Goldman Sachs Working Conditions Survey
drive.google.com
drive.google.com
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
That's not tone deaf or anything.
God I hate late stage capitalism.
(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.
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.
The only way to get people to do it would be to hire people on rock bottom salaries and only pay well once they prove they’ll work the 80h weeks, or keep a lot of of the comp as bonuses that pays out after a long employment. In neither of those cases I’d be interested in being employed there.
I burnt out of this industry but if anyone made a spreadsheet like this they woulda been laughed off the boat and probably subject to all sorts of bad behavior.
Not saying this justifies any of it just adding some perspective. There's plenty of industries where this goes on and most of them don't involve making huge piles of money.
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.
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.
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.
But with that said, junior banking is an incredible brain-drain - when you look at the average banker credentials at top investment banks, compared to the actual work they do there.
I guess that is the price you have to pay for prestige. Dedicate your youth to chasing a rat-race, then when you're finally done with your MBA, maybe you get to work on genuinely interesting stuff - more than just being a spreadsheet jockey, or correcting font-sizes in PP.
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.
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?
How you create predatory people: pressure, unfairness, stigma on soft feelings, and a hierarchy you can fight your way up.
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.”
> 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"