wrote:
| Yes Hedge Funds usually. Sell side is banks selling services
| and the buyers are Hedge Funds, Asset Managers etc.
| ludwigschubert wrote:
| Yeah, funds, or anyone who makes investments essentially.
| Unlike banks, which focus on the sale and generating revenue
| from fees etc. rather than investment insight. Investopedia
| isn't always the best source, but for definitions they come
| in handy: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/buyside.asp
|
| (I had a brief internship in finance on the buy-side and had
| to look up a ton of terms like that, to the degree that I was
| given this tongue-in-cheek "guide":
| https://www.amazon.com/Damn-Feels-Good-Be-
| Banker/dp/14013096.... It's immature af, but managed to teach
| me the cliches and terminology.)
| logicchains wrote:
| >Funnily enough, I can't count the number of times I had an
| interview and the interviewer described the company as the
| 'Google of Finance', with an emphasis on work-life balance. It
| couldn't be further away from the truth in my experience.
| Management in the financial industry is unfortunately still
| plagued with people who think that more working hours is
| perfectly correlated with more productivity.
|
| Some HFTs are better in this regard, as developer
| quality/productivity matters a lot more for high-frequency
| trading than it does at a slow-trading bank or hedge fund, and
| mistakes are more costly, so they have incentive to treat their
| developers better.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It seems to me that people that work 95 hour weeks should develop
| some backbone.
|
| That's _far_ beyond _death by overwork_ level even in Japan.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I think we can not assume that the people who take pride in
| their 100h work week actually are honest to themselves. Maybe
| they are 100h in their office but I can not imagine that they
| are fully concentrated and don't get distracted at all
| GolDDranks wrote:
| Yeah, we have 40 hours of maximum "standard" work hours in
| Japan. Additionally, there's some limits for overtime, such as
| max. 15 hours overtime per week, and 45 hours per month. At my
| workplace, these are strictly enforced, but I've heard that
| there's some culture of not reporting one's actual work hours
| in some companies.
| dmje wrote:
| I just have no understanding of why anyone would work at anything
| for 95/80/crazy hours per week. Unless: it's your own thing and
| you're committed in a personal way, eg a startup or first
| business or whatever. But even then, life is too short to do this
| for any protracted length of time.
|
| But then I also don't understand anyone working solely for money,
| and I double don't understand anyone wanting to get into finance,
| so what do I know...
| submeta wrote:
| Do they work 7 days a week? That would mean 11.4 hours a day,
| 8am-7pm. Or do they work 6 days a week? That would mean 13.3h a
| day, 8am-9pm.
|
| This is insane.
|
| Edit: This means no workout-time, no family-life, no social life
| at all, no learning/reading/taking a walk, no meditation, no
| visiting your parents, no nothing.
| kingaillas wrote:
| Anecdotally, I had a friend at one of these places in
| Manhattan, trying to make it out of provisional status (or
| whatever the next level up on the ladder was). He pulled 15
| hours (9am to midnight) Monday to Friday, and 8-10 hours on
| Sat. His employer was gracious enough to allow them Sundays
| off, and call it a day as early as 6 pm on Fri depending on
| workload. ;)
|
| So that was ~65 to 70 hours a week, and I thought it was an
| insane workload. He wound up leaving after year to take a
| "normal" finance job in corporate America in another state.
| high_derivative wrote:
| One thing I find interesting is that banking is still a way to
| make a large salary almost _purely_ on grind. It 's not an
| intellectual competition, it's much easier to get into than good
| FAANG jobs with better work life balance. It purely rewards the
| grind.
|
| I totally get why people want this.
| eof wrote:
| What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of
| their effort?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Money, presumably.
| cube00 wrote:
| More hours at work means more deals then the other guy who
| went home at 5pm.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the
| output of their effort?_
|
| There is a sharp divide between those who bring in revenue
| and everyone else.
|
| Analysts and associates do not bring revenue. Their work is
| to idle until a deal is imminent. At that moment, being the
| team that can immediately whip together materials for a
| client, that can immediately generate closing documents, that
| can be the difference between winning and losing the deal.
| Between tens or hundreds millions of dollars in fees for the
| firm or zero. Between those intense bursts it's mostly
| farting around.
|
| At the higher level, more work means more selling. Unless
| you're in a real bum corner of the market, there is always
| another deal you could pick up. If you start reaching
| diminishing returns, empire build--branch out.
|
| One of the biggest breaks I had in my career was moving from
| a finance culture to an engineering-led one. The finance
| culture _works_. But it optimises for short-term results and
| it optimises for the partners, those at the top.
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, Big Law works on a similar model. associates get
| billed out for far more than they make so it's in the
| interests of partners to generate lots of billable hours.
| And then it's basically up or out. Make partner (at which
| point, as you say, your job basically becomes sales to a
| non-trivial extent) or leave.
|
| Management consulting as well.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Big Law works on a similar model_
|
| Law and consulting are different because more hours
| _literally_ means more revenue. Banking is success fee
| driven. It 's thus _theoretically_ possible for hours to
| be reduced without impacting--or possibly, positively
| impacting--revenue.
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough even if the end result is pretty much the
| same.
|
| My understanding is that investment banking, which I made
| a very deliberate decision not to go into, throws
| associates at a whole lot of deal book production and
| proofreading that is only read by some other overworked
| associate.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea that's one of the worst things that really convinced
| me that the investment banking track was not for me: How
| utterly pointless the work was. You're spending 100 hours
| a week updating slide decks to use 14 point font instead
| of 12 point, and making the titles a different shade of
| blue. And it will all be read by....likely nobody, maybe
| someone who doesn't care what the font is. I'd rather
| grind as a software developer on a feature that never
| ships--at least there's creative output, and you're
| learning something.
| [deleted]
| belly_joe wrote:
| I think the chief complaint of the analysts is less about
| the total hours worked than the fact that much of the
| grinding is not productive.
|
| From what I recall, the issue was that management knew
| analyst time was not valuable at all, and so it was common
| practice for them to leave the office at 7pm with an "i
| need this by tomorrow" order for client materials that were
| meant for speculative pitching rather than supporting a
| live deal.
|
| Thus the analyst ends up getting holidays and weekends
| crushed repeatedly by projects that aren't really that
| meaningful and could have been spread out in a much more
| manageable way if the higher ups had given any
| consideration at all to what they were asking.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the chief complaint of the analysts is less about the
| total hours worked than the fact that much of the
| grinding is not productive_
|
| It's a fair complaint. This anecdote stood out:
|
| "VPs create shells for decks that do not align with what
| senior team members want to show, which results in junior
| teams creating the wrong materials. Ultimately, senior
| team members see these materials and junior team members
| often have to start from scratch on incredibly short
| timelines (less than 24 hours) - resulting in unnecessary
| stress, subpar work, and lack of sleep" [1]
|
| This is a problem! Also, when I was an intern, it wasn't
| uncommon for an MD to have a meeting at 11AM, be back to
| back until 5PM, to only drop a request on the associate's
| desk at 6 _from that morning meeting_.
|
| [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-
| wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INo...
| evgen wrote:
| 'Good FAANG job with better work life balance"
|
| Ha.
|
| Ha ha ha.
|
| The grind to get in to those jobs is similar to a banking entry
| job, the grind for the first few years to make a small mark and
| advance up the ladder is very similar, and you are still not
| making the same payout at the end of the road in tech. If you
| want the tech equivalent it would be those FAANG companies just
| a few years before IPO, when the payout was assured and almost
| certainly going to be large and when the company was still
| small enough to be extremely picky about hires and still
| expected people to have no work-life balance at all.
|
| Concerns about work-life balance did not show up in tech (or at
| least was not talked about) until all of the FAANGs had already
| IPO'd and there was no chance for a multi-million dollar payout
| for enduring the grind.
| high_derivative wrote:
| >, the grind for the first few years to make a small mark and
| advance up the ladder is very similar,
|
| Citation needed. At which FAANG do people work 90 hours a
| week? I see junior engineers working consistently 40-50 hours
| (FAANG ML lab), and some managers perhaps putting in 55-60. I
| have never even heard of people at Amazon (arguably the worst
| grind) putting in these hours.
| evgen wrote:
| These days, by the time you are grinding to make the next
| level and avoid the 2 year cut you are already past the
| point we are talking about. The post-hire grind at a FAANG
| is now closer to what a middle manager at GS would do; it
| is good money but you are not going to make more than
| $1M/year working at a FAANG unless you are a rock star or
| director level. OTOH let me tell you stories about pre-IPO
| Facebook or Google....
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| When the companies were smaller, there was far too much
| work and it was all high value. Therefore, they hired lots
| of driven people, gave them some autonomy and watched them
| work themselves into the grave for you.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Among many people I know who worked at FAANGs (primarily
| Google and Apple) from the early 00s to the present, none of
| this is true.
|
| Yes, many of them worked long hours, but none of those I knew
| described it as a "grind", they honestly just liked their
| work. Certainly _none_ of them did it to the level of sleep
| deprivation or damage to their physical health.
| [deleted]
| II2II wrote:
| In this context, I do not understand the grind. The grind
| should be an up-front cost that allows me to leave concerns
| about work at work. For example, things such as professional
| development do not spill into your personal life. That is
| possible while working strenuously for a 40 or 60 hour week.
| There is not much left of a personal life if you are working an
| 80+ hour week.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not much left of a personal life if you are working an 80+
| hour week_
|
| To be fair, it is made _abundantly_ clear to anyone going
| into investment banking that they should not expect a
| personal life in their first few years. Similar to law or
| medicine.
| high_derivative wrote:
| The grind is that if you are coming from impoverished
| circumstances, it the salary you can send e.g. to your family
| can lift your whole family out of poverty.
|
| It's a great personal sacrifice that most HN readers do not
| need to make, but keep in mind there are people for whom this
| presents an opportunity to change their entire family's life.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 80 hour week cap
|
| Understandable, but ultimately pointless: employers don't demand
| the hours per se, they just pile so much work on you that you
| need 100 hours to complete it. The unspoken implication is that
| if you can't complete it all in a reasonable amount of time, the
| fault is with you, not the workload.
| sneak wrote:
| The funny part is that they're right: if you continue to
| consistently work 80+ hour weeks, the fault _is_ with you.
| lucian1900 wrote:
| They should unionise. Then they can strengthen their demand with
| the threat of industrial action.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Goldman Sachs has a lower yield than Harvard. Meaning they
| accept a fewer % of applicants.
|
| Industrial action against GS would be completely ineffective
| because a million other grads would be willing and eager to
| cross the strike line.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| Sounds like they need a union to increase their collective
| bargaining power in order to achieve better working conditions.
| f_allwein wrote:
| There was actually a banking intern a few years ago who died
| after working for three nights in a row:
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/05/moritz-erha...
| NotPavlovsDog wrote:
| As others have commented, the long hours essentially have to do
| with hazing and conformance vs productivity. It is almost
| impossible to expect "leaders" that have gone through the same
| grinder to treat new employees differently.
|
| "I have suffered, hence you must suffer"
|
| For those considering a job at GS, or, for that matter, any job,
| examining the core culture, and asking about it early in the
| recruitment process, is a must.
| [deleted]
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Being a knowledge worker I've noticed the following when I push
| beyond 8hrs of focused work per day.
|
| 1. Tasks take 50% more time to complete.
|
| 2. The probability of screw up increases. And it really shoots up
| beyond 10hrs or so.
|
| 3. Net result, I take more time cleaning up the mess I created
| than if I had worked on them at a normal pace.
|
| It's like a over speeding car taking more time to reach the
| destination because it either took a wrong route or its engine
| broke down and had to be replaced.
| melomal wrote:
| Whenever I try to 'push' myself I always remind myself of about
| 8 years ago when it was 12 - 16 hours on the computer, sleep
| and repeat.
|
| In my mind at the time I felt like it was being productive and
| doing good. Reality was that it was a lot of clicking around,
| trying to focus was impossible and my productivity was just
| shot.
|
| Now I work solidly for 7 hours and that's it. If I have enough
| juice to be able to focus on an article or do some of my course
| then I'll do it but if I have to re-read the same sentence 3
| times, I tap out. Tomorrow is a new day and so far my obsession
| with 'optimizing' every waking minute has provided me with
| exactly nothing so now I'm trying to switch things up to a more
| placid life.
| sscarduzio wrote:
| I can confirm this running my own company, I work less (albeit,
| with very high concentration) to achieve more.
|
| When I bring up my concentration, my brain is much faster and
| I'm more impatient. So I had to buy a very fast computer
| vnglst wrote:
| Bankers don't need focus, any monkey can beat the market [1],
| but monkeys can't bill 80 hours a week for it.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-
| monkey...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Bankers don 't need focus, any monkey can beat the market_
|
| This isn't what bankers do.
| risyachka wrote:
| I'd argue that really effective mind work is max 4 hours per
| day (max concentration and productivity suited for solving hard
| problems).
|
| Less intensive work can be done for a few hours more, after
| that it is pure wasting of time.
| gbronner wrote:
| PowerPoint jockeying isn't mind work. You need them to be
| there, do the work, and not complain because everyone is on a
| crazy tight deadline and everyone is tired. Unfortunately,
| you can't split the work between people as the communication
| overhead and loss of secrecy overwhelms the savings in time
| sneak wrote:
| Imagine tolerating a job that would fire you for "only" working
| 70 hours per week, when software is free and so easy to learn.
| cryptica wrote:
| They have great, extremely privileged positions with ridiculously
| high pay. They have no right to complain. If they don't love it,
| they should leave.
|
| My work as an indie cryptocurrency developer is more mentally
| challenging, requires more hours, requires me to take more risks,
| requires me to make more enemies and so far I've been getting
| paid a lot less too.
| walshemj wrote:
| A crypto developer whose burning god knows home much carbon is
| in no place to make that sort of of comment "check your
| privilge mate"
| cryptica wrote:
| I work on a "Proof of Stake" blockchain which uses very
| little electricity (no miners) so actually I'm helping to
| save the planet from both a rotten monetary system which
| encourages mass consumption and endless growth and also from
| carbon emissions which would otherwise have been generated by
| cryptocurrency miners on Proof of Work blockchains. It's an
| even better alternative to a better alternative.
| keiferski wrote:
| I believe this is the PDF employees presented:
|
| https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rim9z3X....
|
| (It was in Matt Levine's newsletter)
| cratermoon wrote:
| They're gonna need a union.
| currymj wrote:
| so the work being done is so important that people have to stay
| up all night to get it done in time -- it absolutely can't be
| postponed even by a few hours.
|
| but also, it must not be very important at all, because it's
| being left to junior employees in a state of extreme mental
| impairment from sleep deprivation.
|
| what kind of work are they doing where both of these things can
| be true?
| bobthechef wrote:
| Here's a question: why work for GS if it's so bad? Sure, that
| sounds like a pretty terrible job to me (E&Y is also known to
| grind junior employees in their infamous rat race). I mean, do
| you really expect me to feel sympathy for people in FINANCE? If
| this article was about underpaid, low income workers with no
| other options and barely able to survive having to work 80+
| hours, then you might have my ear, but finance? And at GS?
|
| Where's the world's tiniest violin when you need it.
|
| The only reason GS does this isn't because they're exploiting
| some starving group of people. They're doing this because young
| brats out of college have fixated on GS and ultimately the
| promise of making the big bucks in finance. The only thing
| keeping them there are their egos.
| OliverJones wrote:
| I wonder if Goldman Sachs sells tiny violin futures? They sound
| like a good investment right about now.
| totalZero wrote:
| Several people in this thread are trying to find a reason for
| these practices, but at the end of the day it's just abuse. I
| started my career in an analyst program at a different investment
| bank several years ago. People pile their work onto you and your
| boss doesn't do anything about it because he doesn't want to piss
| them off. And they abuse you when they have a bad day. In my
| first three weeks of work, I had one guy threaten to punch me in
| the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed
| his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to "show me who
| is boss," occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely
| say stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working.
|
| Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept
| it. I saw my boss's boss get publicly humiliated by his boss's
| boss a couple times. Difference is, the junior guys don't have
| anyone to whom they can pass off work that rolls down to them, so
| they just end up doing the work of several others on their team.
| They're the backstop.
|
| There's no profit-oriented reason for the culture, just like
| there's no good reason for prison abuse. It simply manifests due
| to the nature of bullying in a hierarchical culture that rewards
| imbalanced personalities.
| baron816 wrote:
| Whenever I hear people describe tech workplaces as "toxic", I
| think about this kind of stuff. I've heard some anecdotes about
| bosses at small startups who just really didn't know what they
| were doing, but nothing systematic like this.
|
| Tech isn't quite a paradise, but compared to finance, or a
| bunch of other industries, it's pretty close. The tech media
| would still have you believe it's on the same plane though.
| jplr8922 wrote:
| When I was a junior in the financial industry, I worked in
| small trading shops where stone-age behaviors was the norm. I
| had a boss who wanted me to join him at a strip club. Another
| one did drink on lunchtime before trading in the afternoon. I
| once had a manager who wanted to discuss the number of women he
| had sex with during happy hours. I've seen sport bets with big
| numbers simply to impress the colleagues. I could go on and on.
| They all had this toxic kind of ''work hard play hard''
| mentality, where work hard = do everything I tell you and play
| hard = some toxic way to deal with the stress.
|
| This kind of ''hockey team leadership'' works well when all
| players have the same hard skills and backgrounds, but quickly
| crumble if the team size gets higher and more diverse. Its easy
| to fake group cohesion if all members are the same douchebag.
| secondcoming wrote:
| In the UK (London at least) it's not unheard of to have a
| pint at lunchtime, and not just in the finance industry.
| bayindirh wrote:
| From my experience, a pint at lunchtime is considered
| normal in all EU, and it's not harmful when done in
| moderation (read: not every day).
|
| This implies something way harder.
|
| BTW: I've always thought that Margin Call is a very very
| movie showing internals of the financial institutions.
| kelnos wrote:
| Sure, but I think the parent was referring to much heavier
| drinking than that. Most people can drink a pint of beer at
| lunch without much or any negative affect on their
| afternoon work performance. But I expect here we're talking
| about two (or more) cocktails, glasses of wine, or even
| hard liquor at lunch.
| jplr8922 wrote:
| Yup, I was talking about extended lunches with many
| beers. In my opinion, heavy drinking is still bad outside
| work hours. I've seen supervisors making financial
| decisions while hangover from their last night party. Was
| I supposed to believe that their judgment was not biased
| and faculties ready for any situation? Would you better
| have an inexperienced sober junior or an experienced
| senior under effect of alcohol as an employee?
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Depends on the person. Some people can do better work
| hungover than others can sober purely because their base
| level of skill/output is higher so the -20% or -40% hit
| (or however you wanna mathematically represent it)
| doesn't outpace their increased productivity relative to
| the next guy
| beambot wrote:
| Ballmer peak for finance?
| antihero wrote:
| It's like financialised toxic masculinity.
| suifbwish wrote:
| Stop mansplaining
| antihero wrote:
| So long as I can bid on mainsplaining futures.
| mobutu wrote:
| Sounds cool place to work at.
| jplr8922 wrote:
| In my experience, most workplaces have at least one manager
| with a light-medium addiction problem (tends to be alcohol
| for olders, and marijuana for millenials). It might be hard
| to spot, but the best way to track it is the quality of
| decision making.
|
| Unfortunatly, addiciton and other mental health problems
| are almost impossible for the firm to adress until its too
| late for everybody (disgrunted employees, missed business
| opportunities, etc). I hope this COVID crisis will make us
| more preventive regarding these issues.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Addiction is a disease of the brain, not a mental health
| issue.
| glial wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the distinction?
| ibthrowaway wrote:
| There is never justification for abusive treatment of others at
| work, but there are business reasons for the prevalence of
| overnight and weekend work by junior bankers.
|
| This post has an insider's perspective explaining how the daily
| flow of the business in corporate finance and M&A requires a
| lot of the work done by junior bankers to be completed at night
| or on weekends:
| http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fine-disreg...
| hogFeast wrote:
| The issue isn't nights or weekends. The issue is: constant
| lack of organisation (i.e. everything is urgent and last
| minute), and not hiring enough staff.
|
| I don't think anyone has a problem with working at night or
| weekends. The issue is working at night or weekends when you
| also worked during the day and week. Again, just hire more
| staff. This isn't a hard problem.
|
| Suggesting that this problem can only be solved by working
| junior staff 100-120 hours a week is ludicrous. Are these
| junior bankers so rare and talented that you can only hire
| one to change a title font size from 12 to 14 at 4am on
| Saturday? Smh.
| kazen44 wrote:
| > The issue isn't nights or weekends. The issue is:
| constant lack of organisation (i.e. everything is urgent
| and last minute), and not hiring enough staff.
|
| this seems to be the main issue. Most other industries
| which require night work, 24 hour shifts etc have solved
| these issues DECADES ago already. Either by some kind of
| rotation/scheduling system, or by having multiple shifts.
| baq wrote:
| a junior employee begging for 80 hours/week cap has a good
| business reason? it must be a truckload of money.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > Of course, there is another very real, very important
| reason lots of work gets done in investment banks during
| weekends. It is the obvious, best time to consummate mergers
| and acquisitions, when public markets are closed and the last
| minute scrambling on deals can't kick up disruptive rumors or
| market movements.
|
| Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to
| justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I
| figured it was coming up in the first sentence.
|
| Bankers are _perpetually_ late on shit. The industry can
| barely manage to transfer money expediently. Listen to
| yourself. The abuse - which by the way is totally orthogonal
| to whether or not you work through the evening - is
| absolutely not about the workflow or timing or whatever,
| because I can't think of a white collar professional more
| dogshit at doing things on schedule than an investment
| banker.
|
| I'm confident 40 years ago the abuse was worse. And the money
| was worse too! They're just not correlated. That's the
| misconception, there's no brilliant insight into how the
| abuse translates into more dollars. The real transformation
| in the industry is that the computers are better at making
| the real money than the human beings are, and like in many
| white collar professions, there are givers and takers of all
| that computer-generated surplus. Fortunately, when you work
| for a money printer, like at a giant tech company, some of
| whom have trading desks with AUM bigger than many hedge
| funds, you can relax a little.
| Rule35 wrote:
| > Smart people will always gravitate to something like this
| to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this,
| I figured it was coming up in the first sentence.
|
| No. The justifications come in around making employees also
| work a 9-5 shift. If they just hired night-quants it would
| be fine.
|
| It's simply a fact that some work needs to be done by the
| next morning like stocking shelves. Or 24/7 like tech
| support.
| kazen44 wrote:
| but is investment banking really necessary work in that
| regard? in the end, it is just white collar office work
| at the end of the day.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Sadly I think you're right. The macho chest-beating kind of
| stuff you mention is definitely abuse in the common sense.
|
| However I'll warn people about the more bearable, long-term
| stress of this kind of job, which is abusive in a slightly
| different way.
|
| When I finished uni, I shared a flat with a friend with one of
| these jobs. Apart from at night, I had the whole flat to myself
| every weekday night for years. He'd rarely be home for dinner,
| often our only contact was him standing at my doorway at eleven
| or midnight, with me basically in bed already chatting with him
| about how his day went.
|
| I remember locking myself out of the flat once, and I just
| walked to his work to get his key. My main problem was staying
| up to wait for him at the end of the day.
|
| During all this time, I never got the impression that IB work
| was important or interesting. He'd clamour to get his hands on
| spreadsheet ("model") work, but it never struck me as actually
| sensible. There were simply too many moving parts on these
| giant Excel sheets to actually be a real, predictive model.
| There was no evidence that such a model was a good
| representation of a supermarket or whatever.
|
| But most of all, the bit that seemed abusive was the way work
| seemed to happen. Having barely slept, he'd drag himself into
| the office in the morning. Amazingly, there'd be very little to
| do. He'd sit around all day until the afternoon, when the MD
| would come in and demand a 100-page deck done by the next
| morning.
|
| We never did anything like a movie or a dinner without it being
| at the very least interrupted by work. Really important stuff
| like "you have to change the font on p57-89".
|
| This was massively stressful on his relationship as well, and
| it eventually ended. Work was not the only factor, but it was
| surely a major contributor.
|
| The trouble is young bankers see the older guys who've made it
| and think they can make it too. They don't see the survivorship
| bias, because when you've gone through a top school and uni,
| you ARE the survivor. The bank makes you think you're the cream
| of the cream. (One thing that seemed to not cause concern was
| that a lot of the young bankers were the children of important
| people, eg CEOs. You'd think that makes your own odd a lot
| worse.)
|
| My housemate duly looked up to his boss, a guy with a similar
| background to himself. Perhaps he could work himself up on that
| team, and build a similar life for himself.
|
| One day, the boss didn't come to work. The bank put out a
| statement that he'd suffered a heart attack at home, in his
| 40s. My friend knew that he hadn't. Not long after he left the
| bank, and shook off the idea of working himself to death.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Anton Kriel had a series of YT videos that crap all over the
| Investment Banking industry. This is one example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjWRu5heGs
| kazen44 wrote:
| > During all this time, I never got the impression that IB
| work was important or interesting. He'd clamour to get his
| hands on spreadsheet ("model") work, but it never struck me
| as actually sensible. There were simply too many moving parts
| on these giant Excel sheets to actually be a real, predictive
| model. There was no evidence that such a model was a good
| representation of a supermarket or whatever.
|
| personally, this would suck out any kind of enjoyment out of
| a job for me, no matter the money.
|
| I also work in a high stress industry
| (datacenter/connectivity) and while the work can be crazy at
| times, it is all worth it because the work i do actually
| matters to people, companies and organisations which depend
| on the systems we run. I am building something which directly
| benefits other people.
|
| > We never did anything like a movie or a dinner without it
| being at the very least interrupted by work. Really important
| stuff like "you have to change the font on p57-89".
|
| If this is seen as "important", what value do these
| investment banks actually produce except gaming the market
| and taking profits? are they actually producing anything that
| helps their peers?
|
| I've been in situations that had me interrupted (major
| outages for instance), which suck ofcourse, but atleast the
| motivation and pride in the work makes it worth it.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > If this is seen as "important", what value do these
| investment banks actually produce except gaming the market
| and taking profits? are they actually producing anything
| that helps their peers?
|
| This is IB, not trading. Basically it's about one company
| buying another. The way you do it is a senior banker talks
| to the CEO and says "hey, you should buy one of these
| companies, here's a slide deck and I'll help you do it".
|
| That relationship with the CEO is way more important than
| what the deck looks like. It's not as if business strategy
| is so complicated it needs a 100 page deck to explain.
| AFAICT it boils down to a few motivations: buy this company
| to get their capital/customers/staff, or buy it because it
| because if you don't you'll fall behind. Or because you
| need to act like a CEO, and CEOs buy companies.
|
| The decks that all the juniors are working on are just a
| way to say "there's a lot of smart people doing due
| diligence on this, so even if this deal fails like 2/3
| deals (fails meaning the merger happens but it's a mess),
| you can say you did your homework". Which of course you
| won't have, because who ever reads a 100 page slide deck?
|
| What value is produced? It's hard to tell, at least it
| didn't seem to me like it was worth terribly much. Either a
| merger is a stupid idea, but the salesmanship gets it
| pushed through, and the bank gets paid. Or the deal is
| obvious to everyone and it's a matter of the bank wanting
| to get their name on the deal ahead of other banks. The key
| is still to have that senior schmoozer guy arranging it.
| Someone's gotta make a slide deck, but it beats me why some
| of our brightest are put to work fixing fonts and choosing
| background images.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking
| at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the
| desk about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss,"
| occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say
| stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working._
|
| This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. Not from my
| short time in banking and longer time in trading (around lots
| of bankers). Not from anyone I know in the field. I'm sorry you
| had to go through that--you may want to talk to a lawyer.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _It 's also not normal_
|
| It's unfortunately common in many places. Maybe "normal"
| denotes the default state, and perhaps abuse of this sort
| isn't the default, but it seems to occur in lots of high-
| competition, high-stress workplace hierarchies. I experienced
| it working in a sales branch for enterprise business
| equipment (pre- and post-sales support) where there were
| junior sales, sales, team managers, branch manager, regional
| manager, regional VP, and this sort of verbal & even physical
| intimidation was an every day thing. I was "fortunate" that I
| reported to the branch manager and couldn't be pushed around
| too much by the rest: "Take it up with my boss" became a
| mantra, and no one ever wanted to do that because they'd get
| shat on in some form or another, but that just meant I had
| lots of shouting matches with people who wanted me to do
| things but couldn't actually force me to do it-- and most of
| the time their issue was that someone else had already
| reserved my time and I wasn't available for them. I still had
| to endure a verbal tirade from the branch manager, complete
| with common macho comparisons to a little girl, when I
| decided to take a better position with corporate
| headquarters.
|
| (My whole experience at the branch level left a bad taste in
| my mouth though, so I didn't stay much longer... it didn't
| help that I became part of a team with an incredibly
| competent manager that had already automated away most work,
| leaving mostly boring tasks. Interesting work was on the
| horizon with a new system implementation coming up, which is
| why they kept a full team, but as I said-- bad taste. That
| second manager did however leave an impression, and I've
| tried to be strategically lazy in automating my own work ever
| since)
| matwood wrote:
| > This is literally abuse. It's also not normal.
|
| I agree it's abuse, but it's more normal than people realize
| when there is a lot of money on the line in high stress
| situations. The solution is to remove some of the stress, but
| I'm not sure how easily that can be done when so much money
| is on the line since they naturally go together.
|
| I remember working in a 'startup' in the 90s with people
| routinely yelling at each other. I remember hearing the owner
| stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss (who
| was awesome). Then my boss came in and asked me if I could
| build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we
| needed it in 3 hours so he could present it and hopefully get
| the next check. Let's just say I may have then yelled at the
| computer while coding. Fun times :)
|
| Heck, one of the owners decked the other one in a meeting,
| walked out, and we never saw him again.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss_
|
| This is fine. It's a hostile work environment. But if
| everyone's on the same page, it can, I don't want to say
| work, but not totally suck. Especially if there's good
| money.
|
| Threatening to punch people, smashing things near someone
| to show them who's boss and "getting physical" is
| different. It's abuse. It's illegal. It was somewhat
| commonplace in and before the 80s [1], but it has not been
| common for decades now nor should it be.
|
| [1] I have a theory for this, and it involves leaded
| gasoline.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > [1] I have a theory for this, and it involves leaded
| gasoline.
|
| May just be coincidence but this is the second time in
| the past few weeks I've heard about this, and I'm
| curious. Would you mind going into more detail?
| matwood wrote:
| Basically there's a time period where people were growing
| up with a low level of lead poisoning caused by the
| burning of leaded gasoline.
| ghaff wrote:
| What others have said. It's also a fairly prominent
| theory that it's at least a factor in why crime rates
| have dropped.
| duckfang wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypoth
| esi...
|
| There's a LOT to chew on in there.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Lead causes brain damage specifically in executive
| function and leads to aggression, impulsivity and
| behavioral control issues.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That first yconbinator batch was a rough group.
| smcg wrote:
| Capitalism incentivizes abuse, because abuse is
| profitable.
| pmlnr wrote:
| You haven't lived in the USSR or in the Eastern Bloc,
| have you? So far, there wasn't a way of living invented
| where there were no abused and/or abusers.
| incrudible wrote:
| There's nothing inherently profitable about abuse. Making
| your workers miserable generally makes them less
| productive.
|
| The thing with banks is that they aren't productive in
| the first place. They're scalping off whatever they can
| get, with fierce competition. If you're fresh out of
| college and get hired into these places, you can't just
| walk away without risking your whole career. It's a
| monopsony. That's what _enables_ abuse, human nature
| takes care of the rest.
| mcculley wrote:
| Many industries have stress. It is a natural and obvious
| side effect of competition. Some organizational cultures
| will work to curb asshole behavior, some will not.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Regarding acting calm in stressful situation I encourage
| anyone to watch the last America's Cup races. Even if
| you're not into sailing it's quite amazing. These boats are
| incredibly fast (40kt boat speed out of 10 kt wind) and
| extremely difficult to handle, they have videos and all the
| crew intercoms on live TV and the calm instructions of the
| helmsmen and other crew even when things really go wrong is
| absolutely amazing. Extremely focused without any panic,
| yelling, anger.
| adrianpike wrote:
| There's such a shocking difference between amateur
| sailboat racing and the pro's. Your average weekend
| beercan race worldwide is an order of magnitude slower,
| with loads and danger a fraction of what you see in even
| a fast circuit boat, and everyone's just screaming at
| each other thinking more volume will unwrap the spinnaker
| faster.
|
| It really really hammers home the power of training.
| kelnos wrote:
| About ten years ago I worked at a startup where things
| could get heated at times, though I doubt it's anywhere
| near as bad as what many people here are talking about.
|
| I remember two instances pretty clearly: in one, the CEO
| and head of architecture were having a 1:1. The CEO got a
| bit shouty, and the head of architecture very calmly said,
| "Don't talk to me like that. If you do it again, I'm
| walking out the door and never coming back".
|
| Unfortunately in another incident, with a different
| coworker and his boss, my coworker did get pissed enough at
| his boss' tone that he walked out of the conference room,
| slammed the door, left the building, and never came back.
|
| This is all just toxic garbage. The people in power require
| that their employees "act professionally", but then feel
| free to heap verbal abuse on their people. Not ok in any
| situation. If you're unhappy enough with an employee's
| performance that you feel the need to yell at them, you
| either just have anger management issues and should see a
| therapist, or they're a bad employee, and you should step
| back, calm down, and after you're calm, fire them.
|
| > _Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a
| client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it
| in 3 hours_
|
| This is why I never agree to anything until they tell me
| the deadline :-P
| uncledave wrote:
| Yeah it's not abnormal unfortunately. Anywhere that "alpha
| personalities" are likely to clash is bound to result in
| some physical clashes.
|
| My own experience was getting into a fist fight with
| someone after I told them to fuck off and open a ticket
| because I wasn't going to drop everything and fix his shit
| right there right then.
|
| Fist fights never go how you expect them to which was
| fortunate for me in the end.
|
| We're still friends 20 years later :)
|
| Edit: I'd like to clarify that this is in no way acceptable
| but it is normal to some degree.
| scsilver wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. Its crazy how worked uo we
| get in the crucible of the moment. Do either of you even
| remember what the ticket was fixing?
| sdwr wrote:
| crucible of the moment. I like that phrase!
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| I read it as cubicle at first. Haha
| uncledave wrote:
| Not a clue. Wasn't really important though in the scale
| of things. You only work that out as you get older.
| onli wrote:
| Sounds like it wasn't about the ticket, but about not
| accepting abuse. Likely worth it and the right reaction.
|
| That's what I don't get in these abusive industries: Just
| because someone is higher up in a hierarchy he is not
| strong, he is not untouchable, the police is not on his
| side. Those pencil pusher bullies get in the face of the
| wrong young new intern and they get trashed. Should
| happen all the time. Should end such behaviour very fast.
| But doesn't. Seems like it's baked into recruiting, only
| hiring people that wouldn't even think about defending
| themselves.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| a reminder that the scientist who coined the term 'alpha
| male' to describe wolves abandoned it as useless years
| ago davemech.org/news.html
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/no-such-thing-alpha-
| male-201...
| kelnos wrote:
| It's great to learn this; I hear so many "alpha male"
| references (or a gender-neutral "alpha") when talking
| about human behavior, and it's always rubbed me the wrong
| way. Even if wolves _did_ have this sort of social
| structure, it 's absurd to immediately assume that humans
| work the same way. Good to know it's rubbish even when
| talking about wolves.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Trading is nowhere near the same as IB
| tclancy wrote:
| Isn't it? Michael Lewis' book Liars Poker describes much the
| same in his experience at Lehman Brothers.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Which was tail end of 80s. Normal is supposed to be a
| little nicer now.
| smabie wrote:
| *Solomon
| dctoedt wrote:
| Salomon.
| smt88 wrote:
| My anecdotal experience suggests that it's normal. Bear and
| Lehman were among the worst, but every major firm has/had its
| own flavor of it, and all of them were really bad.
| macNchz wrote:
| Yeah my roommate right after college worked at a major
| investment bank and the "culture" struck me as purely abusive
| hazing...he worked 6-7 days a week and was out of the apartment
| before 8am and home after midnight most days. The working
| environment he described sounded godawful...cruel for the sake
| of being cruel. Assignments delivered at midnight and due at
| 7am. People using the strict hierarchy to make junior people
| suffer. Young people with serious stress-induced health
| problems. Heavy drinking on the occasional night off to dull
| the pain.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| What do you mean "got physical"?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I suspect I already know the answer (they have the best
| lawyers), but these organizations seem like such a juicy target
| especially for a class action lawsuit. Has anyone tried that at
| any point and how are their leg bones?
| hogFeast wrote:
| Kids have died working these jobs. Nothing happened.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| you better hope you get rich enough from the lawsuit to never
| work in the business again, and as a member of a class action
| suit that's not going to happen. I'm sure there are many
| lawyers who would happily target them, but good luck signing
| up enough claimants to certify.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| As the person starting the class action lawsuit, don't you
| get a whole lot more? Moreover, wouldn't these companies be
| terrified of such lawsuits?
| fakedang wrote:
| There are lawsuits once in a while, but you get risked being
| blackballed in the industry eternally.
| rdtwo wrote:
| They typically get silently settled with a gag clause
| julienreszka wrote:
| That's just a huge larp
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk
| about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss,"
| occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say
| stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working._
|
| > _Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to
| accept it._
|
| And that's why it continues: because everyone accepts it and
| allows it. I'm lucky to be in a position where it's not
| difficult for me to find a job (so I can understand that this
| sort of principled stand is not available to everyone), so if a
| boss ever behaved like that to me, I would quit on the spot,
| and tell them, very loudly, in front of the whole floor, why I
| was quitting. Zero question about it.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| That is so beyond insane it's comical.
|
| It's literally something a crazy Will Ferrell character like
| Ashley Schaeffer would do.
|
| It's so hard to believe it even happens but for some reason I
| feel like in Finance these types of insane people are common.
| etempleton wrote:
| Marketing agencies often function the same way and with a
| similar culture.
|
| Many end up damaging their personal relationships and suffering
| mental health issues.
|
| Work is passed down to the lowest person in the org chart. Most
| junior employees burn out in a couple years and are replaced
| with a fresh college grad. Rinse, repeat.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Does the company provide the cocaine or do you have to bring
| your own?
| sjg007 wrote:
| This is not normal or acceptable. It's not even their money so
| if the bullies have this extreme loss aversion they should not
| even be in the job.
|
| Normalizing abuse is also a problem. In graduate school I was
| in a lab where the professor was abusive from day one. In
| retrospect I should've quit that same day!
|
| That being said we just spent 4 years being abused by the
| President.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > but at the end of the day it's just abuse.
|
| to this day, im not sure how i feel about this topic. I saw the
| US Navy undergo a lot of changes in this regard while i was
| serving. historically, various forms of hazing and abuse have
| been a part of the culture and advancement process. this has
| fallen out of favor and policy has either eliminated or taken the
| teeth out of these older practices.
|
| im not convinced it has been a net positive. there are certainly
| some positives, but there are also some negatives. having abuse
| in the pipeline means that the only people that make it through
| are strong enough to withstand abuse and this strength is a
| positive quality. however, good people that might otherwise have
| performed well are sometimes lost.
|
| ive known people that have had psychotic breaks or jumped off the
| ship in the middle of the ocean, but i also knew concentrated
| forces of willpower, warfighting engineers that inspire me to
| this day. would more or less hazing have changed either one of
| those groups?
| dang wrote:
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26522550.)
| smcg wrote:
| Those abused people go home and abuse their spouses and
| families. They kill and rape sex workers and native citizens
| oversees. Just because the externalities fell on people you
| don't care about doesn't make it okay.
| smt88 wrote:
| So you want the Navy to filter out people who either aren't
| abusive or can't take abuse?
|
| During the pandemic, my friends in medicine saw people go
| through absolutely grueling months of long hours, dangerous
| conditions, and sometimes isolation from their families. They
| did it because lots of people are strong when they have a
| reason to be and believe in what they're doing. No one hazed
| those people.
|
| Your idea of strength is sad, narrow, misinformed, and honestly
| something I thought we had left behind in the last century. I
| am afraid for the mental health of our military.
| leokennis wrote:
| Sorry, but military abuse is literally what led to atrocities
| committed by the German and Japanese armies. Or atrocities
| committed by child soldiers:
|
| - The lowest ranks have no power, get little sleep, little
| comforts and get bullied
|
| - The people who withstand this for long enough, get a
| promotion and het a little more power and are incentivized to
| use this power to now bully their new subordinates
|
| - This way, they become "part of the system" as well, so they
| are less likely to change that system
|
| - Repeat ad infinitum through all the ranks
|
| So what you're building here is a pyramid scheme of bullies,
| who are all guilty enough to have no moral standing to stop the
| bullying and who at the same time are all bullied enough to
| want to make promotions so they might be bullied less.
|
| Results: hush hush culture, blind obedience, no checks and
| balances on excessive behavior, larger percentage of people who
| "make it" will have psychopathic tendencies.
|
| Give these people guns, bayonets and power and within no time
| they're stabbing Jews for fun in Auschwitz.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Another thought I had...
|
| There are plenty of cases where brutal militaries who
| dehumanized people have worked out great for the parent
| countries. Early Americans abused and abused and exterminated
| native Americans and is now a super power. Mao's armies used
| similar tactics to take China and is also a super power.
| Britain build a global empire of oppression and abuse.
| Although their empire is gone, they still reap the benefits
| of their colonial oppression and atrocities today.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You point out some very real consequences, but that does not
| negate the possible advantages. Weighing the net effect
| really depends on your organizational objectives.
|
| For example, I know people who are damaged from growing up in
| incredibly hard abusive environments. They Have shot people
| and still occasionally beat people bloody due to anger
| issues. If I had to choose someone to be in a life or death
| combat situation alongside, I would easily choose them over
| my less "damaged" friends.
|
| In a similar vein, the Japanese were also known to be
| remarkably ferocious and obedidiant fighters and it is
| unclear if Japan would have done better in WWII if they had a
| less abusive military.
|
| It is entirely possible that the optimal mental state of a
| soldier is not the same as a healthy and productive member of
| society.
| leokennis wrote:
| Sure, there might be advantages like you describe. But then
| you're describing damaging people for life, only to extract
| 5-10 years of possibly more effective military service out
| of them.
|
| If that is truly a decision you want to take as a
| country/military, it says a lot about the kind of society
| you're part of.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It certainly does say something about the society.
| Currently and historically there are many societies
| willing to damage or kill their citizens to further
| greater goals, such as defending themselves from being
| conquered or conquering others.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Getting two cities vaporized followed by unconditional
| surrender and your enemy rewriting your entire governing
| structure does not seem like a successful military outcome.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I never said it was
| leokennis wrote:
| While you indeed never said that, it is true that the
| Japanese military brought out a special kind of longing
| for harsh revenge in the US army, likely caused by their
| brutal military tactics.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This is true. I have never heard that revenge had an
| impact on the decision making for nuclear bombing, so I
| missed the connection you were making
| leokennis wrote:
| The bombing was not revenge per se, but the Japanese
| never surrendered even when outnumbered 20 to 1. Even
| worse, the last Japanese standing would probably blow
| himself up with a grenade to take out a few Americans
| with him.
|
| In this light, the Japanese basically "forced" the US to
| literally go with the Nuclear option: using such
| outrageous force on an already weakened enemy, just to
| get them to surrender.
| __jem wrote:
| > having abuse in the pipeline means that the only people that
| make it through are strong enough to withstand abuse and this
| strength is a positive quality
|
| Having an assembly line process to create abusers isn't a
| positive. After they're done abusing the cadets, these men go
| home and beat their wives and children.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Not to mention their captive "non-military combatants".
| ausbah wrote:
| totally ignoring how even if you look fine on the outside,
| abuse still causes mental trauma
|
| if you want a force of people that are mentally resilient, make
| the job tough. you don't need to needlessly harass workers
| because it gives the appearance of "strength"
| bdauvergne wrote:
| What about an organization that would build such willpower into
| people instead of just selecting those which already have it ?
| Maybe it's possible, and I think it would economize more of the
| available human resource. A bit like lean management applied to
| people. It seems to me that self confidence and willpower is a
| direct result of social confidence. If you know the group is
| behind you it's simpler to become strong, maybe.
| EliRivers wrote:
| If an organisation is serious about building mental fortitude,
| one of the worst (and ineffective to the point of being
| counter-productive) ways to do that is to let bullies and weak-
| willed followers freestyle brutalise people.
|
| It doesn't make people stronger. It doesn't create mental
| fortitude. It just selects for people who will enjoy or put up
| with that kind of bullshit.
|
| Nobody teaches marksmanship by giving untrained recruits a big
| box of ammo and seeing who hits the target. Nobody teaches
| fieldcraft by just releasing untrained people without equipment
| into the woods and seeing which of them don't starve or die of
| exposure. Why the hell would anyone try to instill mental
| fortitude (which is so vitally important in times of stress)
| through such an incompetent, cack-handed and damaging way? They
| wouldn't. They're just looking for an excuse to look the other
| way.
| kebman wrote:
| Having done my duty for the Norwegian army, I'd say there is
| some justification for having a level of "abuse" in the
| military, due to the stressful combat you may have to survive
| one day. After all, in times of war, the reward for
| underperformance is death. Even so, that is no excuse for
| bullying or extortion. And to me this story sounds much more
| like the latter.
|
| Being hired by an office is not going to war, no matter how you
| frame it. And pouring so much work on subordinates that they
| buckle or quit, isn't really effective either, from more
| standpoints than one, and especially if the job cannot
| reasonably be optimized any further. If so this practise
| reveals a pretty horrid view on your fellow human beings as
| disposable. While a certain amount of stress can be a good
| motivator, in the end it just wears you out. Makes me curious,
| though. If you work at Goldman Sachs, is the pay so bad that
| you cannot afford an assistant? Or are the bosses there really
| so stingy and morally empty that they'd rather wear people out,
| than foster a productive environment? When their practise is so
| short term, it makes me wonder about the rest of their
| business.
| mythrwy wrote:
| "it makes me wonder about the rest of their business"
|
| Maybe the rest of the business is basically raping and
| pillaging society at large and the abuse is a form of
| training as in your military example?
| chrisgd wrote:
| If you said this about fraternities, everyone would ridicule
| you for hours. I don't think the technological progression of
| the navy would have been hindered if we had had a nicer working
| environment.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Fraternities are basically lord of the flies right?
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| What are you basing that on?
|
| In Lord of the Flies, the kids burn down an island and kill
| the fat kid by dropping a boulder on his head.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Allegory.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense as a response. Lord of the
| Flies is an allegory for anarchy and violence driving a
| group in a desperate situation.
|
| I asked what you are basing your comparison of the book
| to fraternities on and you told me a literary device used
| by the book instead.
| jorts wrote:
| Not even close
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There are other factors besides technological progression to
| be considered. If you want "workers" who are willing to
| brutally kill others and sacrifice their lives without
| questioning their orders, the question becomes less clear.
|
| IT is entirely possible that the optimal mental state of a
| soldier is not the same as a healthy and productive member of
| society.
| chrisgd wrote:
| Every actual war that called up those that weren't ready
| and trained proves this point wrong
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't see how unless you think untrained draftees
| performed as good or better.
| genedan wrote:
| One way to get more out of people is well, to pay more. Another
| way is to treat them better. Yet another way is to abuse them,
| but I would think that would only work for people who don't
| really have any other options in life, and you do run into the
| problem of turnover when people quit, so you pay for it anyway,
| although I'm not sure how the military works - can you just
| quit and go work as a civilian? I can immediately find another
| job that pays at least as much as my current job if my boss
| were to start abusing me, for example. If you can't quit the
| military then it does start making sense to me. The people who
| stay justify their life choices by characterizing the people
| who leave as being weak, but those people simply had better
| options.
|
| I don't think building a stressful/abusive culture is necessary
| to get the best out of people. Great people have been produced
| without such structures, although some people can be coerced
| into greatness, so it is a way, but not something I'd want to
| deal with nor is that the kind of culture I would want to build
| if I were in charge.
| ak39 wrote:
| Yeah, by all means, make you employees put in those extra hours,
| but please pay them additionally for their extra hours fairly.
| The moral hazard (for abuse) is squarely in the employer's camp
| if the financial consequence of allowing a culture of 80-100
| hours per week does not dent the payroll budget.
| totalZero wrote:
| This is a good point. But even if you set policies in place,
| those people who complain will eventually be let go and get
| blackballed by the rest of the industry.
|
| In theory the end-of-year bonus is supposed to reward you for
| your effort. For analysts, that bonus is not entirely
| discretionary; there are generally three or four buckets,
| selected in coordination with HR, all of them meager by the
| industry's standards.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Or they (Goldman) could make less profit and allow for its
| employees to have reasonable lives. Anything over 40 hours just
| isn't needed unless one is living in poverty. Once one gets out
| of poverty, why work so much?
| payamb wrote:
| Direct link to the Goldman Sachs employee's survey
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INo...
| leroy_masochist wrote:
| Former Goldman IBD associate here. Don't have any major insights
| to add to the discussion, but a few observations:
|
| - I'm not sure what to make of the N=13. Maybe it means that the
| survey was circulated within a small, trusted group out of
| discretion; maybe it means that this represents the opinions of
| the 13 most pissed off analysts currently working in IBD.
|
| - Analyst revolts at Goldman have been happening for decades.
| Having worked at GS at a time when Solomon was co-head of IBD and
| there was a fair amount of analyst grumbling, my strong hunch is
| that he views this situation as, "here we go again".
|
| - Investment banking is going to be an interesting space to watch
| as AI improves. The singularly important skillset of an
| investment banking analyst lies in taking an excel spreadsheet
| that contains a company's filed financial statements and then 1)
| building an integrated three-statement financial model with five
| years of forecasts and valuation outputs and 2) reading the
| company's recent financial filings and any pertinent news, then
| making adjustments to the figures contained in the filings in
| order to calculate "true" pro forma historical financial
| performance upon which the projections are based. I'm no AI
| expert, but if that's not already doable by AI, we've got to be
| pretty close, right? My hunch is that we will soon see small
| groups of entrepreneurial managing directors working with small
| groups of engineers to build a platform that offers deliverable-
| intensive investment banking client service without
| analyst/associate headcount.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| I worked as a dev at GS - it's a much smaller bank than its
| competitors (40k vs 204k at Citi, for example) but completes the
| same amount of work.
|
| This means that every employee is expected to do the job of
| multiple people, and is expected to manage their time
| appropriately to be able to handle this. For me, I joked about
| working two shifts, and starting 'second shift' after the trading
| day ended and I handed off monitoring to Asia. I'd grab dinner
| and then start working on my coding assignments.
|
| At the end of my tenure, it wasn't uncommon for me to work 15
| hours a day and be on call 24/7.
|
| Now, this isn't healthy by a long shot, but it is what's
| expected. You get used to it and you allocate your time to make
| sure you don't go crazy.
|
| When I hear about these kids going through the ringer and working
| these 100 hour weeks, I'm almost incredulous because: a) this is
| the amount you're going to be expected to work in the future, but
| you need to figure out how to manage it and b) you've heard the
| stories, what did you think was going to happen ?
|
| I have sympathy because it's hard, and I've been there, but
| that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's
| awesome. It's pretty inspiring to figure out what you're capable
| of under dire circumstances, you develop great skills quickly,
| and after GS everything else has the volume turned down.
|
| Also, you can tap out and there's no shame in that.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Do you still consider it a good salary once you factor in all
| the extra hours and "health concerns" [1]?
|
| [1]: I imagine super high caffeine/stimulant consumption,
| sustained lack of sleep, high blood pressure, inconsistent
| diet, less time to go to the gym, lack of social opportunities
| outside of work, etc.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that 's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it,
| it's awesome_
|
| It's also a clear signal to everyone later in your career that
| you can handle that sort of throughput and not fuzz out.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I highly doubt that. Those people are unmarried (probably not
| even dating), have very few friends outside of work, and
| definitely not any kids. That's literally the only time in
| their life they can work like that without "fuzzing out"
|
| Later in life priorities change for good reasons.
| luckylion wrote:
| Priorities change, but you can influence those by paying
| more.
|
| The ability to work 70+ hours week after week after week
| and keeping the quality reasonably high, that doesn't
| change as much. It's also something you can't convince
| people to be able to by offering more money.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I don't think people working like that in their 20s is a
| prediction of how they'll work in their 40s.
|
| We have some kind of superpower in our 20s. You can work
| like dogs all day and night and still be productive in
| the morning.
|
| Biologically speaking it's probably because those are
| prime child rearing years and that effort is needed to
| raise children. Instead Goldman Sachs gets those years.
| Hopefully it was worth it to all in the grind.
| luckylion wrote:
| I've always found that working significantly more than
| average is a mental thing more than a physical thing. It
| can become a bit of a habit, not easy to get into, but
| once you're in the rhythm, "it just works".
|
| The signal is probably not so much the raw energy level,
| but the discipline to focus that energy on a task. If you
| choose to work that hard at 20 instead of spending half
| your day hanging out with friends, that might be a good
| signal for how hard you'll work when you're 40. It is in
| my personal experience, but that doesn't say much.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it's probably because those are prime child rearing
| years and that effort is needed to raise children.
| Instead Goldman Sachs gets those years._
|
| Few people are responsibly having kids in their early
| twenties. Goldman got the time, but their alumni got the
| cash and cachet.
|
| Not defending the practices in the complaint. 90+ hours
| is excessive. I turned down that lifestyle and think I've
| done decently well for myself. But being dismissive about
| the power, wealth and material comforts that work opens
| one up to is ignoring a strong signalling mechanism in
| our society.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Later in life priorities change for good reasons_
|
| Everyone gets that. They left for a reason. But someone who
| can stay afloat at 70+ hours a week will tend to, at the
| very least, not fuck up with 40 or fifty. And having
| someone who will reliably not fuck up is worth paying up
| for in most roles.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| What do devs even do at GS?
|
| I mean banks are not an example of technological
| innovators; if all you're doing is some HTML changes like
| a squirrel running in a wheel 80 hours a day you will not
| be able to handle 40 hours a day in a messy startup
| environment where devs need to constantly reconcile
| business logic with changing environment.
|
| Banks don't require "smart" work; even less so for low-
| level analysts.
| inv13 wrote:
| My very TLDR summary: The older people at the firm had the same
| experience coming into this business. So they expect every new
| comer to behave the same. Its that simple. Doctors do that with
| residents which I think is more concerning. I read about it in a
| book called why we sleep[1] about sleep. [1] -
| https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
| jpz wrote:
| I've worked all through many London investment banks, mainly
| front office tech, I have rarely seen traders working weekends,
| and I was not compelled to work many hours greatly exceeding
| 40-ish.
|
| I don't know what these jobs are that they are talking about that
| are greater than 60 hours. I've seen a little of it maybe in the
| mergers and acquisitions side of things.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _have rarely seen traders working weekends_
|
| Traders don't work these hours. Bankers do.
|
| As the old joke goes, a bank trusts young bankers with
| PowerPoint, young traders with its balance sheet. A sleepy
| trader could lose the bank millions. A sleepy analyst might, at
| worst, typo a spreadsheet that gets reviewed by an associate.
| Banks are incentivized to avoid sleepless traders in a way they
| aren't with analysts. Also, exchanges shut down at night--
| nobody is gaining an edge by staying up until 3AM.
| (Counterfactual: FX.)
|
| (Disclaimer: I chose trading over banking. Mostly because the
| people were more fun. But being able to go home at 6PM on
| Friday, having put in your 60 hours, and turn off until 6AM on
| Monday was no small matter, either.)
| MereInterest wrote:
| > But being able to go home at 6PM on Friday, having put in
| your 60 hours
|
| I know you are phrasing this as a better sign, but even here,
| I would see 60 hours/week as extreme overwork. I started
| tracking my hours to get a sense for how much I work in a
| typical week, and found that both my quality of output and my
| emotional state are impacted greatly by the number of hours.
| At 40-50 hours/week, everything is pretty reasonable. I can
| do 50-65 hours/week in short bursts, but not over a prolonged
| period. 80 hour weeks are barely possible, and will leave me
| absolutely shot at the end of the week, and the following
| week will be spent recovering from the overwork.
|
| (Side note, my personal tracking has only gone down to a
| minimum of 40 hours/week, but it would be interesting to
| track productivity with a shorter work day/week as well.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| To each their own. I'm now in a role where my workload
| oscillates between 30 and 60-something hours a week. I love
| it, and I like the bursts, though there is recovery.
|
| After a year or two, in trading, that sixty goes down to
| 50. After some more time it goes down to 40 or so. That
| said, those hours are _work_. They are intense and
| stressful and horrible for one's nerves and health.
|
| I left trading after my boss, a trim middle-aged man (I
| assumed) with extensive balding and some cardiac history,
| celebrated his thirty-second birthday.
| maest wrote:
| British work culture is more relaxed than the very intense US
| approach.
|
| Also, traders work very little outside of market hours. It's
| usually IB analysts that burn through weekends and late nights
| when working on deals.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > An internal survey among 13 employees showed they averaged 95
| hours of work a week and slept five hours a night.
|
| I'm always curious about this, about people who say they
| routinely sleep < 6 hours a night. Now, I know there are some
| very small percentage of people who, genetically, need very
| little sleep, but for the vast majority of humans, I don't think
| this is really physically possible.
|
| I can certainly pull an all nighter once in a blue moon, or go
| two nights on a couple hours of sleep. But honestly, I feel like
| total shit after a single night with less than 6 hours of sleep,
| and if I do this more than a night or two in a row I _always_ get
| sick and I can barely think straight. I honestly think I would
| die or at the very least end up in the hospital if I was
| continually on 5 hours of sleep a night.
|
| I know I need more sleep than most people (I'm fine on 8 hours
| but my "natural" preference, e.g. with no alarm clock, is 9), but
| I always wonder about people who say they go months on 5 hours of
| sleep a night. I always think they're either superhuman or
| exaggerating their sleep loss.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| These people aren't genetic freaks, it's just a simple
| combination of:
|
| 1) being young & healthy
|
| 2) lots of coffee (and usually adderall too)
|
| 3) sleeping in heavily on the weekends
|
| Almost everyone will quickly burn out if they're missing any of
| these criteria. It's not healthy, but it's doable.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, and also a heavy impact on your health regardless of
| those things.
| kelnos wrote:
| For most of my 20s I couldn't sleep more than about 5 hours at
| a time. I would go to bed, and like clockwork, wake up roughly
| 5 hours after falling asleep. I did not feel fully rested, and
| was not happy with that state of affairs, but I could lie in
| bed for another 3 hours but be entirely unable to fall asleep
| again. I would feel ok after getting up; not particularly well-
| rested, but not lethargic either.
|
| Sometime in my 30s _something_ changed, and I can sleep longer
| now (though I do still often wake up in the middle of the
| night, but am usually able to fall asleep again). Anytime I try
| to intentionally get by on a small amount of sleep, most of the
| next day is awful. 6.5 - 7.5 hours is my norm these days, and a
| solid 8 hours of sleep only comes if it 's after a day of
| unusually very heavy physical exertion, or after having barely
| slept the night before.
|
| As a sibling mentioned, age is definitely a factor. I could do
| several all-nighters in a row in college and feel mostly fine,
| but if I try to even do a single all-nighter now, I definitely
| won't make it through the next day, and might not even make it
| through the first night.
|
| On the flip side, I never did the caffeine thing. I don't drink
| coffee (never liked the taste) or soda (stopped drinking it in
| college), and the most caffeine I get is from a low-caffeine
| tea, though I prefer caffeine-free teas.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| It's also used as a kind of humble brag. I just read an example
| today in the Journal.
|
| The subject of the piece Austin Russell seems really really
| impressive and SO young. But the advice from one of his mentors
| Nick Woodman stuck out to me.
|
| "To be your best self, you have to take care of yourself,'' he
| urged the Luminar CEO. As a result, Mr. Russell shortened his
| average workweek to 80 hours from 120. "Burnout can be real,''
| he says. "It's all about finding the right balance.''
|
| It's great advice, but those numbers just seem unbelievable to
| me.
|
| Maybe I'm just projecting my personal experience!
|
| But to me it comes off as kind of the common Japanese trope of
| going into the office just to brag that you're "working" insane
| hours.
|
| Those numbers are just insane to me and I have a hard time
| believing A it's physically possible, B you're actually being
| productive to the point it's worth doing 120 hours (literally
| only 6 hours of potential sleep almost every other minute
| working) versus 'taking it easy' (lol) at 80, which at least
| seems humanly possible with a lot of sacrifice.
|
| http://archive.is/1e7Zs
| amscanne wrote:
| These numbers are always made up. Sometimes you'll even see
| claims that people work more than ~170 hours a week (there
| aren't that many hours in a week).
|
| Dissecting the claims can make for a fun thought experiment,
| e.g. in this case 120 hours translates to 17h15m each day and
| Austin says:
|
| > What time does your alarm go off on weekdays? Around 8 a.m.
| Usually up until 2 a.m. night before.
|
| That's ~6 hours. Austin now has ~15 minutes every single day
| to do everything else in life (bathing, eating, getting
| dressed, etc.).
|
| > How do you relax? I enjoy going for a drive through the
| mountains or along the coast on weekends.
|
| Uh-oh. Austin has only ~1h45m each _week_ for _everything_
| else outside of work in his life. Is this drive an hour? He
| now has only _six minutes_ each day to do everything which is
| "not work".
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Austin just thinks if they're having a two-hour lunch while
| being immediately available for a call as working hours.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yeah, even 80 hours is nuts to me. I've done 80 before, for
| extended periods, and I was not happy or healthy throughout.
| Consider 80 hours a week is still more than 13 hours a day,
| assuming you work 6 days a week instead of 5. I guess some
| people are into that, but that kind of life does not appeal
| to me at all.
| blowfish721 wrote:
| I used to need 8-9 hours of sleep to even function. Two kids
| later (one almost three and one three months old) I go to bed
| between 1-2am and get woken up between 5-7am now. After a while
| you sort of adapt to it but the mind is nowhere near as sharp
| as it used to be. I would never do that to myself working for
| someone else however I should add.
| smu wrote:
| I'm in the same boat.
|
| Can't wait until the nights stabilise in a couple of months
| and I get my mind and my good mood back (those are the main
| symptoms for me).
| cycomanic wrote:
| Couple of months? You're in for a rude awakening (quite
| literally). There's some studies that parents don't get
| normal sleep cycles until the last child turns 6.
|
| Mine are 4 and 6 now and while it got better, my sleep is
| still not back to normal. It seems also that the two have
| some silent agreement to prevent their parents sleep, for
| example when the younger one got old enough that she would
| regularly sleep through most of the night, the older one
| started waking up at around 2-4 with nightmares. Still
| wouldn't change a thing though, it's all worth it!
| secabeen wrote:
| > I always think they're either superhuman or exaggerating
| their sleep loss.
|
| I think stimulants also play a factor, legal or otherwise.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I always wondered why it would make sense to let a single person
| work > 80h? Are these task they are doing soo sequential in
| nature, that its not possible to split them to two persons with
| 40h (and half the pay)?
|
| Edit: Especially keeping in mind that half the pay probably nets
| the 40h person much more than half the salary due to tax
| progrssion
| hikingsimulator wrote:
| The current way work is done in Mergers & Acquisitions for
| instance is that you are expected to be on-site for a long time
| because you never know when a new project/opportunity must be
| answered. So you may effectively be at work for 80-100h but it
| doesn't mean you are consistently working.
|
| The second reason is that work is siloed. If you and your team
| takes on an opportunity, for instance creating a buy-side
| valuation or a sell-side offer, you and your team only will
| work on it.
|
| It has ties with how teams are split by specialities and know-
| hows, but also with how your end-of-year bonus is calculated.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > because you never know when a new project/opportunity must
| be answered
|
| Is there any reason this answer cannot wait until 9am the
| next morning?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Presumably because if you don't answer, another firm will.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Possibly, or maybe sociopaths in firm A can use the
| threat of a potential capture by firm B as an excuse to
| pulverize juniors and consume their souls for personal
| gratification?
| gregw2 wrote:
| I never worked at Goldman or had close friends there, but I
| have spent a modest amount of time in circles where people went
| to or came from Goldman.
|
| Possibilities:
|
| * Yes, it's sequential. It's hard to partition the task of
| creating a model of some analysis in a spreadsheet to multiple
| parties. Amdahl's law affects humans too.
|
| * Context. Transferring context -- implicit knowledge -- from a
| client to partner to a junior associates is hard. Transferring
| it to two junior associates is harder. The more skilled or more
| domain knowledge someone gets, the harder the skill/KT transfer
| gets.
|
| * Coordination. Partitioning a task to two associates
| coherently, getting both to equally understand it, execute on
| it, having them communicate effectively with each other on it,
| getting results back that are coherent and consistent, is all a
| burden you don't have if you have one person working longer.
| Brooks's law basically.
|
| * Competitive culture. Goldman recruits from the most
| competitive academic institutions and thus gets people who are
| very bright and work very hard and have spent years competing
| with others and harnessing those two capabilities when
| competing with each other or the standard of pleasing someone
| (professor, client, etc). Even without management pushing, in
| an environment competing as junior associates, they will
| continue to use both of those strengths to their utmost in an
| attempt to dominate (or keep their head above water).
|
| * Deadlines - Tight deadlines make all the above problems
| worse. The sooner the deadline the harder to partition the
| problem and the easier to just "work more hours"
|
| Meta-dynamics:
|
| * Firm competitive advantage/moat - If a firm can hire the very
| brightest people who also work the hardest, they can promise
| the best results on the tightest deadline. By promising a tight
| deadline of X quality, they can then offer something their
| competitors don't/can't. If they sacrifice either of those
| hiring approaches, they are subject to significant competitive
| pressures. Thus a firm in Goldman's position is led for
| competitive reasons to push for shortest deadlines possible
| which leads to the above effects.
|
| * Normally salaries would limit the amount of abuse people
| would take but there is extra capital for pay available in the
| financial sector in part because the monetary focus and
| measurements and payoffs can be so clear and direct (for
| management). The higher pay allows associates to more quickly
| pay off college loans and accumulate capital. Ironically, this
| in turn is partially used by elite universities to justify
| charging more tuition which then requires a certain set of
| poeople in those universities to need to go work in a place
| like Goldman to more quickly recoup their educational
| investment ... a vicious cycle/positive-feedback-loop.
|
| I'm sure there are more and better explanations, but that's
| what I see...
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Awesome explanation! For a complete outsider (like me) it is
| very hard to understand the value creation process in these
| kinds of jobs. The argument of the tightest deadline makes
| most sense to me, as it also explains the comparatively large
| idle times that one hears about occasionally ("face time")
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| 40hours/week looks already excessive to me. Perhaps for Goldman
| Sachs 80hours/week looks fine.
| doovd wrote:
| 40 hours is excessive? From a philosophical standpoint, yes,
| but from the way things are in the world that's totally
| normal lol
| qaq wrote:
| If you remove excessive meetings and other unproductive
| crap I'd be surprised if median meaningful work hours were
| above 20h for Soft. Eng.
| dbattaglia wrote:
| Totally agree, although for myself personally the other
| piece that chews up my time is customer support. In
| previous jobs with standard SaaS applications the support
| load was there but it was easy enough to just file a bug
| report in the backlog. Now I'm building managed managed
| infrastructure and there's so much that can go wrong that
| it's hard to not get sucked in, especially for more
| senior and tenured folks.
|
| 20 hours a week of meetings, OTOH, is brutal amd I don't
| miss it. These days I'm much closer to about 5/week
| average.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Would they accept half the pay?
| mraza007 wrote:
| Just out curiousity what does a day in a life of investment
| banker looks like at work
|
| And what kind of work they do that requires them to work more
| than 80hrs of weeks
| lai-yin wrote:
| I majored in Finance over 10 years ago and this was common
| knowledge then. A recruiter even warned us about it. Graduates
| still applied for the program. It's just bankers larping as Navy
| SEALs in BUD/S training.
| Jonnax wrote:
| What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to
| work 80 hour weeks?
|
| Also is the salary high? Or is it one of those jobs where juniors
| employees have low salaries with the carrot of promotion dangled
| in front of them?
|
| These companies are also not cash strapped. If I was leading a
| team, I'd prefer two employees working a normal set of hours
| versus a single employee working themselves to the bone.
| [deleted]
| oflanac52 wrote:
| According to a website "efinancialcareers" or something, I
| think first could be getting PS90k, and that before the bonus.
| And yes that is very IMO but in their career trajectory it
| seems to be small.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| For someone in their early 20s in the UK, that is a massive
| salary
| kowlo wrote:
| For someone of any age, that is a massive salary. Average
| salary in UK is PS36k
| noir_lord wrote:
| And even that average paints a strange picture (it's
| distorted by high earners).
|
| Median household income is PS29.9K (and some households
| have two or more earners).
|
| Full time minimum wage is ~PS15K a year.
|
| I look over the pond and see what people with my level of
| experience are earning and think "damn, I'm under paid"
| then I look at at the median household income and think
| damn I'm way over paid.
| kowlo wrote:
| I agree. If someone tells me they're on PS36k, I think
| they're on a decent salary in the UK.
| gambiting wrote:
| Literally on another thread someone(American) was trying
| to tell me that if you don't make at least $150k/year as
| a dev you should immediately quit and find another job. I
| was just like.....are you familiar with the pay levels in
| the UK lol? It's incredibly hard to cross the PS100k/year
| barrier as a dev, with some very rare exceptions, nearly
| all of them in the financial industry and down in
| London(and yes, then you're paying PS3k/month for a flat,
| so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think
| it is).
| beforeolives wrote:
| Yes. Some things that are taken for granted in the US
| that I haven't seen in the UK:
|
| - Being in high demand, especially after your first job
| in the industry. Nope, every job search is as difficult
| as the first one and there are no companies competing to
| have me on.
|
| - Being able to get a FAANG job as long as you're great
| at algorithm problems. Nope, those companies have limited
| presence in the UK, their salaries aren't nearly as good
| as in the US, it's tough to get an interview and there
| are no UK equivalents to them. So even if I'm the best at
| whiteboard problems, that makes no difference to my
| career.
|
| - High salaries, both right out of university and later
| in one's career. Or tech salaries being much higher than
| other industries. In the UK tech is just another group of
| okay-ish white-collar jobs.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Working for a company that also has offices in UK and
| with team mates in London, the problem is that UK is
| expensive versus countries relatively close (Eastern
| Europe) and London is very expensive versus Warsaw, for
| example, so the demand is not high because companies
| moved a lot of business out of UK and Western Europe due
| to cost. In a global world where India and China are
| cheaper and business can move where they are treated best
| (taxes and cost of labor), UK is in a very bad spot.
| Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Ljubljana are close enough
| and cheap enough to be preferred by companies instead of
| London.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not taken for granted in "the US" either except for
| maybe a tiny slice of people in a tiny slice of industry.
| The number of people who can quit their job on Monday and
| have their choice of six-figure offers by Friday--as some
| seem to think any developer who is half-trying can do--is
| miniscule.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There is a lot of mythology on HN that everyone writing
| software is making $300K TC, has $2M in their retirement
| account, drives a brand new Porsche, and has a supermodel
| partner. This is an outlier group of high-level engineers
| at an outlier set of top companies, in an outlier set of
| high cost of living locales.
| [deleted]
| jcadam wrote:
| When I was younger I briefly flirted with the notion (and
| eventually decided against) of working abroad as a dev
| and came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software
| engineering salaries in the developed world. For an
| American, finding a low COL area to settle in and working
| remotely seems like the winning play.
| javcasas wrote:
| > came to the conclusion the UK has the worst software
| engineering salaries in the developed world
|
| You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in
| latin america than I got offered while trying to work in
| Spain
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I don't think the salaries here in Spain are anything to
| write home about compared to other developed countries,
| but they've gotten significantly better over the years.
|
| I consistently see JavaScript SEng roles at startups and
| large companies going for 40-60k.
|
| The big cities are quite expensive, and you're not going
| to buy a mansion with that kind of money but it's still
| pretty good, especially compared to the national median.
| jcadam wrote:
| I was stationed in Germany while in the Army and always
| wondered how Europeans manage to make ends meet. Compared
| to the US, prices are higher (since adopting the Euro, at
| least), taxes are higher, but salaries are lower.
|
| US troops are given a cost of living allowance (COLA)
| while stationed in Germany. It is (or was while I was
| there) tied to the USD/Euro exchange rate. Even so, we
| always tried to avoid shopping "on the local economy" and
| stick to base facilities for groceries and such as much
| as possible.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Two factors, I think:
|
| - Social security is far better. You of course need to
| save for bad times, but getting sick will cost you
| practically nothing (you're always insured and the
| insurance will pay you 2/3rds of your wage) and when
| loosing your job (which is already far harder than in the
| US) you'll be covered quite good for 18 months and fall
| back to basic social support after that
|
| - Generally a bit lower standard of living. It's not bad,
| of course, but 100k$+ cars, for example, are usually only
| leased via work, and 2k$+ laptops are a rather large
| expense to many people.
| OJFord wrote:
| > in London(and yes, then you're paying PS3k/month for a
| flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people
| think it is).
|
| A PS3k/month flat is certainly lavish. Or at least sized
| for two incomes.
|
| (And even then, probably a nice a place in zone 1. Did
| that figure come from actually looking for places, or
| just exaggeration to make a point? I mean, of course you
| can spend that much and far more, but it's by no means
| the entry point is all I'm saying.)
| switch007 wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with the UK, you can find cheaper
| but you get exactly what you pay for. And you'll be
| commuting. And the tube is not fun.
|
| Our standard of housing is extremely low here. And small.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| 3 years ago I rented a flat in zone 1 for PS1300/month,
| 10minute cycle to bank. It was small (50m2) but nice
| gambiting wrote:
| No, I have friends living in London. Yes the prices drop
| down quickly further out, but if you're doing 14 hour
| days you don't want to commute for an hour each way.
|
| I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much
| opposite Facebook's office, paid PS2800/month for a 1-bed
| studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the
| City, he pays dead on PS3000/month for a flat but he's 2
| minutes away from the office and pays for that
| convenience. And yes, I know someone who lives in Ealing,
| but a 2-bed flat(not a house) is still PS1900/month, and
| the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.
| sweeneyrod wrote:
| You absolutely can find a 1-bed in super-central London
| for well under PS2000/month, e.g. it took 2 minutes
| searching to find this one https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-
| rent/details/57988484/?search_id...
|
| But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location
| for around PS2000/month (I live in one). Suggestions that
| an analyst at GS or an E3 at FB earning 70-100k isn't
| actually that well off because rents are high are silly,
| if they're struggling how is someone on a more normal
| grad salary of 35k supposed to be coping?
| [deleted]
| gambiting wrote:
| That's not what I'm suggesting at all :-) I just know
| some people who were on 50k in the North East and moved
| down to London to be on 80k - well, after the increase in
| costs it was pretty much a wash, the biggest upside is
| living in London, but also the biggest downside is living
| in London. But if you can swing 100k salary in London
| then yes, you're very well off regardless.
| winterismute wrote:
| I live in London as well and what you are depicting is
| more or less correct but a bit distorted in the general
| view imho: for example, you can live near the West
| Hampstead area and be in the city (city thameslink or
| farringdon thameslink stations) in 20 mins, however a
| good flat with one bedroom would cost you 1400 (even less
| after covid) and you would be in a quiet street next to
| lively areas, well connected and with a lot of green
| spaces at reach. And this is only an example. The 2.6-3k
| flats in the "center" are fundamentally "laziness-scams"
| for people who don't want or don't like to search for
| alternatives and are ok with living next to no real green
| spaces and with the constant background noises of cranes
| and construction works; the 3k/mo "luxury flat" costs
| little more than 2k, plus 90? per month of communiting in
| a nice area in zone 2, you don't need to go to ealing.
| richardknop wrote:
| You don't need 3k per month that is certainly lavish and
| I would expect that to be supported by 2 incomes so a
| couple living together and splitting rent and bills
| 50/50. If you are living alone you should aim for about
| half of that in central London.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Just for info, I know 2 people in London that make more
| than PS100k/year and they are both contractors; they
| reached around PS60k/year at max as employees before
| changing to contractors. One works for the government
| doing mostly nothing (not kidding, he explained what he
| did in his first 6 months - probably worked 30-40 hours
| in total), one works from London for some companies
| abroad. If you want to get 100k as an employee it's very
| tough or closes to impossible, but it is doable if you
| switch.
| 0xy wrote:
| No it's not, it's barely above minimum wage when you
| consider hours worked. Not to mention the job dangers
| (stress/burnout/health impacts).
| beojan wrote:
| It would be more than PS10 per hour even if you worked
| 168 hours a week.
| beforeolives wrote:
| Your calculation is way off. The living wage in London
| (not minimum for the UK) is PS10.85 per hour. That's
| PS45136 at 80 hours a week (the cap they're asking for in
| the article) and PS53599 at 95 hours a week (which they
| are supposedly averaging now). PS90k is a long way to go
| from there.
| notahacker wrote:
| Glassdoor puts Goldman's junior analyst basic salary at
| just over PS50k though, which actually is below minimum
| wage at the hours quoted in this article...
| sweeneyrod wrote:
| "analyst" covers all entry-level roles. The analysts with
| total compensation close to the base salary of 50k (e.g.
| developers) won't work crazy hours. The bankers who do
| have crazy hours also get bonuses with order of magnitude
| equal to the base salary.
| beforeolives wrote:
| That's a good point. I have no idea what their actual
| salaries are. I was responding to the suggestion that
| PS90k a year is just above minimum wage when you adjust
| for the hours worked (which is false).
| dan-robertson wrote:
| PS50k base for a random IB in London doesn't sound
| shockingly low to me. There's two things there:
|
| 1. Pay in general is lower in the UK than the US. The
| bank will pay what they can get away with and there isn't
| enough competition between banks/consultancies/tech/law
| to drive pay up. I wouldn't be surprised if more
| competitive candidates got higher offers.
|
| 2. A lot of compensation can be made up in bonuses,
| though I don't know what kind of bonus a junior analyst
| might get.
| caoilte wrote:
| 90,000 / 46.4 (52 - minimum statutory holiday) / 80 =
| PS24 / hour.
|
| Minimum wage is PS8.72 / hour.
|
| So at a bare minimum (before perks / generous pension /
| very generous bonus) they are getting three times the
| minimum wage.
|
| That's still not great, but they are suffering far less
| than millions of cleaners and other essential workers,
| not to mention the millions of people on zero hour
| contracts who are unable to get minimum wage and the
| thousands of people in forced labour conditions aka
| slavery (ie migrant Labour).
|
| Which is mostly to say that the condition of most people
| is a lot lot worse than most of us stop to think about
| most of the time.
| exdsq wrote:
| To be fair I reached PS130k at 26 without a degree by
| working remotely for a company in the Bay Area - it's not
| impossible but you do have to prioritise money. Ended up
| giving it up for a lower salary that's more interesting
| work anyway; ended up money wasn't everything!
| alexc05 wrote:
| I was a teacher in England in my 30's and my starting
| salary was something like PS18k.
|
| PS90k was something that you'd take 10 or 20 years to get
| to.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| You can make PS90k as a teacher in England?
| fakedang wrote:
| I know of elite boutiques that pay at around $70k.
| Efinancialcareers has a habit of mixing up numbers and
| overestimating.
| bacbilla wrote:
| These are typically junior bankers working on M&A/IPO deals.
| The ones working on the desks/trading will have much more
| moderate 45-60 hour weeks with little/no weekend work.
|
| The salaries sound high - but bearing in mind that you will
| need to live within very close proximity to the financial
| centre of the city (London City, Canary Wharf, Wall Street etc)
| you do not end up with much spending money at the end of the
| month.
|
| You may well have a comparable salary as a relatively junior
| FAANG developer with a lot less effort.
| brmgb wrote:
| > These are typically junior bankers working on M&A/IPO
| deals.
|
| M&A has always been notorious for the insane hours it pushes
| on interns and junior employees and most of them use it
| signalling to land much more balanced job in management
| consulting or other parts of finance (unless they really want
| the money because there definitely is money to be made
| there). The royal track of an internship in audit/large
| finance department followed by one in M&A then a job at
| Mckinsey was very much still in the head of some when I was
| business school student.
|
| Also finance is known to have a peculiar culture and use
| gruelling first years has a filter. Some consulting companies
| do it too. I personally find it stupid and therefore elected
| to work for a more sensible place but it is real however.
| Still contrary to what another commenter implied this is not
| a grind. Things become more normal after the first hurdle and
| these companies reward in a way which is not particularly
| dissimilar to any other big companies (a mix of making
| yourself visible and intelligently playing the political
| game).
| thu2111 wrote:
| _What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to
| work 80 hour weeks?_
|
| Nothing worth it. I've talked to people who have been through
| the investment bank meat grinder and who got out. One guy went
| to Silicon Valley. He said tech firms have their own issues but
| treat him far better.
|
| The gist is: there's a culture of abusive working practices
| that appears to have becomes self-perpetuating in the way that
| hazing rituals at US colleges or the army sometimes do. Much of
| the work is horrendously inefficient, for example, writing long
| reports for managers that are then never read, or which are
| read and then ignored, or in which only a single figure is
| actually needed. Other problems involve managers who have no
| idea what they want so constantly change their requirements,
| causing work to be scrapped and redone, but with arbitrary and
| ludicrous deadlines attached.
|
| Additionally managers think nothing of setting someone a new
| task to write a large report at 9pm on Friday night, then
| demanding it be delivered to their private home at 6am on
| Saturday morning.
|
| Because the workers are young and ambitious, they tolerate this
| even though they can see that a lot of it is work for work's
| own sake. And presumably the only ones who make it are the ones
| who have become inured to the notion that arbitrary work is
| some measure of self-worth, and thus try to select "the best"
| by pushing people to the limits and seeing who breaks.
|
| This culture is entirely absent in tech, where if someone is
| asked to do a task there's a general expectation that the task
| actually matters and has been thought about - at least a little
| bit.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > He said tech firms have their own issues but treat him far
| better
|
| Did he mention what those issue are?
| thu2111 wrote:
| I only vaguely recall the conversation. I think they were
| cultural. Tech was more full of people who genuinely bought
| their own hype, even when it was self-evidently ridiculous.
| Basically the sort of issues that the show Silicon Valley
| picked up on. It wasn't anything super serious from a
| work/life balance perspective. More of the "feel" of the
| place.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm just constantly curious why the games industry gets so
| much shit from every possible angle for employing young
| ambitious people who are willing to put themselves through
| the grinder to work on something they enjoy, but when the
| same thing(actually worse, considering most people there
| actually don't enjoy it and are in it just for the money)
| happens in finance that doesn't get any coverage whatsoever,
| it's just "part of the ritual".
| thu2111 wrote:
| It does get coverage, often when something terrible happens
| like an intern committing suicide. But finance has been
| like this for decades and lots of people are aware of it,
| it's not news. The games industry crunch-time phenomenon is
| less well known outside of the software industry.
|
| Also, my impression is that after the EA "wivesgate" thing
| or whatever it was called, practices at the bigger studios
| got better. But maybe that's just rumour and speculation.
| I'd expect long hours at small firms no matter what
| industry they're in, by the nature of being smaller.
| draw_down wrote:
| That's fair, but all if it sounds pretty shitty to be
| honest.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| I guess in finance it's cultural knowledge that this sort
| of thing goes on, there are not many surprises. The work-
| life balance of the games industry is not so embedded in
| our collective consciousness.
| fsloth wrote:
| Finance pays a lot better. Game industry just leeches off
| from enthusiasm of youth.
|
| Or, to put in other terms: games industry squeezes people
| who joined the industry for a chance of self-expression
| whereas finance industry squeezes people who generally
| joined for the money and the grind.
|
| Squeezing is not nice but at least in finance you know what
| you got into.
| gambiting wrote:
| Right but that's not always true, is it? There was such a
| huge backlash for rockstar and their overtime on RDR2,
| but I know people at Rockstar, the bonuses are insane and
| people there work themselves so hard hoping for that
| bonus. Isn't that the same in the finance industry? Work
| really really hard to _maybe_ get in that crazy pay
| bracket where you 're basically sorted.
|
| I'm not particularly trying to defend the games industry
| here, I'm just curious why the popular culture lately is
| so keen to cover the hard work being put into games but
| not into other industries which work even worse hours.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think you're just projecting what you're familiar with.
| People who know people in investment banking (or big law)
| are very familiar with practices there and there are also
| any number of books that have been written about it.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| RDR2 was a guaranteed hit. Even if it sucked, it still
| would have sold a million copies. R* could have delayed
| it by a year a la Cyberpunk and still been fine.
|
| The fear is when you're in a company where your project
| might lose funding if you don't complete eight months'
| worth of work in two months time. That's when the games
| industry goes from abusive to masochistic.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I suspect it's to do with the money involved. That game
| developer doing months of crunch is likely already
| underpaid (compared with a similarly skilled and
| experienced dev working in another industry) when one only
| considers their contracted working hours. The person
| working similar crunch hours in finance is likely making
| tens of thousands more. For better or worse people tend to
| think very little of bankers and the prevailing attitude is
| that they're making too much, instead of the more sensible
| approach that others are paid too little.
| notahacker wrote:
| The ritual in finance is part of a realistic path to PS1m
| annual earnings in a short space of time.
| chrisgd wrote:
| Pitchbook for a CEO that details stats about several start ups
| intheir space that might make good acquisition targets.
|
| Pitch book that details financial implications of acquiring a
| publicly traded company where all the details are available -
| what the balance sheet looks like post merger, earnings,
| revenue, synergies.
|
| Private equity backed company is for sale, we need to show them
| every deal we have worked on in the past 10 years that is
| similar to the company for sale so we can prove we can sell it.
| Who is going to buy it, how much can they pay, who do we know
| at the buyer firm to get a quick decision.
|
| Formatting pitch books is bouncing back and forth between excel
| and PowerPoint to make sure all info is correct and sokmetimes
| you are waiting on others to do there part before you can move
| forward. Group head tells VP who tells associate who tells
| analyst and it flows back and forth before getting back to
| group head who screams "what the duck is this?"
| raverbashing wrote:
| > What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to
| work 80 hour weeks?
|
| Preparing reports, power point presentations and playing with
| Excel spreadsheets that will be looked for 5min then set aside
| as the negotiation politics come to play
| notahacker wrote:
| They're _the_ junior analyst on a deal rather than _a_ junior
| analyst, and the client and their boss expect the updates
| complete by tomorrow 's meeting. The banks could certainly
| afford to train an extra analyst, but a lot of the work is
| drudgery updating single documents where it's easier to let one
| half awake person deal with it than divide it between two.
| Junior analysts don't usually push back on requests, and banks
| don't ask clients to wait a bit longer whilst they get things
| ready either.
|
| The salary is high, but not _more than two professional jobs
| for top grads_ high. They are eligible for bonuses though, and
| that carrot of six figure salaries is dangled.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _banks don 't ask clients to wait a bit longer whilst they
| get things ready_
|
| To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds
| of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time
| sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from
| one tomorrow. Doing all this with reasonable working hours
| isn't impossible--it just requires a global, co-ordinated
| team.
|
| "Why not hire more analysts?", you may ask. Well, who will
| pay for them? If you take it out of the senior bankers' pay,
| they'll quit. Start their own firm. People will work those
| hours, and they'll find them, and they'll take a bunch of
| their clients with them. If the house pays for it,
| shareholders protest. Why is ROE falling? Why are fixed costs
| so high when you had a dry year?
|
| It's a collective-action problem likely only addressable by
| regulation. That or litigation.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| Why don't the entry level workers unionize?
|
| (not saying this in favor/against unions in general, but
| from a worker's perspective, why not pursue that option?)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's a low-skill premium-paying job that turns away most
| applicants.
| notahacker wrote:
| > To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or
| hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work
| is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price
| differently from one tomorrow.
|
| I _get_ that, even though though the closest I 've come is
| having a banker struggle to keep it civil as I passed on
| the message that _no_ we couldn 't just fudge the asset
| valuation after the client admitted at the last minute
| they'd supplied us with an incorrect detail, and _no_ our
| analysts were going to do it tomorrow, not this evening.
| But as they stood to earn four orders of magnitude more
| than we did from them and actually had more competition
| they weren 't in the same position to tell the client that
| we weren't going to drop everything to rectify their error.
|
| I thought the division of labour problem was more of an
| issue than a salary at the entry level though, not so much
| because a pitchbook _can 't_ be handed to a suitably
| qualified employee on a different continent to finish but
| because they don't trust that setup. Dividing the pie
| between more senior bankers is obviously going to cause
| consternation, but surely a few extra graduate analysts
| isn't going to dramatically affect Goldman's bottom line,
| especially if they can cut those entry level salaries a bit
| and still retain more?
| [deleted]
| rory wrote:
| I have a couple friends that went this path and one reason for
| the absurd hours seems to be that their work needs to be done
| in between the times the boss is working. A more senior analyst
| will hand off analysis to be done overnight or on a weekend,
| and expect it back the next morning. But there's also an
| expectation to keep up appearances / "be available" during the
| day. So they spend most of the work day either making work for
| themselves or doing nothing, then work their real full-time job
| after normal office hours.
| homero wrote:
| What exactly do they do? Study company financials?
| dd36 wrote:
| We would do underwriting of deals. Prepping spreadsheets,
| decks, etc. It's a dollar volume game.
|
| I got out after a few years.
| horstmeyer wrote:
| No sympathy. They are horrible people doing horrible things for
| detestable motives. Nobody forces them except their greed and
| vanity.
| totalZero wrote:
| Horrible things like what? Mergers and IPOs?
|
| They're twenty-somethings who got a somewhat high-paying job
| coming out of college. Above average but not the pick of the
| litter. And they don't know what they're in for until they've
| already signed on the dotted line. The way you get treated as
| an intern is orders of magnitude better than the way you're
| treated as an analyst, because the bank is still trying to
| entice you to step through the full-time door.
| horstmeyer wrote:
| Goldman & Sachs is a notorious money making machine that's
| optimized to squeezing as much money as possible out of
| everything they deal with. They will do everything they can
| get away with to achieve that. Where do you think the 50
| million bonuses are coming from? And of course individuals
| who sign up for it know what they're getting into and why.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I imagine they may be referring to how Goldman Sachs is a
| pipeline into the most entrenched and detestable levels of
| government, in both major parties, where they encourage
| policies beneficial to the financial industry but costly to
| the people, and generally act out _regulatory capture_ in the
| most mercenary possible way.
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