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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

No it's not, it's barely above minimum wage when you consider hours worked. Not to mention the job dangers (stress/burnout/health impacts).

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Your calculation is way off. The living wage in London (not minimum for the UK) is £10.85 per hour. That's £45136 at 80 hours a week (the cap they're asking for in the article) and £53599 at 95 hours a week (which they are supposedly averaging now). £90k is a long way to go from there.

Glassdoor puts Goldman's junior analyst basic salary at just over £50k though, which actually is below minimum wage at the hours quoted in this article...

That's a good point. I have no idea what their actual salaries are. I was responding to the suggestion that £90k a year is just above minimum wage when you adjust for the hours worked (which is false).

"analyst" covers all entry-level roles. The analysts with total compensation close to the base salary of 50k (e.g. developers) won't work crazy hours. The bankers who do have crazy hours also get bonuses with order of magnitude equal to the base salary.

£50k base for a random IB in London doesn’t sound shockingly low to me. There’s two things there:

1. Pay in general is lower in the UK than the US. The bank will pay what they can get away with and there isn’t enough competition between banks/consultancies/tech/law to drive pay up. I wouldn’t be surprised if more competitive candidates got higher offers.

2. A lot of compensation can be made up in bonuses, though I don’t know what kind of bonus a junior analyst might get.

90,000 / 46.4 (52 - minimum statutory holiday) / 80 = £24 / hour.

Minimum wage is £8.72 / hour.

So at a bare minimum (before perks / generous pension / very generous bonus) they are getting three times the minimum wage.

That's still not great, but they are suffering far less than millions of cleaners and other essential workers, not to mention the millions of people on zero hour contracts who are unable to get minimum wage and the thousands of people in forced labour conditions aka slavery (ie migrant Labour).

Which is mostly to say that the condition of most people is a lot lot worse than most of us stop to think about most of the time.

It would be more than £10 per hour even if you worked 168 hours a week.

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