Pushed to the limit as a banking intern
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It's also not about getting particularly difficult work done - intern-level spreadsheet and PowerPoint work isn't the sort of thing that only a select few can handle.
It's entirely about filtering for people who will submit to abuse.
Nothing is ever perfect of course, but this is never a problem because these demanding clients always turn out to be capable of accepting reality after all. If you would make reality even harder and suddenly make it illegal for bankers to work at night, no one would be surprised to see deals still being done.
I find it hard to believe that working so much that your faculties are diminished brings something valuable to a job. It's more likely that this has something to do with social dynamics. It could be just a convention that was needed to please those who decide on your promotion, a way to signal your dedication, or a way to protect yourself against what others could do to you when you're not here. Finding a way to get rid of this would surely benefit all. This seems obvious now that one worker died of it.
> Deals are fragile creatures
So are we
Deals involve a tremendous amount of back-and-forth, changing deal terms, changing financing details, etc. Bankers could simply go home at 6 pm and get to requests the next day, but that would make deals take longer. While a deal is in progress, it's fragile. Parties can decide to back out, prices can go up, third parties can swoop in. That's the sort of thing that causes shareholders to get pissed, lawsuits to get filed, etc, and is generally to be avoided. Also there are the usual deadlines of corporate life: we want to get this off the books this quarter, we want to get the merger done this fiscal year, etc. All that results in C-suite execs picking bankers who will turn things around as quickly as possible.
Juniors don't make decisions, they do analysis to support the decision makers. If a decision maker proposes something in the afternoon, he wants the analysis by morning to make the decision.
Good point. That's a good way to put it. Depending on task, unfortunately not everything is parallelizable.
But quite often, culture is the problem as well. If performance bonuses are large enough, people will compete with each other and will be at each other's throats over control of projects. Machismo and cowboy-like behavior is to be expected in some environments. I personally think those environments are toxic.
Anyway I see the a point about some tasks not being easily de-composible, but I think culture plays a significant role here as well.
We sorta do in some cases. If you've ever worked closely with an outsourced team (in my case, India) handling support cases, this ends up being almost exactly like working in shifts. We make sure to commit our code and update the bug/client ticket before leaving. Then someone on the India team can pick up the work from where we left off.
Of course, this was only used specifically for high priority cases that came directly via a client rather than a normal bug fix or feature request. But I think this reflects exactly how and when shifts should be used. Work that can wait until tomorrow doesn't need to be handed off to someone. Work that is urgent can be handled in shifts.
They would take less time because people involved would be getting adequate amounts of sleep and as a result would be able to function normally.
People who insist that other people work absurdly late hours are demonstrably not interested in efficiency or thoroughness and are actually interested in making themselves feel powerful and important by forcing other people to adhere to irrational standards.
It seems more likely that the treatment of interns is an expression of sublimated rage on the part of their supervisors. But I suppose they can laugh all the way to the bank.
Personally I'd feel safer if deals involving lots of money were conducted by well-rested, sane people. These kind of insane hours do not help your judgement, analytical thinking or productivity.
Sort-of, but not entirely. You have the typical corporate exponential bottleneck (~25+% per year attrition) and extremely competitive people, but the work isn't intellectually difficult, so people need to compete on something, and it comes down to conformity and availability. It turns out that some people can take that to an extent that would kill many of us. We're good at our stuff; they're good at theirs.
I don't think the intention is to subject analysts to "abuse" at any level beyond the abuse that comes from clients. Sure, there's a bit of hazing and testing that goes on, but it's there for a reason: when shit really does hit the fan, even the MDs (who usually have a 9-to-5 existence if they want it) are working 24/7. You can't be a front-office banker if you can't deal with those kinds of hours-- even into your 40s.
I don't think so.
IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is how Google itself went public. It's true that the investment banks have access to a larger pool of investors. But that's circular reasoning. If the investment banks didn't exist, then these capitalists would be investing in IPOs through a Dutch auction like OpenIPO.
Structured products? The investment banks earn a 50% profit margin on structured products. The people who buy structured products could double their returns by constructing their own structured products on the options and future markets. And if they're not sophisticated enough to do that without an investment bank, then they probably don't understand what they're buying!
In my corporate finance class they described how some countries (I forget which) had experimented with auctions instead of using i-bank underwriting, and in the end they had all gone back to using i-banks.
I don't know anything about M&A, but on structured products I agree they are just for customers who don't know any better.
I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it".
It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.
And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.
I imagine most of us do it because we think it's for a good reason.
People generally do not go into investment banking expecting to make a career out of it. A few-year stint as an analyst is a great way to get into HBS/GSB/Wharton, and from there into a CFO-track position at an F500. It's also a good way to get into a PE/VC firm or a hedge fund. Because those firms do their own deals and have a lot of autonomy from their "clients" (LPs), the jobs aren't quite so demanding. Finally, some people just want to stick it out for 8-10 years, save up a couple of million dollars, and do something else after.
Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America and ideally a bunch of money saved up.
For the majority of people who aren't looking to be career bankers, it wasn't "chasing a dream" but rather using a job as a stepping stone.
I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again."
My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)
That's an incredibly broad statement to make for the whole population. Everyone is different and have different tolerances.
I would agree with you to the extent that people are able to know their tolerances and stop, but that doesn't seem to be the case for banking.
I always say, Money (and hence career) is a solvable problem. Health less likely. You can't always solve away your chronic health issues by working harder, spending more money on it, etc.
It would be nice to ask all those people with chronic back pain, chronic insomnia, etc. that isn't easily fixable if the "opportunity" was worth it.
It's not missing fingers and hands like you might have encountered in an early 20th century factory, but that absolutely sounds like long term health problems from a few years of banking work to me.
The original article is about an intern who died. So your comment is really quite stupid.
If you think the goal of society is that every single individual satisfies your aesthetic preferences for what makes a good life, then you're right, it doesn't make it any less wrong.
Luckily, in the UK, we have the European Working Times directive, and so interns should not feel forced to work 70 continuous hours.
I can't speak for the UK but in France it is not allowed for an intern to work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstances, yet in many industries you still see 60+h workweeks as a standard for interns...
Because by any means, an intern subject to this kind of unacceptable working conditions will not speak up since that would annihilate his chances to get a job at the end of his internship (and might even discredit him at other companies in the same industry)
Thus "You'll have to be at your desk for insane hours. You won't be doing much work. You increase the chance of fat-finger[1] errors. We know you'll probably have to take illegal drugs to stay awake that long. We're borderline illegal. We're opening ourselves up to serious legal liability (eg, causing harm to our workers). But hey, you'll get a shitton of money. (Where shitton is not that much, and less than you'd get from other more normal jobs)"
It's a perverse incentive because there's money slopping round in banking, and there are not adequate controls on how that money makes its way from A to B to C.
The bank does $SOMETHING, and the customers are happy and pay, and the bank pays $BONUS. But there's randomness in the system and often the $SOMETHING has very little to do with actually making any money.
Why do you care? In particular, why do you care enough to force the employer and the employee into a different understanding?
People do all kinds of things that I don't want for myself. I wouldn't want to be a boxer since I don't like having people punch me in the face repeatedly.
Doesn't mean I would want to forbid others from being boxers.
Let people have their freedom and stop trying to control everyone else's lives and choices.
That really depends on what you're doing.
We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.
So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government.
That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them.
Do I have that about right?
The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.
No Lord God Mises necessary. The rules for "pure" capitalism are the minimum set needed to allow free exchange between individuals.
I was thinking about how tuna fishermen cast dragnets that often catch many other things, up to and including sharks and dolphins. Hence, you couldn't really call such a net a "tuna net", since it more just catches tuna by coincidence of catching everything even remotely fish-shaped.
This is not even wrong. It carries too many unproven, moralizing background assumptions to be wrong or right. It is an attempt to prescribe reality, not describe it.
"Capitalism is defined as a social and economic system in which capital assets are mainly owned and controlled by private persons, labor is purchased for money wages, capital gains accrue to private owners, and the price mechanism is utilized to allocate capital goods between uses."[1] Even this definition carries nasty background assumptions, namely: a class division between the laborer and the capitalist. A laborer who controlled his own means of production would never sell labor alone, he would just produce actual goods or services and sell those.
So you need at least: enforced and exclusive (meaning: no commonly-held property belonging to whole communities) private property in the means of production, enforced private contracts, and some way of separating the population into laborers and capitalists.
The key to that last element is institutionalized debt [2], usually created through outright force. When you can't find enough wage laborers to man your factories, just pass laws enclosing the commons and kicking peasants off their land! Or create a new tax or rent that can only be paid in money and kill those who disobey.
Now you've got capitalism: a laboring class exists who are paid in money wages, and a capitalist class exist who accumulate money as capital by owning the means of production, because on some level the former is created by their enforced compulsion to pay the latter. In fact, once you've got people out of self-sufficient lifestyles, the whole cycle runs itself: laborers require money wages merely to subsist! They're in debt to the Grim Reaper!
(Situations in which the working class are not so deeply in debt to the Grim Reaper are exactly the cause for the rise of consumerism: something has to stop them from saving and accumulating themselves for the whole system to not come tumbling down. Too much money-value being allocated to labor leads to inflation!)
Which then leads the accumulation cycle of capitalism to become self-reinforcing and self-optimizing, giving us the world we see today. To steal a phrase in conclusion: capitalism does not love you, and does not hate you, but your life is made of productive power it can use to accumulate money.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Economic_elements [2] - http://isreview.org/issue/84/debts-role-history
"For my first five years at Google, I pulled an all-nighter every week," Mayer said in a recent talk at New York's 92Y cultural center. "It was a lot of hard work."
Eh, depends on who you ask.
It's not believable that Mayer worked 130 hours per week for 5 years.
Wow, a great contribution to a company.
I'd think that a company that needs to perform at the highest level should do so with smart people giving their best hours and resting appropriately so they can be sharp.
The number of hours is irrelevant. Great people are great because their contributions are of great value, not because they contribute mediocre work three times as much as everybody else.
A job isn't just a job.
To make an accurate comparison we would need to consider a number of facts I'd rather not take the time to compile. Such as:
% of people who drop out of college in year 3-4 # of people who never get a job in banking, but still have the student loans % of interns who wash out % of bankers who never make it past an entry level position
Then we take the small number of people who made it through the funnel and distribute all those 120hour work weeks over their annual compensation. We'll be generous and not also add the 'keeping up with the social circle' expenses that would be necessary as well.
Given all of those factors the averages are probably slightly higher for the bankers. Still not as much as you would think. Also not a deal I would seek out in general.
Personally I'd rather work 25 hour weeks for 50k than 50 hour weeks for 100k. Definitely not 100 hour weeks for 200k.
However, both jobs are stigmatized against by major corporations and government precisely because how necessary yet independent they are. People with money and power are constantly in need of more peons to help them maintain stability and so brazenly flaunt their fabulous wealth in front of us, alluring us with the hope that we too can become like them if only we'd go submit ourselves to their devices. Blinded by this hope and seeing only so many other young brilliant people doing the same, we find ourselves pursuing careers in finance, STEM, business, etc., oblivious to the fact we're playing right into the hands of the corporations.
Oh no doubt they'll treat us well, the people at the top are generally good kind folk, but the fabulous wealth, dazzling fame, etc., that they seeded into our imaginations will never materialize in our realities... and before you know it, you're 30+, married with children, and you've come to accept the fact you'll only ever live an (upper) middle class life and the only thing still meaningful in your life is watching your kids grow up and providing for them.
To which I say: fine! Why should we ever claim that a person has no right to call themselves successful unless they've managed to beat X% of other competitors in a zero-sum competition? The whole point of societies is positive-sum collaboration in the first place.
What's wrong with having a world-class standard of living (ie: upper-middle class First Worlder with social services available as back-up), a good relationship with your partner, a good job, and children? I personally could never stand the suburban white picket fence, but I don't get why being a reasonably successful professional with a family is failure.
One problem with both occupations is lack of enforced regulation. My impression (but don't have any supporting data) is that these occupations have a number of immigrants who may not be legal working in them. I've also heard of "cash discounts", which might mean taxes are not being paid. As a straight and narrow guy, I would hate working in such a profession - it would be impossible to compete.
I've never understood why these employees (who are clearly quite intelligent) don't just pursue another career where they have more leverage. After all, I don't think they have any particular love for banking. Being on HN, the obvious suggestion would be software development (not a bad choice, considering the current state of the market), but there are a lot of other options out there as well.
Outside of London (as I'm sure you're aware), this could be offered as a senior developer salary.
Anybody saying otherwise has been reading too many tabloids.
You can find out more details about salaries in this area by using a site like glassdoor.com. This 100%+ bonus culture is simply not true (now).
Typically a VP in a high-performing group will outrank an ED or MD in a lower-ranking group (say, $150+300k vs. $300+100k).
1) it's a networking-based industry. Everyone would have to move at once, or at least a very large chunk.
2) They would have to move to somewhere in the same time zone (finance has outposts in NY, London and Singapore/HK that cover the day in 3 8-hour trading days). I suppose that's less relevant if you're working 20 hours a day.
3) They'd have to move to somewhere similarly cosmopolitan to London. No point in making all that money if you can't walk out the door and find somewhere to spend it in your few precious hours off. That rules out much of the African continent, although there are expat clusters in Angola and UAE.
There are strict limits for extra hours. As an employee working more than 48 hours per week is allowed only as an exception and working more than 60 hours per week is simply put illegal. Extra time has to be balanced with free time. We also have a minimum of 24 payed vacation days. Most people have more.
If a job contract includes provisions that explicitly give up some of basic job limits (say, no vacation, unpaid overtime, limits of shift/week length, etc) - then, barring very few exceptions (listed in the same legislation), those parts of agreement are null and void. It's the same as it's everywhere for minimal wage - even if you sign a contract that you'll work for $0.05/hour, then that provision anyway means $[minwage]/hour.
Looking anecdotally at friends in software and in finance (I went to a school with a great reputation for both cs and business ) , a good software engineering (at a good company) is not trivial to get into. On the flipside, banking was what you did if you had no discernible skills.
If you fail in software, then you're just an out-of-work programmer. If you fail in banking, you take a two-year timeout at Harvard Business School and raise a search fund before you're 30.
The upside of software is arguably better (fatter rightward tail, more interesting work, more impact, less tied to NYC and London) but the insurance is not there.
Uhh, what? How many people can get into HBS? I don't think it's that simple.
OTOH, if you fail in software, you just find another job - that's what the market is like right now.
First, I'll quibble with the definition of all-nighter: "I ended up doing an all-nighter in my first week as an intern, which is when you start work at nine, you stay until five or six the next morning, you go home, have a quick shower and then head back into the office and continue working."
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC), that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Third, he's leaving out the part where a deal dies and you find yourself with nothing to do for days. You may not experience that as an intern, but once you're actually working the 100-hour weeks will be interspersed with very dead weeks.
>100-hour weeks will be interspersed with very dead weeks
That still sounds pretty dramatic man. Would you want your doctor on that schedule? Your bus/cab driver?
Doctors in their residency have notoriously awful hours, so bad that they had to legislation was crafted merely to cap the hours at a four-week average of 80 hours (meaning that, yes, they could work 3 one hundred hour weeks and one 20-hour week).
Nowadays, they have a new system, "Doctor's Watch", where the GP's from a certain area operate at night in rotation. It's a bit more official and less personal, but it does allow those not on rotation to get a proper night's sleep. Pretty sure they'd compensate that by working less hours during the day / week.
Also, you are expected to be active researching and publishing and studying for certification; figure another few hours a day outside of the hospital when you're not on call.
The banking industry is well known for being able to make a lot of money in, but having to put in long hours. Unfortunately I can't feel sorry for people working in that industry, you have to keep an eye on the long term goals of earning 6-figure salary with bonuses that double that (I know plenty of people doing that who have "put in the time")
As an analyst, you'll be making over six figures, with a base in the $70-$80k range. You can live 20 minutes from midtown Manhattan on that, though you'll probably have to have roommates (but hey you're 22 so again, no big deal).
N.B.: This was awful and I am now safely far, far away from the banking industry.
I do not think I could be coerced to work 100 hours a week regularly for less than $50/hour of cash and equity, and the lower bound might be closer to $100/hour.
If you've got decent odds of hitting the big payoff, that's one thing, but if the expected value is low, it just becomes another lottery, with a few winners, a lot of losers, and a the winners enriching themselves at the expense of the losers.
If you can put up with the hours until you end up as a director or higher, you can pretty reliably makes over a million dollars per year (with continuous increases in salary) putting only 50-60 hrs a week.
People do banking because it's one of the lowest risk ways to becoming rich.
A 20 month commute would put me off working anywhere.
> Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Never. I don't get why people do it either, it's not like it makes you a better student. If anything, having to pull all-nighters for college can, in my limited and breezing-through-school opinion, mean only a few things:
* You only started to work on an assignment / study for an exam at the very last moment. * The US school system is terribly broken and puts a disproportionately and unhealthily high workload on its students, turning it into a Chinese sweatshop instead of a nurturing educational facility.
In software methodology, there's an expression called 'Sustainable Pace' [0]. When building software, it's pointless to go and do 'crunch time', since, one by one, your people will start underperforming or even outright crashing, leaving the remainder under duress to compensate. Doesn't work.
I don't know what these 'deals' are, but I can't see how they'd require anyone to work 21-hour workdays for any duration of time.
Personally, I work a 9-5 job as a software developer / consultant, and I close the door behind me at 5. I resist my colleague's excitement over DOING ALL THE THINGS!11one, simply because I know I can't deal with it. I've seen enough colleagues (and my superiors, lol) work too much and unable to let go of their job and becoming unfit for work. So yeah, I like to dramatise this a bit, and not allow myself to fall into the same traps. It's not like I'd gain anything from it, anyway.
Work to live, not the other way around. etc.
1. They tend to be terrible at time management and prioritization. They procrastinate until the last minute and then have no choice but to cram.
2. They do it to create a narrative that can protect both their ego and their image. "I failed the exam despite pulling an all-nighter - it was just crazy hard!" sounds a lot better than "I failed the exam because I'm dumb" or "I failed the exam because I didn't start studying until the last minute."
Around the same 2 weeks during a semester the profs will load up on all the projects, labs, and other must-dos, across all your courses. Taken separately these workload increases are modest, but as a whole you literally start running out of time.
My coping mechanism back then was to strategically not do some of these things, but then again my only intention going to school was to get a piece of paper that would unlock the Magical HR Gates at companies. My GPA isn't exactly great.
At least for me, this became an issue only if I didn't do the homework assignments and study the class notes. What would happen is that we would get a large project, and I would realize that I didn't even have a firm grasp of the material. So I'd have to work two or three times as much, first to understand the prerequisite subjects, and then start working on the project itself.
After I figured this out and started to study regularly, projects started to become progressively easier, and as a result took less time. Even when professors loaded up on all of them within a short period of time, I could knock them out quickly because I was already very familiar with the subject.
It's like picking up a new programming language. There's the learning curve of the language itself, and then there's the learning curve of all the tools. But if you are already familiar with the tools themselves, you can learn the language much faster and get projects done much more quickly.
Again related to your post, this sparse sleep schedule was caused by college. I go to Caltech (for those who haven't heard of it, its probably pretty similar to MIT in terms of workload/intensity) and have a fairly typical sleep schedule among my peers. I'm pretty sure that every term (10 weeks) that I've been here I've had at least one 40+ hour period with 0 sleep, and had a term where I would sleep from about 7AM to 10AM every weekday (and then at least 10 hours/day on weekends). These longs hours are mostly caused by problem sets + studying, and things get a bit worse when you're actually too busy working to have time to go to class (which is a common occurrence).
As for why students do it, its to get everything done. Typical courseload is 5 courses/term, and starting in the middle of sophomore year most people are taking courses that would be intro graduate level courses at most institutions. 4 advanced math + 1 social studies/humanities course definitely keep you busy.
Also, among my group of peers, we typically define an "all-nighter" to be where you just complete the planned activities for the following day without any sleep at all. This generally involves staying awake from one morning (10AM) to dinner time on the next day (~5PM), making an all-nighter be ~30 hours. If an all-nighter were defined more leniently, we'd have a depressingly large number of all-nighters.
Note: Most of the above applies to my more difficult terms. I've also had terms where I slept 7+ hrs/night and maybe only worked until the sun rose about 2 or 3 times.
Your opinion has been proven wrong by every single scientific study on sleep. Humans do not effectively adapt to less sleep. Error rates go way up, productivity goes down disproportionally, focus goes down, etc.
Are there any studies that compare how much people can done in a few months on different sleep schedules? I'm imagining some sort of cognitive task (like reading books and passing a comprehension test, or working through all the proofs in a math book) where the goal of the participants in the experiment is to accomplish said task as many times as possible in a fixed time period. This would be very difficult to design because one needs to decide on cognitive difficulty for the task (if the task was very easy, then less sleep = more time would almost certainly help) and have roughly equivalent ability between the 2 groups. This study wouldn't capture dealing with context switches or retention of information; just how much can be done in a fixed time period.
As far as I know, such a study doesn't exist. Anecdotally, I've seen many people make the decision to trade sleep for more time even while working on cognitively difficult tasks. Personally, I feel like I accomplished more during my terms in school than I could have sleeping 7+ hours/night.
On the other hand, I acknowledge long term sleep deprivation is not good for long term health, and I've personally seen my ability to run with intensity suffer during periods of low sleep.
In summary, I don't doubt the long term effects of low sleep on health, I slightly doubt the negative long term effects of sleep on productivity (know people who have been doing uberman for years and swear by it), and I heavily doubt that people can't be more productive over <3 month window by sleeping less than the recommended 8 hours per day.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1739867/pdf/v057...
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071308/
[3] http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1997-07865-006
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Effects_on_th...
"I am not the exception" is a good principle to live by, but it is also important to note that sometimes you are the exception, you are in exceptional circumstances, or you can become the exception (through exceptionally hard work for example, or exceptional stupidity. Being the exception is not always a good thing).
My experience is similar to lightcatcher's. When I was younger, before I was married and had kids, it was common for me to sleep 0-3 hours for a few days while I was working on something and then crash for a few days, sleeping 10-14hrs. Basically I slept when I felt tired, stayed up if I still felt alert. At the time I did not feel less productive and I did not feel like I was putting out lower quality work. Looking back objectively those were the most productive times of my life to date, and the quality of the work was on-par or better with anything else I have done. Temporary sleep deprivation under specific conditions was highly effective by all the objective measures I can think of.
Fortunately, we have facts about this, so we don't need opinions. Its not true, although it can appear true over short periods of time. More importantly, the amount of sleep a person needs can vary a lot between individuals - you might only need 6 hours/night, but that doesn't make it physically possible for everyone to survive like that.
How much you get done = rate of work * time working.
Many studies have shown that the rate at which people can "work" (which means something like respond to visual stimulus) decreases when people sleep less. I haven't seen a study that compares this decrease in rate to the increase in time available for work.
If I have to do a task 1000 times each day and each time takes me 2 seconds longer on 5 hours of sleep than it does on 8, it'll take me 2000s ~= 34 extra minutes to do the task 1000x when I'm on less sleep, but then I still have 2.5 hours left out of the 3 that I decided not to sleep. (Numbers from this inspired by [1])
I acknowledge the health issues of chronic sleep deprivation.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/sleep-deprivation-w...
First, as stated, these are interns, which wouldn't have the money to live in NYC. Second, three hours of sleep may help but in the long run it is just as unhealthy. This is shown by the answer to myth #3 on WebMD's "7 Myths About Sleep" (http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/7-myths-about-...).
"Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die."
How many times did take prescription pills to stay awake? Mix that in with lack of sleep and lack of exercise (after all, how are you going to exercise if you are working all of the time) and you have a potential recipe for disaster. Plus, there are the possibilities of health conditions that the individual may not know about or may not want to disclose in this particularly fast-paced and competitive environment.
I still agree it's an insanely unhealthy and stressful lifestyle, which is why I never even considered it, but these interns are certainly able to make it home rather quickly from the office. And judging from Facebook statuses and casual conversation, they often take pride in all the hours they put in. This is a very ambitious crowd.
"They're just not aware of how sleepy they are," says Thomas Roth, Ph.D., sleep researcher at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
"Wakefulness for 18 hours makes you perform almost as though you're legally drunk," says Walsleben.
I am not arguing against moderation in our sleeping patterns, and I am not contesting the results of the many studies published. I just find it hard to swallow when we draw these conclusions and state them like they are universal truths about all people in all circumstances when the reality is that people and circumstances vary far more than the studies account for, especially since we don't really understand the causal relation between sleep and performance.
It was also pretty rare. In the vast majority of classes I took, an all-nighter was never necessary so long as you didn't procrastinate. It was just in one or two classes where we'd unexpectedly get assigned huge projects at the end of the semester.
It may not have killed you, but somewhere along the way, something you did, or something that happened to you cruelly robbed you of your critical thinking skills. The non-sequitur in the above sentence is so obvious, it's almost shocking that you don't see it.
Also:
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC),
20 minutes? If you live across the street. Or in the same building, maybe.
that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
When he said that all you have time to do is take a shower before heading back to the office, he meant just that.
You aren't just "quibbling" with his definitions here; you're playing semantic head games.
How many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count.
Enough to realize that it's a really stupid idea (for the same reasons everyone else is saying), like a whole lot of other stupid things one does during those years. Like drinking before your midterm, or waking up in bed with someone without being able to remember, for the life of you, how you got there, or why.
Never have, never will.
So as long as you don't die doing something, it's okay?
Every single time I have done that, in college or grad school, it has fucked me over far worse than if I had just planned ahead, scheduled my work well, and gotten plenty of sleep like a sensible person.
Go tell someone who has epilepsy that, douchebag...that's exactly what happened to the BoA guy.
5-6 sleep cycles is healthy. Three hours is like 2.
There were many times when people just wouldn't respect other people's time. At 5PM I would get an email: "Hey, I need this done for tomorrow morning"..."So why didn't you just tell me earlier? I know you knew about it in advance."
Was it basically deals going on that needed to be analyzed quickly so they could make a decision?
The reason why I said the analysts knew they needed the reports before 5 o'clock is because they were the once who set those meetings up weeks in advance (they are institutional clients, it doesn't just happen last minute), they just forgot to share it with our team.
I actually liked working on deals that needed to be analyzed quickly, it was usually something new and I got to be more creative.
Not only are bankers by definition terrible managers, but there's absolutely zero incentive for them to try to treat the junior people below them well. Junior people's time is viewed as an consumable resource like an oil well or a coal seam.
As a result, the sort of "pizza-sized team" project management that is the heartbeat of software companies is just a total unknown on the corporate finance/M&A side of investment banks. (Less so in consulting.)
Worse, there is no concern for what we used to call "yield loss:" slides or analyses that we'd create because a senior banker demanded them that were never presented to the client or in which they client had no interest. Countless times I've been the creator of and recipient of extensive presentations of which maybe one slide was relevant. I recall numerous instances of sending such books by messenger or FedEx to hotels/partners' houses, only to learn that they were never even picked up, let alone looked at.
As a VC/private equity guy, the presentations and investment memos that were no doubt largely written between 2 and 5 AM were mostly discarded; I extracted the few numbers I needed and tossed them, as I wanted the raw data from management and not the bankers' glossy sales pitch. I had stacks of these things in my office.
I'm not of the opinion that investment banking adds no value. But I firmly believe that the culture and habits of investment banks result in piles of unnecessary work that just burns out everyone associated with the enterprise and is not in any meaningful way related to the quality or value of the service delivered.
Clients don't care how many hours you worked, they care about the end results.
(I make exception here for situations with real economic deadlines like M&A auctions, but the biggest issues are not usually financial--they're business issues that bankers don't actually help much with compared to strategy consultants--I was one of those for a summer too, and the hours were long but reasonable.)
The question become then, why do clients allow them to get away with it? Do they satisfy their clients to such an extent that they don't care about bloated costs or do the clients just not know?
Edit: changed metal to mettle >_<" thanks
And for a client, the deadline is more important than the money sometimes. I mean, when you see what these firms bill, it's obviously money is no object for the customer... because damn.
If the job market keeps worsening and huge unemployment/underemployment/unpaid work becomes The New Normal, it will become time to have a hard conversation about hard caps on working hours as a means to improve quality of life for the workers and provide more jobs to the non-workers. You want to put in 100 hours? You'd better be co-owner.
The more general excuse for overworking bankers is to limit the number of people accountable for a particular project, meaning no sharing of workload even when it would be efficient to do so.
There's no deceit here -- the investment banks clearly articulate what the lifestyle will be like, and people sign up for the pay. I know, I did an internship at Lehman Brothers and saw it firsthand -- people staying till 3am just to impress. I managed to keep my weekly hours under 40 by automating my job in Visual Basic, and then decided I wanted to make productivity tools for the general market instead of in-house.
The article makes it sound as if the interns could just play FarmVille all night, as long as they’re at their desk. A lot of people would be doing that anyways at home. Is that a correct assessment?
I don't understand. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them?
The real issue is if he was paid for overtime and what was his contract details about overtime. Nowadays, a lot of employees demand overtime from their workers without properly compensating them.
That really doesn't sound any different from doing field operations the military. Except without the shower.
Why do people feel the need to put down the jobs of others? Is it because they are different? Is it jealousy because they are not smart enough or don't themselves have the will power? I don't get it.
I have absolutely no experience on what particular type of tasks are done in these positions. Could someone provide more insight? Maybe there could be opportunity to automate this work, at least partially?
But of course, I'm not a banker.
If you have depression, anxiety, or panic disorder, you probably shouldn't consider an analyst program to be a viable career option, just as being a pro basketball player isn't viable for 99+ percent of people. Sorry, but it's just not going to work; those typically manageable conditions become crippling disabilities in the crucible of a 100-hour work week. You should probably find another way; if you're smart, you can do something more interesting than analyst dreck, get an MBA, and move in as an associate-- or, perhaps even better, stick with technology and move in as a quant and have a ~10-hour day.
This person had epilepsy, which is potentially fatal. He never should have taken on an analyst gig.
I'm not saying this isn't horrible and wrong-- obviously, it is-- but I wish in general that young people were more aware of the reality of health risks. It's one thing to go into a job like that knowing what the risks are, but a lot of people have no clue.