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Comment by OutOfHere | Hacker News Reader

When I was younger, I used to think that it was honorable to work long hours, including overnight, for an employer. As I grew older, I realized it was so unfair, especially considering that the bosses would never put in even a regular full day of effort, and would undermine my work with bad managerial decisions. Just because they put in extra effort at some point twenty years ago doesn't entitle them to do that to me now.

Regarding being an investment banker, if you're intelligent, it's imho better to earn your capital and then do your own investment banking for yourself, not for someone else.

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> When I was younger, I used to think that it was honorable to work long hours, including overnight, for an employer.

That is a foolish idea planted in the minds of the young and naive to prime them for exploitation.

IB analysts are not dumb - they put up with this because the worst of it only lasts for a few years, and on the other side are huge riches.

If they work long nights, they will be dumb eventually. Permanent stupidity can be induced by a relatively a short period of sleep deprivation.

Umm, proof?

I don't have that, I should probably have been clearer that this was my own observation and view, but I felt that there was something that happened when a particular highschooler failsed to sleep and stayed up using caffeine pills and I feel that it made the person more rigid, less creative, something like that; and then I saw others who were on the other end of the spectrum, whose parents made sure that they slept, and they were just smarter.

I have no data, no scientific studies. It's just that I don't see how it can be any other way.

Alternatively, maybe caffeine and other stimulants decrease creativity and lead to what I felt became stupidity.

> Regarding being an investment banker, if you're intelligent, it's imho better to earn your capital and then do your own investment banking for yourself, not for someone else.

Investment banking isn't "owning a bunch of stocks"

Investment banking is SELLING a bunch of stock, to collect commissions, and when you make a bad decision, covering it up. See 'Boiler Room.'

No, a boiler room operation is typically a brokerage, which is a completely different kind of a business from an investment bank.

Whatever it is, the end result for the worker is the same if not better via stocks and derivatives. There is no relative benefit for an intelligent individual to being an investment banker.

Investment banking associates aren't performing the job of a wealth manager or financial planner. They spend much of their time performing research on businesses, creating presentations on businesses, and working with other businesses. They're not working with retail level individuals looking to have their wealth managed.

Until tech took off, investment banking was the only profession that competed with big law and medicine, compensation and prestige wise. It still is highly difficult and selective to break into, even for those coming from high ranking schools. Arguably much more difficult to break into than most big tech, and unlike with tech, if you miss the internship to investment banking sliding door out of college, it can be near impossible to break into later.

For those who are clueless on this: the primary work of "investment bankers" is providing advice to corporate clients on raising capital (through market offerings like bonds and stocks), mergers and acquisitions, and also by underwriting transactions where they act as a middleman between the client and the market - classic case is the IPO.

This is distinct from market making, which is buying and selling securities in the market, albeit that investment banks often have strong market making operations as well.

It's also distinct from asset management, which is the business of taking money from people and investing it for them through e.g. funds.

This article is about the first kind of investment banking, which is legendary for ludicrous overloads for analysts (hires direct from school) during their first few years. Those that survive often go to B school, get their MBAs and come back as associates; but this is also a pipeline that leads into other finance careers like private equity.

> Those that survive often go to B school, get their MBAs and come back as associates

If you're already an analyst and not (completely) burned out by 70-90 hour weeks you are becoming an associate within 2-3 years.

You use the MBA to exit out of IB into VC, PE, PM, CorpDev, etc.

This is also why tech became so popular over the past decade - new grads are earning IB level compensation with significantly better WLB and less barrier to entry, and most analysts are now STEM or STEM Adjacent majors.

This is essentially the route my brother took, sans the MBA. A couple years spent surviving as an IB analyst, after which he was promoted to associate. Stayed on for another year after the promotion, before being headhunted by a PE firm he ended up joining.

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