No, just understanding the reality of the world we live in and what's possible and impossible in it. Labour advocates in the US are now fighting for $15 minimum wage, not $50, because they too understand that's the maximum they can possibly convince the congress to pass. Any more than that and people would laugh to their face.
That's a suggestion by the analysts. As someone who has worked 100 hour weeks in finance, there is a world of difference between 80 and 100. 80 allows you to care for your health in a way that 100 doesn't and is in that way just barely sustainable.
Lol. That is an incredible bullet point. Someone actually decided okay we need to draw a line in the sand where anything more is excessive. That line is at 80 hours. After that is too much.
I dont work 105 hours, but I am on HN all the time while waiting for builds and all-test cycles. I can usually do two things at a time, but there is a limit to that.
I did 80's (over 5 days) for an extended period of time twice and you definitely adjust.
Looking back, the quality of work was definitely diminished. It didn't impact me too greatly in the first because it was a sales role primarily filling out RFPs. The second time was my startup and I am confident I made plenty of bad decisions due to lack of relaxation/sleep/exercise.
The most I've worked in my life was a two week intensive effort to reach a deadline. I did little more than work eat and sleep, and yet I only worked 75 and 80 hours. And my brain was pretty fried after. This was working from home, with rewarding work I was motivated to do. I don't see how it would be possible to work 95 hours in some office, let alone the 105 hours reported with 5 hours of sleep. It wouldn't make any sense. If you haven't slept more than 5 hours, the other 15 hours (assuming you work Saturday and Sunday) are going to be unproductive. Diminishing returns is a real thing. So, the managers here seems both very unprofessional, and remarkably bad. No one wins, and everyone loses? Nice way to run a business.
Since they mention "junior bankers", i'd say most of it is:
- re-formatting presentations decks
- re-formatting booklets
- checking numbers
- being available
The first two to three episodes of HBO's Industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_(TV_series)) reflects this well, and darkly. It is also fairly accurate w/r/t what my banker friends experienced.
According to family who worked in finance: the reformatting has to do with any errors.
If there is one small error, somewhere, then how do you know there aren't more? These banks are making million or billion dollar transactions, so a small rounding error can cost fantastic amounts of money. So start from square one and do it over, and make sure it's right.
Additionally, they need a lot of collateral. Appendices of research, citations, crunching other numbers -- most of which will never be looked it. But if the customer does want to see them, they have them, they know they're right, and they're able to answer any questions johnny-on-the-spot style. Again, with billion-dollar deals at stake, you'll do the due diligence, even if it means no one will ever read that info -- the "just in case they ask" risk is high enough to justify it.
That all translates into long, grinding hours for documents that no one may ever read.
Really surprised they can't automate that shit. It sounds like they need linters for their documents.
I certainly would trust a well-tested piece of software to get the numbers right sooner than I'd trust a gaggle of overpaid sleep-deprived 22 year-old Princeton grads.
Each company's analysis is a DAG of sorts with assumptions, each assumption based on other assumptions, and all of those based on tables of estimates and projections.
That makes it all somewhat unique, at least beyond the industry level. Further, it is not like there are numerous IPOs, its not really done enough times to automate.
Finally, there is a hazing and rite-of-passage component to all this. And it is paid very well, with even better prospects after the job, so people accept it.
If you're interested in what investment bankers do in a 95-hour week then check out the book "Barbarians at the Gate." Events took place in 1988 so you don't have things like PowerPoint but there are a lot of good examples of how it becomes "necessary" to put in so many hours. "Necessary" in quotes because it's not a matter of life or death but it really does become required to win the deal. With the amount of money involved in these deals it becomes ultra-competitive and more hours pretty directly translates to a better chance of winning the deal. Especially once you have short deadlines that are intended to get everyone to come forward with their best & final offer, you might just have one weekend to put together a whole pitchbook + all the deal terms to try to win the business.
Because the hours worked translate so directly into increased chances of winning the deal, it really does become a prisoners dilemma amongst all the firms. If they could all stick to 40 hour weeks then no one would have an advantage based on hours worked, but all it takes it one firm to defect and it's game over, welcome back to 100 hour weeks.
I worked at GS but not in investment banking. I had a really positive experience and rarely went over 60-70 hours.
It all depends on your role. IBD is definitely the most demanding, but they all made a choice, with basically perfect information, to accept that job. I promise you, they knew it would be like that. It's hard for me to feel too sympathetic.
I don't think these are the people that deserve our sympathy. What did they think? That they would get rich by defrauding the world only 40 hours a week?
I read the list and found nothing immoral. Can you be specific?
This is an investment bank, if they find a profitable trade they will make it. That’s not immoral, and if you disagree then you must think all the protagonists of The Big Short were villains too.
Goldman does the Lord’s work, the thankless but necessary work of facilitating accurate pricing in capital markets by ruthlessly arbitraging inefficiencies, and similar morally repulsive but necessary gutter-cleaning tasks.
Working in the financial industry, I have a few questions in mind
1) how much of this is actually caused by the candidates themselves? If a bunch of competitive people want to impress their boss to get a job offer, how much will they work as a group?
2) how much of it is caused by their inneficient IT systems? Why invest in IT if each you have a bunch of interns willing to kill themselves to do everything by hand in excel?
3) how much is caused by their boss? A lot of people have a mentality of ''I did it to get my job, so you must suffer too''
I'm not sure what the best enforcement mechanism would be, but this should be addressed through national legislation. Perhaps mandatory overtime and/or some kind of business-level tax for anyone working more than 40 hours a week? Nobody should be "exempt" from earning overtime.
No, I'm saying that if they work more than 40 hours in a week, they get overtime pay at a higher rate than their usual pay instead of working 90 hours and getting paid for 40. Maybe an extra tax on Goldman's end so they're discouraged from scheduling people in this way.
The end result would be to force first year hires to work for free as interns, since their job involves a massive transfer of value from GS to them in terms of future earnings.
I have friends who work in finance. They don't work hours like this because they don't sign up for it. They end up making a little less, but they have a life. There are other jobs and places to work at within finance.
What would we do without nerds to type commands into an editor?
When you don’t understand what another persons value really entails, it’s easy to make fun of. Warren Buffett is in finance, has never used a spreadsheet, and built a business that employs over 400,000 people.
Their entire job is to inflate the price of existing assets. There is no other productive purpose, this money is not being re-lent for people to start businesses and it is not serving any other practical purpose, it's literally "number go up".
>The securities that were so instrumental in triggering the financial crisis of 2007-2008, asset-backed securities, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were practically non-existent in 1978. By 2007, they comprised $4.5 trillion in assets, equivalent to 32% of U.S. GDP.
That's 4.5 trillion dollars in imaginary money that isn't serving any purpose. Even Warren Buffet agrees:
>Warren Buffett (who famously disparaged CDOs and other derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal"
The burn out and churn is intended. Big 4 accounting is the same way, recruit individuals straight out of college, work them 80+ hours a week, burn them out and have them move on. It’s a win-win, the employee gets a stamp on their resume which opens many doors and the employer gets cheap labor and less people moving up the ladder.
I'm familiar with the IB -> HF/VC/PE route but where do usually accountants head post burn out?
also, I spoke with a junior analyst at a bulge bracket recently and apparently he had signed for his next job in PE before he even started his analyst job...
A "Big 4" partner explained this to me years ago. It's an intentional system designed to extract the most resources from a college graduate as possible. Some are promoted up the ranks, but most leave with the resume line item to do something else.
Agree - I worked at one of the firms on the tech advisory side a decade ago. I do think some of the Big 4 realized they had lack of talent staying and have improved their working conditions. I was on the partner path there - but ultimately decided it wasn't worth staying.
I remember hearing from HR that the reason mandatory retirement was 60 there is that most partners died by 65. That coupled with the senior leaders endless travel, hollow marriages, trails of divorces made it unappealing.
> "The sleep deprivation, the treatment by senior bankers, the mental and physical stress... I've been through foster care and this is arguably worse."
I know GS'ers aren't popular people. But this is no way to treat anybody.
No one's forcing them to put up with it: they're paid handsomely (not compared to their abusive superiors, obviously) and they can quit any time they want.
As a resident in the hospital (a couple years ago) I worked 100 hours a week and there were others on the team who were putting in more hours than I was. I think the hours are similar at some law firms. Honestly I find it hard to believe people actually exist that only work 40 hours a week.
I am sorry to give a reality check, but there are plenty. making even more bucks in 20 hours than some residents in a hospital in 100 hours. so for me its hard to believe there are people putting in 100 hours for their employer for free (guess your contract says 40 hours)
I have already commented with something snarky, but in seriousness:
Does it it seem to anyone else that the new generation entering the workplace (zoomers?) have wildly different expectations of what it's like vs. the reality? Not necessarily out of line with what it could or should be like (though I would say it does lean this way), but just how it is in practice?
I for example would never work for someone like Goldman Sachs because my perception is the work/life balance is abysmal. It's a surprise to me that anyone is surprised by this.
Among a lot of people, especially bankers, there is a sort of bragging right about making insane hours.
But 95h/week is impossible. That would be almost 14h per day, for every day of the week. Or 19 hours a day when working week days.
My impressions of bankers is that they are like programmers. They are paid to think. Performing research, reading reports, etc. Most people, myself included, can't even do that for 8 hours a day. 14 hours a day is impossible, no matter how work hungry you are. You may be 'at the office' for 14h, but there is simply no way that you can be productive for 14h straight, and certainly not for 7 days a week.
But regardless of the amount of hours you make. If you don't like it: get a different job. If bankers expect crazy hours, and you don't want to do that, then don't become a banker.
I'm not sure how to disprove what you're saying, but I'm right around the age of these first year analysts and have friends working at top IB firms in similar positions, and 95 hours is usually the extreme end of what they work a week. It's always at least 85 hours, and has gone up to 100 - 105 hours. Yes, it is around 14 hours every day if not more, with some weekdays being closer to 17-18 hours. It's the nature of the industry.
Much of the time they're paid to create similar models to stuff they've done in the past, it's not the MOST intellectually demanding job in terms of needing optimal creativity and brainpower. And a lot of the time it's just doing stuff like double checking numbers and rearranging reports.
I worked for Morgan Stanley in London almost a decade ago, they were a notch down from Goldman Sachs, and there I worked supporting analysts roughly 90-100 hours per week for the entire 6 week engagement (and occasionally this was 6 days per week). I only did 6 weeks, but this was absolutely normal for those in that department.
This isn't to say that the whole of the company do it, but some teams, some roles, some functions... they really do these hours.
PS: "Notch down"... there was an unwritten hierarchy, if you worked at one rung of the hierarchy then you were good for that rung and the rungs below but not the rung above. This can be translated as "if you could survive in Goldman Sachs you can survive anywhere" and "if you can survive Morgan Stanley then you can survive anywhere except Goldman Sachs". "Survive" isn't just hours, but also being shouted at, whipped to work at a certain level, the sexism/racism... as a programmer I built a reporting system and one of the reports constructed by the manager at Morgan Stanley was nicknamed "the baseball bat" as it formed the basis for ritual punishment and humiliation of low performing analysts and traders.
It is possible to like one's job but not like everything about that job. It is possible to want to improve the job. Often employers even encourage people to improve their jobs. In fact, cerebral jobs like finance or software tend to encourage that kind of thinking.
It’s definitely possible to “work” that much if work consists of being present in the office and nominally working on something or thinking about it. There’s a lot of menial work in most jobs that you can kind of force yourself through for hours at a time.
60 hours a week is easy: just work from 8-6 six days a week.
To get past that, the easy option is to add Sundays. But you do burn out if you work all Sunday, so taking Sunday to rest is a good idea. Let’s say you just work from 6-10pm on Sundays to map out the week and get ready for Monday, that leaves plenty of time to rest.
So now you’re at 64 hours a week, and you want to bump it up. Not too hard: give yourself a dinner break from 6-8 each night, and work again from 8 to midnight M-F. That’s an extra 20 hours, so you’re at 84. And that’s actually not too bad because you have Saturday nights free to socialize and Sunday morning to sleep off your hangover.
Getting past 84 hours is harder, you’ll have to sacrifice Sunday. But if you go ahead and adopt your normal 14h schedule Monday-Saturday you’re already at 84 without working Sunday, and by comparison fitting another 11 hours on Sunday still feels like a little bit of a breather. Maybe you just work 8-7 on Sundays and use the last few hours for some Netflix and go to bed early.
All of this is much easier if you’re not trying to spend 8 hours a day in bed. Suppose you find that 6 hours a day in bed can get you through, now you’ve got an extra 14 hours a week to do thinks like go jogging at 6am or whatever else helps you de-stress.
TLDR; 60 hours a week is relatively easy. 80 hours a week is harder but still manageable. The difficulty ramps as you go from 80-100. 100 hours a week is very hard. Anything over that is unsustainable, but can still be managed in short bursts if you don’t sleep, and we have lots of drugs that can help you avoid sleep.
1. They are all lying. They are not working productively for 95 hours a week. At most they are *present* for 95 hours a week. It is not humanly possible to maintain mental focus for that long. Everyone who says it is telling macho lies. It might be possible to get close to it for a week or two with stimulant drugs, but eventually you will have to pay the piper.
2. It is no secret that Goldman expects self-destructive levels of work from some of its employees. Everybody knows this. Former employees brag about keeping up with the punishing schedule. Future employees speak to each other about it before they start work. It is seen as a point of pride. "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere." So while this is undoubtedly abusive behaviour by an employer, the employees are getting exactly what they signed up for.
I agree in the literal way, but if you're kept captive for 95 hours regardless, does the distinction of work vs being present really matter? I doubt they're able to schedule anything meaningful for personal growth/enjoyment (e.g. dinner with friends?).
The end outcome is that it hurts the employee. The survey was for 13 people, but it still saddens me to see that they unanimously agreed on having negative relationships with friends/family due to their work. Those are harder (and sometimes impossible) to repair...
Right. Plus people vastly underestimate the long term health impact from that kind of lifestyle.
The other thing is if you're a client, this should terrify you. Nobody working those kinds of hours can maintain anything resembling a clear head with good judgement.
They are not being kept captive. They are freely contracting to be in this situation. They presumably did well in university and are highly employable.
Where do they claim to be "working productively for 95 hours a week"? And are these the "macho lies" you're referring to:
- “I can’t sleep anymore because my anxiety levels are through the roof”
- “My body physically hurts all the time and mentally I’m in a really dark place”
- “Being unemployed is less frightening to me than what my body might succumb to if I keep up this lifestyle”
It doesn't sound like this person knew the degree of abuse they were signing up for:
- “I didn’t come into this job expecting a 9am-5pm’s, but I also didn’t expect consistent 9am-5am’s either”
Nobody really signs up to be abused. They sign up because they're the sort of college grads who've handled every other challenge that's been thrown at them, and “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” doesn't sound any different.
Some of the people are hired into the program right out of college for two years. Most of these people are told that they should look for work elsewhere at the end.
(Other people are just hired and are not in the program.)
It's very competitive, so people work hard to try to make the cut.
In the US, if you make that cut, you have a chance to get promoted to Vice President, then Managing Director, then Partner.
The pay varies depending on your performance and the financial results of your part of the company and the company as a whole that year. Some people think a Managing Director can make about $1M per year, and a Partner can make about $5M per year. But no one really knows, and there are a lot of variables. I saw a NYT article that claimed that one particular Partner earned over $50M in one particular year.
I think when people right out of college are working all those hours, they are fighting for a chance to some day become Partner.
> What I said then is that what is bad for junior-employee lifestyle is generally good for the firm; the fact that everyone is working too hard means that there’s a lot of lucrative work to do:
> “We recognize that our people are very busy, because business is strong and volumes are at historic levels,” said Nicole Sharp, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs. “A year into Covid, people are understandably quite stretched, and that’s why we are listening to their concerns and taking multiple steps to address them.”
I guess so far the money they are making is worth the pain. You can only hope that they will make working conditions even worse so less people go into investment banking. The financial sector is way too big as a part of the economy and you can only hope that people will go into sectors of the economy where they actually provide value for society.
There were less people in that sector they would have less time to cook up derivatives on top of derivatives on top of derivatives that will probably blow up the economy soon again. Of course we will bail them out again too.
I think it'd be an interesting idea to try and ban people from working more than 50 hours. It's better for the humans in the long run, they'll feel better and be more healthy. I also think there should be mandatory physical movement policies. Have teams of people make a few laps around the block or a park or something. That'd get the dopamine flowing and again, everyone would feel better.
That being said, I don't feel that sympathetic to these juniors, but I can understand why they feel they need to do this. Finance is opaque and obscured by design, to keep people out of the money mansion. They are in a hostile environment and they adopt hostile behaviors to survive. It's not different than violent prisons imo, in concept. They just adapt.
Wow. Personally I wouldn't make it a week. I value my time outside of work more than I value work. Of course, like they said, they didn't sign up expecting a 40 week. But yeah, this sounds like torture.
Two things - 1) I interviewed at places like this after college. The hustle at least to me was very apparent. It boggles my mind that ppl want to work at these kinds of places. Maybe you become a senior banker and make fat stacks but let's be real most don't. I can't help but feeling these are young naïve workers taking these positions.
Second this scam jobs tend to thrive to down markets. I could see there rise as things go south as we come out of the recession and the number of white collar non-tech jobs continues to disappear over time.
Finance is on the high side for sure, but intense work weeks - especially for junior level positions - is par for the course in many fields. I worked in Architecture, and this starts from college, with a lot of effort going into planning when you’ll sleep, a lot of awareness that there are exactly 168 hours in a week and thinking about whether you can save an hour or two by eating faster etc. The working world is less intense, but 80 hour weeks are normal when a project is in its final phases. The intensity of the college experience is just preparing you for that.
One reason I love software so much, and am so glad I changed careers, is that the expectations on work/life balance are so different. 30 hours is considered a decent week. 40 hours is a demanding job. 50 hours is “abuse.” I’m thrilled to work in a field where people can say with a straight face that working 50 hours is “abuse,” because it makes my life so much easier and nicer.
I rarely comment on this because it’s not worth bike shedding, and software engineers who are complaining about work are generally unaware of how much harder most other jobs are. They’re sincerely expressing the stress they feel. But I do find myself rolling my eyes a little bit when software engineers complain about how hard they work. Hard work is a muscle, and when you’ve been tested by a truly grueling experience it makes you stronger and able to handle so much more, so work that used to feel hard doesn’t feel hard anymore.
The truth is we (Software Engineers) do a different kind of work, where not all hours in the chair are equal, and the best work happens in short, focused sessions with time to relax between them. And we do extremely scarce and valuable work, so we can demand amazing pay, benefits, and other things from our employers because if they won’t provide it we can just leave and immediately have work someplace nicer.
It’s a great life and I’m deeply, deeply grateful for it. I suppose my point in sharing this is just that I think we could all benefit from a little gratitude, and a little self awareness about the privilege our field offers.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadThat's not tone deaf or anything.
God I hate late stage capitalism.
just wait until you see behemoth-state authoritarian-technocracy socialism!
Looking back, the quality of work was definitely diminished. It didn't impact me too greatly in the first because it was a sales role primarily filling out RFPs. The second time was my startup and I am confident I made plenty of bad decisions due to lack of relaxation/sleep/exercise.
I can recall multiple studies finding that working more than 50 hours a week sees a severe drop-off in productivity. Here's an article about one: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/26/working-more-than-50-hours-m...
- re-formatting presentations decks - re-formatting booklets - checking numbers - being available
The first two to three episodes of HBO's Industry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_(TV_series)) reflects this well, and darkly. It is also fairly accurate w/r/t what my banker friends experienced.
According to family who worked in finance: the reformatting has to do with any errors.
If there is one small error, somewhere, then how do you know there aren't more? These banks are making million or billion dollar transactions, so a small rounding error can cost fantastic amounts of money. So start from square one and do it over, and make sure it's right.
Additionally, they need a lot of collateral. Appendices of research, citations, crunching other numbers -- most of which will never be looked it. But if the customer does want to see them, they have them, they know they're right, and they're able to answer any questions johnny-on-the-spot style. Again, with billion-dollar deals at stake, you'll do the due diligence, even if it means no one will ever read that info -- the "just in case they ask" risk is high enough to justify it.
That all translates into long, grinding hours for documents that no one may ever read.
I certainly would trust a well-tested piece of software to get the numbers right sooner than I'd trust a gaggle of overpaid sleep-deprived 22 year-old Princeton grads.
That makes it all somewhat unique, at least beyond the industry level. Further, it is not like there are numerous IPOs, its not really done enough times to automate.
Finally, there is a hazing and rite-of-passage component to all this. And it is paid very well, with even better prospects after the job, so people accept it.
Because the hours worked translate so directly into increased chances of winning the deal, it really does become a prisoners dilemma amongst all the firms. If they could all stick to 40 hour weeks then no one would have an advantage based on hours worked, but all it takes it one firm to defect and it's game over, welcome back to 100 hour weeks.
How you create predatory people: pressure, unfairness, stigma on soft feelings, and a hierarchy you can fight your way up.
It all depends on your role. IBD is definitely the most demanding, but they all made a choice, with basically perfect information, to accept that job. I promise you, they knew it would be like that. It's hard for me to feel too sympathetic.
> mentally I’m in a really dark place
Indeed. First find some morals, then try again.
This is an investment bank, if they find a profitable trade they will make it. That’s not immoral, and if you disagree then you must think all the protagonists of The Big Short were villains too.
To be fair, there's generally a lot less competition when you're doing something illegal, so it should be easier to get rich via fraud not harder.
When you don’t understand what another persons value really entails, it’s easy to make fun of. Warren Buffett is in finance, has never used a spreadsheet, and built a business that employs over 400,000 people.
Their entire job is to inflate the price of existing assets. There is no other productive purpose, this money is not being re-lent for people to start businesses and it is not serving any other practical purpose, it's literally "number go up".
>The securities that were so instrumental in triggering the financial crisis of 2007-2008, asset-backed securities, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were practically non-existent in 1978. By 2007, they comprised $4.5 trillion in assets, equivalent to 32% of U.S. GDP.
That's 4.5 trillion dollars in imaginary money that isn't serving any purpose. Even Warren Buffet agrees:
>Warren Buffett (who famously disparaged CDOs and other derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal"
All of that money is either investments, loans or hedges. Just because they got mis-priced in 2006 doesn’t mean CDOs aren’t a useful financial tool.
Warren Buffett also wrote derivatives. They are useful contracts for hedging and insurance.
The financial industry dies far more than just CDOs. Do you think there is no place for market making, investment management, underwriting, etc, etc?
I guess by making a companies stock and debt easier to market to a wider range of customers is “inflating” their value?
also, I spoke with a junior analyst at a bulge bracket recently and apparently he had signed for his next job in PE before he even started his analyst job...
This has been the way for decades now.
I remember hearing from HR that the reason mandatory retirement was 60 there is that most partners died by 65. That coupled with the senior leaders endless travel, hollow marriages, trails of divorces made it unappealing.
I know GS'ers aren't popular people. But this is no way to treat anybody.
My sympathy for greedy masochists is limited.
I'm one.
Why would I do more?
Does it it seem to anyone else that the new generation entering the workplace (zoomers?) have wildly different expectations of what it's like vs. the reality? Not necessarily out of line with what it could or should be like (though I would say it does lean this way), but just how it is in practice?
Among a lot of people, especially bankers, there is a sort of bragging right about making insane hours.
But 95h/week is impossible. That would be almost 14h per day, for every day of the week. Or 19 hours a day when working week days.
My impressions of bankers is that they are like programmers. They are paid to think. Performing research, reading reports, etc. Most people, myself included, can't even do that for 8 hours a day. 14 hours a day is impossible, no matter how work hungry you are. You may be 'at the office' for 14h, but there is simply no way that you can be productive for 14h straight, and certainly not for 7 days a week.
But regardless of the amount of hours you make. If you don't like it: get a different job. If bankers expect crazy hours, and you don't want to do that, then don't become a banker.
Much of the time they're paid to create similar models to stuff they've done in the past, it's not the MOST intellectually demanding job in terms of needing optimal creativity and brainpower. And a lot of the time it's just doing stuff like double checking numbers and rearranging reports.
This isn't to say that the whole of the company do it, but some teams, some roles, some functions... they really do these hours.
PS: "Notch down"... there was an unwritten hierarchy, if you worked at one rung of the hierarchy then you were good for that rung and the rungs below but not the rung above. This can be translated as "if you could survive in Goldman Sachs you can survive anywhere" and "if you can survive Morgan Stanley then you can survive anywhere except Goldman Sachs". "Survive" isn't just hours, but also being shouted at, whipped to work at a certain level, the sexism/racism... as a programmer I built a reporting system and one of the reports constructed by the manager at Morgan Stanley was nicknamed "the baseball bat" as it formed the basis for ritual punishment and humiliation of low performing analysts and traders.
60 hours a week is easy: just work from 8-6 six days a week.
To get past that, the easy option is to add Sundays. But you do burn out if you work all Sunday, so taking Sunday to rest is a good idea. Let’s say you just work from 6-10pm on Sundays to map out the week and get ready for Monday, that leaves plenty of time to rest.
So now you’re at 64 hours a week, and you want to bump it up. Not too hard: give yourself a dinner break from 6-8 each night, and work again from 8 to midnight M-F. That’s an extra 20 hours, so you’re at 84. And that’s actually not too bad because you have Saturday nights free to socialize and Sunday morning to sleep off your hangover.
Getting past 84 hours is harder, you’ll have to sacrifice Sunday. But if you go ahead and adopt your normal 14h schedule Monday-Saturday you’re already at 84 without working Sunday, and by comparison fitting another 11 hours on Sunday still feels like a little bit of a breather. Maybe you just work 8-7 on Sundays and use the last few hours for some Netflix and go to bed early.
All of this is much easier if you’re not trying to spend 8 hours a day in bed. Suppose you find that 6 hours a day in bed can get you through, now you’ve got an extra 14 hours a week to do thinks like go jogging at 6am or whatever else helps you de-stress.
TLDR; 60 hours a week is relatively easy. 80 hours a week is harder but still manageable. The difficulty ramps as you go from 80-100. 100 hours a week is very hard. Anything over that is unsustainable, but can still be managed in short bursts if you don’t sleep, and we have lots of drugs that can help you avoid sleep.
2. It is no secret that Goldman expects self-destructive levels of work from some of its employees. Everybody knows this. Former employees brag about keeping up with the punishing schedule. Future employees speak to each other about it before they start work. It is seen as a point of pride. "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere." So while this is undoubtedly abusive behaviour by an employer, the employees are getting exactly what they signed up for.
The end outcome is that it hurts the employee. The survey was for 13 people, but it still saddens me to see that they unanimously agreed on having negative relationships with friends/family due to their work. Those are harder (and sometimes impossible) to repair...
The other thing is if you're a client, this should terrify you. Nobody working those kinds of hours can maintain anything resembling a clear head with good judgement.
- “I can’t sleep anymore because my anxiety levels are through the roof”
- “My body physically hurts all the time and mentally I’m in a really dark place”
- “Being unemployed is less frightening to me than what my body might succumb to if I keep up this lifestyle”
It doesn't sound like this person knew the degree of abuse they were signing up for:
- “I didn’t come into this job expecting a 9am-5pm’s, but I also didn’t expect consistent 9am-5am’s either”
Nobody really signs up to be abused. They sign up because they're the sort of college grads who've handled every other challenge that's been thrown at them, and “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” doesn't sound any different.
(Other people are just hired and are not in the program.)
It's very competitive, so people work hard to try to make the cut.
In the US, if you make that cut, you have a chance to get promoted to Vice President, then Managing Director, then Partner.
The pay varies depending on your performance and the financial results of your part of the company and the company as a whole that year. Some people think a Managing Director can make about $1M per year, and a Partner can make about $5M per year. But no one really knows, and there are a lot of variables. I saw a NYT article that claimed that one particular Partner earned over $50M in one particular year.
I think when people right out of college are working all those hours, they are fighting for a chance to some day become Partner.
most interesting bit:
> What I said then is that what is bad for junior-employee lifestyle is generally good for the firm; the fact that everyone is working too hard means that there’s a lot of lucrative work to do:
> “We recognize that our people are very busy, because business is strong and volumes are at historic levels,” said Nicole Sharp, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs. “A year into Covid, people are understandably quite stretched, and that’s why we are listening to their concerns and taking multiple steps to address them.”
There were less people in that sector they would have less time to cook up derivatives on top of derivatives on top of derivatives that will probably blow up the economy soon again. Of course we will bail them out again too.
That being said, I don't feel that sympathetic to these juniors, but I can understand why they feel they need to do this. Finance is opaque and obscured by design, to keep people out of the money mansion. They are in a hostile environment and they adopt hostile behaviors to survive. It's not different than violent prisons imo, in concept. They just adapt.
What a world.
Second this scam jobs tend to thrive to down markets. I could see there rise as things go south as we come out of the recession and the number of white collar non-tech jobs continues to disappear over time.
One reason I love software so much, and am so glad I changed careers, is that the expectations on work/life balance are so different. 30 hours is considered a decent week. 40 hours is a demanding job. 50 hours is “abuse.” I’m thrilled to work in a field where people can say with a straight face that working 50 hours is “abuse,” because it makes my life so much easier and nicer.
I rarely comment on this because it’s not worth bike shedding, and software engineers who are complaining about work are generally unaware of how much harder most other jobs are. They’re sincerely expressing the stress they feel. But I do find myself rolling my eyes a little bit when software engineers complain about how hard they work. Hard work is a muscle, and when you’ve been tested by a truly grueling experience it makes you stronger and able to handle so much more, so work that used to feel hard doesn’t feel hard anymore.
The truth is we (Software Engineers) do a different kind of work, where not all hours in the chair are equal, and the best work happens in short, focused sessions with time to relax between them. And we do extremely scarce and valuable work, so we can demand amazing pay, benefits, and other things from our employers because if they won’t provide it we can just leave and immediately have work someplace nicer.
It’s a great life and I’m deeply, deeply grateful for it. I suppose my point in sharing this is just that I think we could all benefit from a little gratitude, and a little self awareness about the privilege our field offers.