Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor

In investment banking, you usually work on a small team of 3-6 people. The work day is very different depending on whether your team is currently working on a deal or is between deals and pitching clients.

If your team is on a deal, then there could be honest-to-goodness work keeping your team busy for 100 hours a week. Tasks include preparing the materials used to market your client to potential investors (including financial models, presentations, and dense official offering documents), managing and attending meetings with investors or the Board, running down data requests, and diverse other things.

Most of the bullshit work comes in when a team is between deals. During this period, the senior members spend a lot of time working their connections at potential clients while the junior members prepare "pitches" - presentations designed to convince a company to do a deal. Junior employees are expected to be at the office when their superiors arrive and stay at the office when their superiors leave. When I was working, I might start a typical day by finishing up a request from the day before, then have absolutely nothing to do for 4 or 5 hours, and then receive and turn around assignments from sometime in the afternoon until the evening. The boss would make his last calls around 7PM, which is when I would get my last batch of work for the day. I would work on that for anywhere between one to thirteen hours and then head home (or not, if it was 13 hours).

The culture at an investment bank is very unforgiving. An employee must be a competent worker to survive, but he must also be sure to keep up appearances. Half of an employee's pay is paid in an annual bonus, which is determined by a mixture of objective and subjective factors. It is not enough to be a good worker, an employee must also make sure he looks like a good worker - which entails being seen in the office a lot. The time of a junior employee is not considered valuable, since they are well overpaid compared to their peers their bosses feel like they should be willing to take unlimited shit without bitching. Managing Directors think nothing of asking an Analyst to do something on Sunday when it pops into their minds, even if the work could easily wait until Monday morning. An MD will also have no qualms about asking an Analyst to start on something at 7PM when he could have told him about it hours earlier. You have never seen so many bitter 23 year-olds as you can find at an I-Banking office.

In exchange for most of your life, an entry-level employee is usually compensated well for someone just out of college. I'd estimate the mean analyst on the street earns $120K in an average year. I wasn't on the street, but I'm not working right now thanks to my savings from my days as an I-Banker. If I could do it again, I probably wouldn't. I like where I am but those were a bleak, desolate 2 years and the angina hasn't completely faded away yet.

You're misunderstanding the metaphor. Working while tired is working at your full potential measured in what you can do in n hours (which is the case you usually face in a startup), not in what you can do per hour (which rarely matters).

It depends on the kind of work. I think there's a distinction between creative work and the more mundane stuff, and any role worth doing has both aspects. I think people only have a few hours of high quality creative work in them a day. But the reality is that most important work has a much larger drudgery component and working longer hours for that most definitely does scale linearly. Fixing bugs or pouring through financial data for inconsistencies is probably going to take you X number of hours no matter how many days you spread it over. In fact, you're probably going to be more efficient doing it in some marathon sessions.

Not everyone in a startup has to work hard, so long as some people do. But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.

But taking a slightly longer term view - how is your productivity the next day? What's it average out to over a few days with a big loss of sleep?

Please tone it down. I made a suggestion for adding one word to the title, and said it might be better. That is a flimsy pretext for such a vitriolic response.

The first sentence wasn't even my main point; the second sentence was. You write, "He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of context and nitpicked." Extend me the same courtesy.

I have the same tossing and turning problem when I work close to bed time.

I find that reading a fiction book, even just a few pages, helps flush my brain's "cache" and relax.

I try to never do super mind-heavy work late at night because I dream in whatever that was alllll night long. When I did have to do marathon code sessions all day and late into the night, I did yoga to flush my brain of coding. It helped a lot and I slept like a baby.

Exercising a lot helps me fall asleep better at night. Lately i've been too busy with work to get much in, and i'm having a hell of a time falling asleep. When I train for something (some sort of race) I sleep like a baby.