Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks Move to Startups

> Who in their right mind chooses to give up a huge salary in favor of an equivalently time intensive startup which pays 1/10 as well?

If that one tenth the salary is enough to cover your monetary needs, then why pay the price for the other nine tenths?

I couldn't make it through the first few paragraphs of this article, which used the drop in the percentage of students at HBS/Wharton going into finance as an indicator that somehow these folks were going into tech because they were "fed up" with 90-hour work weeks. Comparing data from 2006 and 2007 to current data is meaningless. The banking industry has retrenched tremendously in the financial crisis. While the top banks are still very profitable, they are doing more with less, and laid off 500,000 people between 2008 and 2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/wall-street-layoffs....

The business school is located right behind the medical school

It now reads "master's candidates in finance", which is a program at Princeton: http://www.princeton.edu/bcf/graduate/

Well, people are proud of being competitive; but more to the point, if they like the sort of work they're doing, then they don't mind doing it to extremes, for a while at least. I do film production, and when that's in full swing it's 80-hour weeks, albeit for only a month or two at a time. It's not all that profitable (partly because I can't move to LA), and work product is sadly lacking in cultural value as often as not, but the work itself is very satisfying.

Money, prestige and the promise of future success makes 22 year olds do stupid things.

I got a lot of BS answers to this question when I wanted to be an investment banker. The only reasonable answer I got is that it's a low-risk way to make a ton of money. Instead of risk you give up your life and/or health.

The opportunities investment banking opens up are fantastic. It's the easiest way, and often times the only way, to get into private equity, hedge funds, or corporate development, and make a ton of money while doing so. It also helps get into a great business school. The modeling/valuation work is also something that I and most finance people find the most interesting, even though that is probably 5% of the job for an analyst. It's something I was and am still willing to do but it's very hard to get an interview if you didn't go to a top school or know anyone in banking, neither of which I have going for me.

I enjoy what I do now, corp finance for a tech company, but banking would be ideal.

The point is that the older employees are hazing the new ones to limit entry into the company. Employment within finance is declining sharply. It would not be shocking if it returns to its low level of prestige that it was at before the 1980s.

I would say that it's not a great sign that Ivy types are looking to recreate the happy-slappy Greenspan years in another sector.

My father worked for Goldman in the 1990s, up to a relatively high level. He was home at 7 pm each day and would often eat breakfast with us before school, and he rode the subway to work. Now, he would also often be commuting cross-continent and be gone for all the weekdays at a time, and would have to spend some time reading reports and financial journals on weekends, but still he never went through the sort of fraternity absurdities that seem common now, even when he started in the industry in his early 30s.

Also, clients have more options now and can demand more from the banks -- their relative bargaining position is weaker. Being that they're all public companies now rather than partnerships, the entire culture has shifted, and they're under more performance pressure. The raw dollar amounts are much higher, but the core business model is eroding.

OK, if you're a client, do you want to have your account handled by some frenetic kid on amphetamines working 100 hours a week, or do you want it handled by someone with class who is going to likely be with the firm for the rest of his life? Junior on speed is going to die of a heart attack at 27 and might jump to another firm or a hedge fund. Taking your confidential information with him in his head to some other firm who might use that information against you some day.

Why would you trust your business with a team of substance-enhanced Juniors with impeccable academic credentials?

Like Bill Solomon recently said on his 100th birthday (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-02/billy-salomon-turns...):

"When you are a partnership there is a different atmosphere,” Salomon said. “You’re working for each other.” That discipline helped instill a culture where clients trusted their advisers, he said."

That trust is gone, and it can't be replaced by just throwing amphetamine-fueled-all-nighters at the problem.

If you can do it for say 10 years and make enough to retire comfortably that can sound like a good deal.

(To me the more curious question is why anyone would employ people to do that, given that you get less done in an 80-hour week than a 35-hour one)

Or you do like a friend of mine - you work for 3-4 years like a slave, once you move in the hierarchy you still work 90 hours a week but that now include "networking" activities like golf and extended lunches.

You drag it while you can, buying a new flat cash with the bonus you get each year. At 32, the bank finally noticed, you are fired with a few years salary and you retire in your all-paid luxury flat, enjoy income from your other 5 flats, get kids and enjoy seeing them grow while living in a luxury.

The only problem of that lifestyle is that in the first 3-4 years, you have basically 1 chance in 10 to make it through. After working in such pressure, you are brainwashed, so it takes some serious willpower to first invest your money properly instead of living the high life and then prepare your exit strategy.

edit: the bank finally notice that you are not as eager as the next batch of freshly promoted coworker. So if your department made slightly less profit, you get selected in the next batch of firing that happen generally just before bonus time.

People aren't that delicate. I've known factory workers who've done 50-80 hour weeks for decades on end. When I was a machine operator at Harte-Hanks outside of Baltimore, I worked a 76 hour week without a day off for three months straight (12h * 5, 8h * 2). They refused to open the plant on Thanksgiving, so it broke my streak.

Right now, somebody in Germany is wondering how I can deal with only having 2 weeks of vacation a year, and speculating that it could lead to serious medical problems.

My father had a series of mini-strokes after having a pleasant salmon dinner.

Most people who go into finance do so right after undergrad, when they're 22-23. Working a few years of 80-90 hour weeks* at a major bank almost guarantees admission to a top business school, allows you to save up a significant amount of money for later ventures, and is a resume line-item that carries almost universal weight in the F500 business world.

*) Although that's more typical of M&A than finance as a whole. My brother is a trader at one of the big banks and probably works more like 60.

Startups are rarely as bad as banking, where you can do 100 hour weeks several weeks in a row, have vacations canceled, miss weddings and funerals. Even though you're expected to work more at startups, most founders realize their employees need time off. I could be wrong, but I'd say a majority of startup employees work less than 60 hours per week.

Also the work at investment banks is boring and monotonous. Doing 100 page pitch decks, knowing very well that 90 of them are going to get thrown out.

Yes, but it's not a badge of honor; it's a matter of necessity, and the tech world nowadays is sufficiently aware of the performance detriment that comes with working long hours.

Was it mentioned what was going to happen after the time spent on the project?

If I were that candidate and it was mentioned that once the emergency was past you were going to take two or three days off (not counting against days off) to unwind, then I would take that as a fair trade of time.

If it was expected for you to show up the next day and continue on as if nothing happened then I would pass too. That's a sign your company doesn't respect people's time. Which as CTO reflects on you.

The rules may be different for you being CTO and you have a vested interest in the company succeeding, but it's hard to communicate that to someone that you also don't have vested interest enough to get someone else to spend the extra time with no real recognition or compensation.

Banking moves fast. Can you seriously not imagine one of the hundred possibilities that would require immediate action? Banks also have huge customers that they simply don't say "No" to, without consequences.

A "warning" typically just leads to analysts eating hours (not recording all the hours they actually worked), especially for fixed fee projects.

You mean the finance work? Although almost all of it has tax implications, most actual tax work is handled by accounting and law firms. The finance folks do the bread and butter of corporate financial transactions and asset management. They underwrite IPO's, put together bond issues, arrange lines of credit, and work out mergers and divestitures. Very little of it arises due to the tax system. Even the law firms doing the legal side of these transactions don't devote huge resources to tax. The NYC firm where I used to work, which had a top-rated tax practice, had about 1/10 as many lawyers working on tax matters as they did working on M&A or securities matters. I'd imagine the accounting firms have a higher percentage of tax people, though.

You've already given out the news, it's the film that comes at 11.