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.

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.

I have participated in same behavior but in the tech industry. I joined my managers at strip clubs for lunches, I introduced fresh grads and H1Bs to endless buffets at strip clubs. Happy hour were pretty much required work activity everyday.

But I never thought it was bad, I mean strip clubs are sleazy, but I always considered happy hours to be part of team bonding. The best teams, I have worked in, also drank heavily.

Not sure if it is age or if it is because I don't go to happy hours that much anymore but I also don't have a strong bond for my team.

But I sort of feel bad for all those reluctant H1Bs who I introduced to strip clubs. I wonder if they really enjoyed hanging out with us or if they were pretending.

In my view there are two ways to understand this problem.

1) As a feminist issue. And it is, since no women will feel good in this kind of workplace where strip clubs are the norm. On the long run its counterproductive for society to allow these behaviours at the workplace.

2) As a creativity issue. Even in a hypothetical where women/minorities don't exist, these behaviours would still be an issue from a business point of view. The ''sport team mentality'' kills intellectual creativity. Try to sell these guys an idea which is alien to their monkey-culture... impossible. While working in these environments, I think I've read up to 10 books about ''how to pitch your idea'', not understanding what was wrong. True creativity is impossible in these circles, and their business usually fails at some point. It happened two times in my life, and I'm not 35 yet.

Getting in touch with your subconscious is like loosing your virginity ; it wont happen if you alway group with similar peers.

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.

If the model were really this simple, relapse would be non-existent. I can't believe any former addicts would make a rational choice to relapse.

This implies something way harder.

BTW: I've always thought that Margin Call is a very very movie showing internals of the financial institutions.

BTW: I've always thought that Margin Call is a very good movie showing internals of the financial institutions.

It was late, I was tired, mistakes were made. :)

Unless you’re drinking a pint of a 14% Belgian tripel, they won’t be equivalent.

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.

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.

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.

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?

There's a LOT to chew on in there.

Note that I don't disagree with your notion that abuse is abundant in all human societies.

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.

It really really hammers home the power of training.

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

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.

https://www.businessinsider.com/no-such-thing-alpha-male-201...

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.

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)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker

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.

I consider myself lucky to have had what I consider excellent bosses and work environment in a couple of my first jobs. So at least when I finally landed into abusive and hostile job, I could with some confidence say that this is not normal, no one should be tolerating this, and hey boss, watch me go!

Whether this ‘theory’ actually holds true, I don’t know. But having had it in my head has certainly allowed me to curtail my bad behaviors over the years. And hopefully has allowed me to be one of the better examples for the next generations.

All this of course assumes that leadership wants to optimize for humane treatment of people.

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.

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...

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.

It doesn't make much sense to criticize investment banks for the behavior of commercial banks. Probably the main thing that connects the two is pursuit of profit. And transferring your money slowly is profitable for commercial banks.

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.

Yes, actually investment banking is kinda critical because every day that paper languishes a bunch of capital is going underutilized and people are idle and unpaid. In order to not waste the life work of so many, yeah the paper pushers should get in gear.

But also, it's rude and silly to ask this. Because I could just as cleverly ask if what you enjoy is critical and we both know that it, when viewed reductively, is not.

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.

IB works by doing absolutely unreasonable amounts of work for CEOs for free, to impress them, so they'll pay even more unreasonable fees when they do want you to do something big like a merger. In the meantime the senior bankers just take off-hand comments by the CEOs, turn them into questions, make the junior staff write 100 page slide decks answering them, and send them back to the CEO, who doesn't read them but feels impressed.

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.

Maybe it's the difference between the people that are seen as bringing in money and the areas that are seen as just costs?

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjWRu5heGs

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.

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.

> 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.

If you endure the period of 1-3 years with abuse and horrible working conditions, you have that golden star in your resume, and can move on to something better.

But that's how the system is designed. Work young analysts to the bone, send them off to business school/hedge funds/private equity firms/corporate dev. jobs/whatever, and take in the next batch.

The people that rock the boat can easily get punished. And then their financial careers go up in smoke. Not an ideal situation for high-achievers that have sacrificed their youth on getting good grades, extracurriculars, and in general maximizing their chances of getting into some investment bank.

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.

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.

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!

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)

> 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.

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.

Management in these places wants to own your time and wants you close so they can keep an eye on you.

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?

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.

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”.

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.

Because we’re not living at the limit of infinity and this discussion is there to change this fact

They are pitted against one another to show their values to their superiors, leading to taking on longer and longer shifts, and an obsession to be the one that ends up being right. Since demand is basically guaranteed (people won't stop getting sick) and money keeps being poured into these underperforming organizations (due to the artificial scarcity of residency spots) there's no incentive to change, better organize and improve the situation. No matter what, the checks keeps coming every months for the organization.

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

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).

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

There is a solution to this: a coördinated 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.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/typical-ma-exper...

https://xkcd.com/1831/

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.

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.

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.

It was "doable" in the sense that I didn't sleepwalk into traffic, but in the end my performance both at work and at school was terrible. It was a waste.

It's somewhat fine if you're doing rote work, which I assume these people are doing, but little else.

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).

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!

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

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".

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.

I think stimulants also play a factor, legal or otherwise.

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.

Every time IB work hours comes up in a forum of 'outsiders,' people always point towards 'more automation' or 'hire more people' as panaceas for the terrible work-life balance. But when you are in high-profile, white-collar client service, there's just no pushback between senior bankers and clients. If you are giving a presentation to a F500 CEO, you're always going to solve for the quickest deadline, and that means 100 hour weeks for the junior people. Only solution is a huge top-down cultural shift amongst senior bankers and executives.

I think there's two things that could change this: (1) the job gets such bad press that junior talent gets worse or (2) clients start pushing back on bad work conditions. But on (1), the job is so mindless and repetitive that a degradation is talent is not that big of a deal (especially compared to engineering). On (2), clients would never do this. Clients pay large fees for this work, being a banker is still perceived as a prestigious job for juniors, it's flattering to think that someone is working 100 hours a week for your company, clients don't see the pain amongst junior employees, etc. - there's so many reasons why clients wouldn't push back.

The saddest part of all of this is not that some people are highly compensated yet miserable. The saddest part is there's still hundreds of college graduates who are chasing this dream because they think it will pay dividends in the future, but most of these kids get burned out and exit to 'generalist' jobs that they really have no passion for. They could have been building a product, adding something new to society, etc.

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”

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.

[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.

Not a like-for-like comparison as Citi and JPMC have huge retail operations. The size of their investment banking divisions isn’t as wildly disparate as you think

It's also a clear signal to everyone later in your career that you can handle that sort of throughput and not fuzz out.

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.

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.

There are very few companies that are “technological innovators”. Most SV devs aren’t writing a new distributed system or a process scheduler for the Linux kernel.

Business schools also acknowledge this when deciding who to accept/reject.

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.

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.

In most of human history your kids would old enough to help you on the farm by the time you reached your early 20’s!

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.

I totally get why people want this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Management consulting as well.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did he mention what those issue are?

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.

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.

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?

(not saying this in favor/against unions in general, but from a worker's perspective, why not pursue that option?)

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

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?”

- 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.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in latin america than I got offered while trying to work in Spain

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.

- 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.

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.

A £3k/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.)

I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much opposite Facebook's office, paid £2800/month for a 1-bed studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the City, he pays dead on £3000/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 £1900/month, and the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.

But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location for around £2000/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?

Our standard of housing is extremely low here. And small.

What department? I couldn't stomach working at a particular 'international trade' department, because they managed to hire the most awful team of over-engineers to build a CMS.

I couldn't understand what the fuck they did there, other than force me to do superfluous shite for months after I delivered what they wanted. That superfluous shite being the bifurcation of a PDF generator Django application to a 'server' and 'client' micro-service that communicated over an HTTP API; which they also demanded that I write a pip installable client for (a client for an API that had one endpoint!)

This was years ago, and I still have no qualms about deriding these jackanapes who work in the insular world of government Python development in London. I felt like a proper whore working for the government, extremely easy work, good pay; but a terrible inability to see how mediocre what they were doing was.