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...
> 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.
> Bankers are perpetually late on shit. The industry can barely manage to transfer money expediently.
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.
> 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.
Nobody questions Baristas starting early to get the coffee shop ready for the day's workers, but you cleverly ask why have work ready for the workers at all.
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.
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.
It's not really about organization, because the person producing the work isn't part of the org structure and doesn't even know they're producing the work.
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.
> 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.
These Wall Street banks (and FAANGs, etc.) outsource stuff to companies that do exactly that. Well, once they paid overtime, then they added shifts, and then they replaced the US-based third shift with one in the opposite time zone.
Maybe it's the difference between the people that are seen as bringing in money and the areas that are seen as just costs?
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...