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Comment by BadassFractal | Hacker News Reader

The part that I totally don't grok about big name consulting companies, or Wall Street, is how people there are able to get any work done while sleeping 3-4 hours a night for months at a time.

Most will agree that you need a continuous stream of good nights of sleep if you're doing any kind of work that requires creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles etc. Sure, you can miss sleep once or twice here and there, and you can still get away with doing menial repetitive tasks, but even those are going to be a bit of a struggle.

In software, we clearly understand that people who continuously work 14 hour days are not actually producing 14 hours worth of clear-headed work. In fact, once you factor in the damage generated by the low quality of deliverables, they might be producing far less than even 8 hours of work. As an industry we've done decades of deathmarches, and we mostly know that those things don't really work. Has this realization not hit the rest of the work world, or are we as developers simply wimpier than other professions?

How does this work in the Wall Street world? Is the idea that it doesn't matter how good your work is, as long as you show martyr-level dedication to the company? Or, are these people superhuman, and are they able to do 14 hours worth of quality work every day for ever? In which case, can I have whatever they're having?

I'd really love to understand this.

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While clearly there are diminishing returns on the number of hours worked in a day, the limit of productivity is way higher than 8. I'd guesstimate that the average person can do 10 solid hours, working on 75% for another 2, and 50% after that. That doesn't mean your work is only 50% as good, you just start slowing down.

And I'm including small off task sessions in that time. When these guys say 100 hours, they aren't stopping the clock when they are reading an article on ESPN.

I know several engineers and programmers who are doing over 10 a day.

People vary on how much they need to sleep, but I really doubt they are only getting 3-4 nights for months at a time. 100 hours a week gets you almost 10 hours a day off. They live close to work, eat takeout at work, get people to do their housemaking duties. That leaves enough for 5-7 a night. I'm sure less on weekdays and more on weekends.

As to why programmers are more sensitive to work/life balance, it's probably because the programming industry has been hot for a long time. Plus, programmers are extremely productive because of how software scales. But industries just develop different cultures. Many tech companies compete for talent based on perks, but finance is mostly based on money.

There is also a bit of hazing element to the finance industry hierarchy. You work less as you guy up. The time is sort of "paying your dues." The ones doing 100 hours are 21-23 years old and can still handle it.

In consulting and law, the billable hour creates perverse incentives. I can be twice the lawyer than someone who bills 15% more hours, but they are 15% more profitable.

Finally, a lot of people can't hack it. The burn out rate in big banks is absurd. The average person lasts less than two years I believe.

> Plus, programmers are extremely productive because of how software scales.

Not sure what you meant by this. Software engineering gets harder as a system scales, not easier.

But one programmer can write a piece of code that runs on a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million servers. Most other workers can't multiply their output that way.

You're assuming that big name consulting companies etc are actually doing complex work.

They're not.

As an analyst/associate you're spending most of your time crunching out excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. Something the average highschooler could do.

I would be somewhat more charitable and claim that they do some "fit the client problem to an existing in-house problem solving models" exercises as well.

I disagree. Having spent 6 years working in one, my tasks ranged from spreadsheets and decks to coding java, dev ops, all forms of testing and plenty of technical design work. It's hard to lump entire big consulting companies into one category as once you get to 100K+ employees the company is like an entire world within itself. I agree that in general, the consulting arms of said companies do not do complex technical work. When you are integrating and upgrading a SAP implementation with 70+ existing systems, across 6 continents, with hundreds of stakeholders, things get complex.

This makes me wonder why they're asking one guy to do the work of two or three people. If it's really that simple, and doesn't require specialized skills, there are plenty of archaeology and anthropolgy grads out there, realizing they made a mistake in choosing a major, who would love a job crunching numbers on Wall St. Why not hire more?

As others have said it likely just depends on the ratio of busy work to complex mental work they're doing.

I had a stint of several months so far this year where I was putting in 100+ hours/week of manual labor at a day job and then coming home to do a couple hours of programming before sleep. Hell, I even started learning Thai during my half hour breaks. I didn't find myself having any serious difficulty maintaining that lifestyle after having adapted to it. I honestly felt great but couldn't shake the thought that I was probably abusing my body to the point where I'd pay for it later.

Oh and yes, some coworkers liked to toss out the "superhuman" quip but I don't think I was doing anything others my age couldn't do. Youth and determination make for a powerful combination.

This basically means that the amount of time that requires intense intellectual strain is way below 100 h/week on Wall Street, but the amount of work that requires much lower intelligence ("busy work") is significant.

This would explain a lot. It looks like a prime target for [more] automation, too.

Anecdotal evidence of course:

It's mindless work, mostly. There's little creative work. And you're pumped up on adrenalin.

I spent 2 months in consulting. Here's a sample.

We slept on average 2-4 hours a night. We traded off eating in the morning vs an extra half hour's sleep - after about two weeks, I yielded and did like everybody else (no breakfast, even though the buffet was sumptuous including home pickled herrings I still dream about). The partners/EMs would meet with the client and then tell us the 400 slides that needed to be produced for next week's board meeting, and sometimes fleshed them out. We then put together the slides, and did whatever BS research needed to be done to justify the numbers (quick Google, hit a database, or - before my time - systematic interviewing of 300 people to create the data necessary, yes, the consultants did the interviewing!). An EM put it to me like this: "Are we 20x as expensive as their in-house talent, certainly; but we'll get it done 10x faster, and without any visual mistakes, and that's all they care about."

I took a weekend (yes, "took" a weekend, because we were supposed to work every day, although we could come in at 10am on Sunday to catch up on sleep) to see an opera in Italy. The train did not have mobile reception. I discovered upon arriving in Verona that I had to produce 50 slides - each with 4 graphs I had to calculate - in 6 hours. I did them, emailed them, went to the opera, had an excellent roast beef with Amarone, got drunk on negronis, came to the hotel to find more work. I passed out on the bed from exhaustion and set about doing it on the train back to Zurich (unrelated factoid: on the train to Italy, Italian customs walked through the train and interrogated the only black guy in the wagon).

One of the team members cracked and overslept by one hour one day instead of turning up for the morning cab to the client. She was mocked about it for a month. We ate sandwiches from a vending machine in the client's corridor. Our EM threw a fit once because McKinsey had booked out one of the 5* hotels in town, BCG the other (both working for the same client as us, funnily enough) and we were stuck with the Ibis Hotel. I didn't understand the swearing in German but I still remember the sound of "Ibis Hotel" fired in anger. I thought it was funny, personally I didn't care, Ibis hotel or luxury palace, it's still a bed and a warm powershower, and I can't have breakfast anyway.

Everybody got extremely depressed once when one of the partners went home at 7pm right after posting a Facebook status update along the lines of "Damn, still at work :( :(". Our return taxi (S-class of course) was booked for something like 2-3am...

I made around 2k/month from my food allowance alone because I ate sandwiches and it was no questions asked cash. We had steak delivery to change us from the vending machine sandwiches, but couldn't enjoy it. Ate the steak in front of the laptop. The hotels and limos were awesome, but what is the point of a balcony the size of a small swimming pool if you never see the sun, and what is the point of a 2m long jacuzzi if you don't have time to take a bath? Some people stopped ironing their shirts to get more sleep, I tried to use room service or my own iron and starch because I foolishly thought I had a career to manage (the EMs didn't care, it's not like us junior folks were client facing).

The lack of sleep was physically painful. By the third night all your body would ache, your eyes would ache from behind, headaches were constant, you were in zombie mode. It sucked but you just saddled up and kept going because everybody else did. Visual perfectionism was constant - I was told off for being 5 minutes late to a cab pickup, and for misaligning an object on a slide by a millimetre. After this, you just stress yourself into double checking your work, all the time, sometimes triple checking, even though it's just as painful. You also eat more from stress, so put on weight. One EM put on enough weight in a month to crack his suit trousers, and went to the supermarket during lunch to buy a couple new pairs.

So yeah, productivity takes a hit, but the sheer amount of hours and generally, the type of people who get into these firms (overachieving, slightly hyperactive, energetic, driven) are more productive per hour on this type of work.

At the end of the case, about half the team quit. Aforementioned lady went to the Kennedy School in Harvard and works for the Brasilian government or something. I joined a trading company. The EM moved to Australia to work on miners' strategy, the other EM to Saudi doing more consulting, but with different working conditions (apparently they get weekend business class flights to anywhere in the world no questions asked in that office).

A few months later, I read in the paper that the client had been acquired by a large foreign group. I thought back about what we were actually doing, and I realized there had been three groups: the management, the board and the shareholders. We worked for the management since they had the power to hire us for more cases. We justified their bad decisions to the board, who themselves had to cover their own behinds enough to be able to pretend they did their work to the shareholders. The company's loss in value over two years was a direct result of a bad strategic decision by management which handed over the market to the one direct competitor. The board was also at fault for not thinking about the stupidity of the one decision in question. In my mind at least.

I'm told it's not always like this, that sometimes you're sent to Sydney with a $40k/month expense account and 9-5 "strategy level" work, that after the financial crisis belts were tightened etc. Hell I had drinks in the Sydney Sheraton spa with a McKinsey buddy recently who was doing just that. Nevertheless I'm not going back to this industry any time soon, it's just not worth it when it's not your equity.

Trading was a different type of intensity. After a particularly active day, even though I had worked only from 9am til around 4.30pm (no lunch, no time), I passed out on the train home. Here, a mistake didn't cost you just a bollocking, it cost the company thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions were usually gains, after the other side made a mistake, we were careful). I was a lot more conscientious than my predecessor and only made three mistake in thousands of trades, saving the company a lot of money just by doing my job properly on the execution side; I think my biggest execution mistake lost us $30,000 on $10m so not too bad. Initially, I took the habit from consulting over and had dinner at the office, reheating supermarket dishes in the microwave; but the office was empty after 6pm which was a big realization, that these people made a lot more money and were a lot happier than "us consultants" whilst working less. I guess that's when what you say above about quality vs quantity hit me.

What was motivation? Well, consulting firms sell you the idea that you'll be at the top of the world if only you stick it out long enough, part of the elite that you presumably aren't yet (even if born there). I think banks are similar. (I later read Richistan, linked it with observations, and realized this "elite" was really just the lowest rung, the "employee" layer in the multi layered world of wealth; that these employees, if unable to ignore it, generally get pretty depressed about being in contact with the upper layers all the time; that wealth is really a relative, not absolute thing, above having enough to eat and sleep and send your kids to school.)

Ego is a big thing. A lot of consultants/bankers think themselves more hardcore, smarter, better somehow than the plebs (a lot of them are mercenaries, understand the game and go through the motion for the paycheck). You'd hear people introducing others as "it's so and so, he's from GS IBD" and a wave of relief would go over your body as you would think "ok, that's one of us, I can trust he understands, I can really talk to him". Even today, when I tell finance people I was in finance and talk about markets, they relax and get a lot more open. It's funny because that's rarely the case with developers.

Money is another, not the money right now but the promise of big bucks if only (again) you stick it out for a few more years. The high drop out rate is a function of realizing that either you won't make it, or that no money is worth it, or - in fewer cases - that someone with the level of talent/intelligence/drive these companies select for can actually make a lot more money/achievement/impact somewhere where you're not working for someone else. Or you realize that you're living someone else's dream (perhaps one fabricated by careful PR from the firms in question, and peer pressure) and you go on to live your own life.

The funny thing is that entrepreneurs are very respected amongst consultants and bankers despite making - on average - a lot less money and having a lower net worth. Stick it out til private equity or hedge funds and you'll have a shot at billions which is much rarer in startup land. Yes, but those billions have someone else's name on them, and that ultimately makes all the difference in the status pissing contest. YMMV.

I have a feeling this comment is going to come bite me back some time in the future :P

That was a great writeup. I always wondered what these people actually do. Not surprising that most of it is BS.

What do you need 400 slides about anyway? 50 slides with 4 graphs each? Who is the audience there and how can they possibly parse that into anything meaningful?

It's sleight of hand. Imagine presenting all the data in one go, in every slice possible, and answering every question the Board might actually have. And if they doubt your numbers, you give them a 500 page booklet in size 8 font and say "it's all here, you're welcome to double check!" knowing full well they don't have the time.

I made several slides with over 300 PowerPoint "objects". I think it was a set of 20 things which were sliced by 10 metrics each of which had its own little circle with a text box inside and different formatting. Didn't know how to make that as a table so they insisted on the circles and text boxes approach. Took me about an hour a slide I think including all the aligns.

The audience for the stuff you produce is the client. If it's the board of directors, they have an hour a week to check progress and hear recommendations. The more you bury them under noise, the more CYA you provide them to say you had all the data to back your recommendation. The best consultants actually manage to convince you that whatever decision they reach was the sound one.

I found much of the same cognitive biases - particularly regarding significance, and saying "I don't know" - in management later. People simply don't care to learn basic stats or think about what they are doing as making a model of the world and then taking decisions based on it.

So the question is, did it work? (the consulting that is). You make it sound like a huge waste of money.

It was a huge waste of the shareholders' money. It saved management's careers and allowed them to transition nicely. Gave board members the confidence to pretend they did their job. So, it depends for whom.

Interesting. I don't see how a board could be convinced by arguments a consulting company hired by management; how could it work more than once? If you found they were doing stupid things you wouldn't report them, would you?

Well put it this way: you're 65, you've led a few companies but now sit on 10-15 corporate boards of multi-billion dollar companies in your spare time, flying around the world for the meetings, there's another 10 people like you in the room, you're meeting the consultants and management after a long lunch (possibly boozy), you have a hunch about why the company is losing sales, but then the consultants put forward this extraordinarily well documented case of why there's 6 other explanations which combined have led to the decline in sales. So you doubt yourself, a little bit. There ARE after all 400 slides in the deck. And all these numbers, and the immense effort the consultants put in, and the way they have convincing answers for everything. At the time, it looked like a cool bet and could have paid off well if it had worked out. Earnings were through the roof for over a year too, so it did pad the treasury.

Can't go against fate, right? Oh well, there's still 14 board seats left. And the acquisition is better than nothing, looks like a good price. Even if your hunch is right, what's the point of punishing a team that's halfway out of the door anyway for a set of bad decisions that can't be reversed? Once you reach that conclusion, you switch off, let the German drone on in his thick accent, and think about what you'll get your granddaughter for her 5th birthday next week in Milwaukee - what is a good German souvenir that a 5 year old would enjoy? You're lost on the meeting from now on.

As for bad management, well, is it their fault? Was it part of their "schooling"? (There's a saying in trading that losses are "tuition fees") Were there extenuating circumstances? I can name (but won't, because I'm a nobody and you never know when you might need connections) a series of well known political and business figures in California, for example, who have provably run large companies to the ground (as far as my humble, not-very-profitable, not-that-learned opinion is concerned) and now enjoy exceptional careers - it's amazing how far being born in the right place and with the right network can carry you.

Since one is allowed to criticize one's own politicians, look at Sarkozy, who was voted out and replaced by what is probably the least attractive, least popular, least "presidential" candidate the left ever put up, as a protest vote more than anything, who somehow still clings to the leadership and has even managed to make himself favorite for 2017 on the right (he even had the balls to rename his party after the US Republicans). No-one, in his own party or its membership, has the balls to pull the trigger. People don't rock the boat. They make excuses, and things just decay slowly. Accountability is hard work and without help, usually leads to the loudmouth getting shot down.

I remember someone once saying that one misgiving of youth is to think you have to be exceptional when really, just doing the job properly is often enough to make you exceptional compared to your peers. I do think that business performance is naturally high-dimensional with very sparse data (high-p, low-n, with non-linear behaviour) which makes it very difficult to understand, more than people expect. For example, a LOT of companies are just levered beta - they go up faster than the market, and go down faster than the market - which makes whoever is in charge look like a genius during any extended boom, and remain a genius if he retires before the bust (putting the blame on the new guy, naturally; I'm not at all thinking about a certain company with a blue logo and two initials, or a certain "American" insurance company with three). Experienced business people are at least instinctively aware of this and avoid making too harsh judgement calls based on simplistic evidence.

Of course all I've said applies to my own conclusions. Maybe my team members and I were overworked and slightly paranoid or annoyed and saw what we wanted to see. But I'd say the probability on that one is pretty high on the side of "management screw up".

I unfortunately don't have much work experience yet, still in school. But I do know measuring performance is hard, and if you're too strict you leave out learning opportunities -- all good points. But still I would only trust a consultancy in an adversarial setting (board hiring to check management), or if there was a firm that could establish a reputation of being ruthless (seems hard to make work due to inherent reward conflict).

So the existence of this kind of thing shows, to me, those boards are either incapable or ineffective.

I'm convinced Francois Hollande is France playing a cruel joke on itself.

As (I think Zappa) said, "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex".

The way I read it from 6,000 miles away and little caring (after all I'm unlikely to ever go "back"), DSK had cleared the field of any decent competition and was going to take the election in a landslide. With enormous international experience, the IMF experience to show that he was a "nice" socialist, not one of these bad "reds" who'd have the Russian tanks in the Champs Elysees on day 2, and Sarkozy's unpopularity, it was a done deal and he was focusing on aligning interests.

Except Sarko's side managed to get the evidence out somehow (Sofitel is owned by pro-Sarko interests, etc.) and destroyed him much as Herman Cain was destroyed when he got too popular - via allegations of sexual misconducts (here, unlike with Cain, justified by later events). It left us scratching our heads at how DSK could be so stupid so close to the finish line (after all, you can do it all you want in France, where the police and media will cover up for you, but to do it in the US which has clean rule of law? insane). Hollande kind of got leadership by default, and Sarko STILL lost.

Honestly, Hollande is doing what he can. I have some sympathy for him and I thought he handled crises remarkably considering low expectations. I savour the irony of the systematic destruction of individual rights occurring under the PS' watch, arguably the "good guys" on that front.

Very interesting writeup, I appreciate you taking the time!

Can I ask what exactly got you into this life? Was it just the drive to make big money and be one of the "elites"? Family pressure?

I went to Oxford as well. There's a sort of soft sell there at recruitment season: It's heavily implied that the most successful people go into Banking and Consulting. They don't say it out loud, it's just what everyone concludes after seeing all the PR.

I caught up with a friend who did the same engineering course. He's in private equity, like many of our classmates. We talked about this one girl who decided to actually go into engineering. She joined a company called SpaceX as an early employee back in the days after uni. How we wish we'd done that.

I don't know if it's the same for you Oxonians but my colleagues who headed for consulting/banking straight after graduation are often retraining to go into engineering, and many of the engineers are now heading towards consulting! I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. The engineers want money and status, the consultants want meaning and a healthier life.

Although SpaceX is pretty awesome. I wanted to apply to Lockheed, Northrop and anybody else involved in aviation and space (reading about the X-37B these days, I still get that pulse of excitement), but unfortunately, they needed US citizens. Many of my neighbours ended up working for the various F1 teams. I worked briefly for Schlumberger's research centre in Cambridge which was, in hindsight, awesome. A massive, airy site, loads of expensive toys, really cool fun "engineer types" complete with thick beard, and an awesome French-run canteen including traditional Thursday leg roasts. What academia should be like! I got to chop stuff and make high tech toys and test them with not an MBA in sight.

edit - and the most academically successful people almost all went on to MIT to do a PhD. No idea why. Something about that place.

Well, funnily enough I seem to be going that way. I know an awful lot about the financial side of things (Options, derivatives, etc), but I'm more and more drawn towards technological things such as latency minimization and smart execution.

I think the real problem is pay. I got offered £11K/pa for an internship in engineering out in the middle of nowhere. I ended up taking an internship in marketing for 15. My friend at Goldman got 37.

To be fair unskilled new grads - in any subject, from any university - aren't worth much. Even the banks basically take a bet on which 20 of the 200 of the intake will survive and absorb enough knowledge to produce value (basically a bunch of cheap OTM calls). The first few years of experience determine a lot of things because they allow you to gain the competency and experience you can then sell as useful work (and thus decent coin).

The prof that sent me to India called me to his office on my last week, and showed me Legionnaire by Murray which he was reading. Told me it was an interesting read and I should check it out, so I did. The gist of Murray's advice was that you don't need to follow the tracks of the set career path to do well in life; in his case, he went soldiering aged 17 in Algeria at the worst period of the bloodiest colonial war the French ever waged, in the unit specifically set up to do the dirty work, and that was his "higher education". He then went off to Hong Kong and somehow rose to run a bank there, and through a bunch of international adventures is now chairman of Glencore. I don't know what the standard is for saying someone led an interesting life but he certainly qualifies.

I think the prof's point was to go and take some risks and go east young man and live a richer life, which I more or less ended up doing, but I'm not chairman of Glencore, not even a Hong Kong bank director, so don't know whether my judgement that it was worth it really is worth much.

And how many top managers these days don't have an MBA? There's a sense that jobs used to be somewhat open-skilled, in that everyone could just sit down and learn them. That's still the case, but nowadays you need paper to prove it.

The exception is in new business areas, which is why they are probably also the most interesting for career travellers. Anything that has shortages needs to entertain applications from people without credentials.

The economy is also not growing at a fantastic rate compared to earlier times, and the job market even less so.

Almost none of the trading heads had an MBA. Even within the traditional management, few of the ex-consultants had one. And yet the business is one of the oldest ones in the world. The key is that the main requirement for moving up was the value created for the firm (which was and still is privately held, mostly between the founding family and the head traders); this did not seem to correlate with having an MBA, but the firm culture was to grow talent rather than hire outsiders.

I've seen businesses where MBAs hire more of themselves "at competitive salaries" and nobody actually has any hard skills. Those have very negative cash flow, but also are very good at raising more money to match it. Not a fan of the degree, but maybe I just saw the bottom of the barrel.

Actually where I started the partners were mostly school leavers who'd worked their way up from (literally) running around with bits of paper. Some of those guys are roughly in their late 40s-50s, running some big desks around the City.

But they don't seem to hire anyone without a degree anymore.

I actually thought I would join the military out of school and jump out of planes and shoot people, and somehow I ended up getting a job writing compilers instead.

Life is weird.

As a founder I can tell you that my LEAST favorite part of the job is the financial stuff - granting how necessary it is - which takes most of my time. It's a means to an end...that end being making absolutely mind blowing breakthroughs in Augmented Reality technologies for consumers.

If you're in SF I have a friend who does finance at a medium sized startup.

It's actually all pretty random.

The relevant steps:

- my European mother moved the family to London so we'd learn English, she looked up the best schools in the country and arranged an interview in each. I was good at music so the best one took me despite my lack of English speaking ability. I picked it up quickly enough to get good grades (at one point was 2nd in my GCSE English class, lol).

- at UCAS time ("pick your uni"), my tutor (this being a good school) pressured me into applying to these Oxbridge universities I never heard of. I got something like 7 mock interviews from various teachers so accidentally aced the entrance interview. I was good at maths and my country likes engineers so I did engineering (another sort of random choice).

- A prof was looking for someone to work in India for a few months, I applied, got it by virtue of being the only one out of 44 classmates who wanted to go. This gave me a taste for working out of comfort zone.

- after graduation, a friend introduced me to a banker in a country I won't name with a very strict visa policy, where I might have worked illegaly on starting a bank. He didn't manage to start it so back I went at the expiry of my visa.

- he sent me a link to the consulting firm's JD, I applied more out of automatism than anything, and my perfect English and prestigious university impressed them or something. I actually interviewed in a different office to the one I should have gone to. Anybody working in consulting in Switzerland needs to master both English and either French, Italian or German. Short supply of that + good uni I guess, so I got the job.

- I applied to over 200 banks and financial institutions. The crisis made it hard. So many interviews. The trading job was one of the few that went to final stage (another one had a whopping 17 interviews). I was interested in global macro/FX so moved into that space internally mostly because nobody else from my intake was as interested.

- some guy called me a cold winter asking me if I wanted to move to Australia, so I said yes, quit my trading job and tried to learn to code.

Every step is, technically, random. Like an opportunity that came about and I just said yes to. Which is why it always cracks me up to see people meticulously crafting their careers and thinking they know where they'll be in 20 years.

Great detailed recollection and psychoanalysis.

I guess after all those stories, the question really boils down to motivation: how much do you care about money, and do you want to sacrifice other things to achieve stupendous amounts of it or are you happy with just 'enough'? Many people seem to find that ultimately life is too short to just stack up cash ignoring everything else for more than a short few years (if even that)... one needs companionship, interests, family, quality of life.

Health, both mental and physical, is definitely one thing to put ahead of cash, perversely particularly when you are young because you are essentially gambling with your entire future, and there's more of it to throw away. That said, you don't have family yet so suicide as described in the article probably seems a more acceptable out... one might assume that suicide rates lower with children.

Well, if you care about money, you find something you're both good at and that you enjoy doing, and you try and teach yourself delayed gratification. Real, freedom-giving amounts take years, probably a decade or thereabouts. So, optimize for learning and enjoyment early on anyway.

Considering a large reason for picking my jobs used to be what % extra salary they paid, I wish I could go back and tell myself that.

I don't know a single suicide attempter, so can't comment on suicide as an out. I saw most humans adapt to stress pretty well. If you read WWII pilot biographies (e.g. First Light by Wellum, a classic!) they were under immense stress and yet just kept going until they had a breakdown, at which point they spent a few weeks in London to recuperate and headed back to the airfield. Humans are remarkably resilient...

Hey, I spent most of my career in rural China ... now shopping for a house in southern France. I know what you mean :)

Get a castle! They're really cheap at the moment. They'll cost you about the same as a decent villa in a big city, involve a bit more driving and maintenance, but then you have a castle which can become your family home, with grounds, and probably designed by an architect who really knew what he was doing. Beats yet another modernist, out of place horror on a cliff that will probably collapse in 20 years...

I recommend http://www.patrice-besse.com/ which seems to have the best line-up and to know what they are doing.

brilliant. although one somehow expects this to some degree, it's nice to see it raw from former insider.

what I find particularly destructive for me is not the part about physical and mental deprivation, but rather that "keep the impression" game, regardless of what kind of mess the real situation is. I don't believe that any sane non-split-personality person can keep his professional life and behaviors apart from rest of his/her life, in contrary. Stay there long enough, and you become this person. then you hear about people divorcing, because the other "changed so much in last 10-20 years".

Would I exchange any amount of money to become less healthy, stressed out and worse person overall? LOL, that's a question that doesn't even need an answer...

Fantastic write-up, thank you so much.

Part of it is about gauging people on their ability to perform under extreme stress. Part of it is about extracting as much work as possible from a human before he / she burns out. Yet another goal is to take dozens of analyst and weed out, over the course of years, all those who are not hungry / greedy enough to make partner.

It sure as shit isn't about doing anything that is sustainable long-term.

I didn't see anyone here mention it so I'm going to bring up the elephant in the room. Performance enhancing drugs. I think most of us around here are aware of our contemporaries who use quite a bit of prescription assistance to operate at a high level. You get the right mix of Adderall, cocaine, theanine, modafinal or whatever and you can pull off some amazing stretches of work. And sadly, anyone who has gone really hard down that path can probably tell you kind of things that it can do to your mental health. Not at all in anyway whatsoever relating that to this article or particular case and I'm sure there are people who pull this off without those things, but I have a hunch it's becoming the exception at this point, not the rule.

I can't answer this first hand, but my impression is that not necessarily the entirety of those 14 hours on Wall Street is usually spent doing work that requires "creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles." One reason for the long hours is that most of the difficult work piles on later in the day due to bottlenecks, or waiting for feedback/turnaround. Another is the unspoken rule on "face time."

The answer to your question probably lies in the old joke, "Why are bureaucrats so vicious? Because the stakes are so love."

At investment banks the stakes are high -- particularly at junior levels. So people endure. Or at least they try to.

The workhorse experience you're asking about doesn't exist at senior levels, which makes surviving long enough to move up the food chain an objective in and of itself. But what typically motivates people to accept such persistent sleep deprivation is expected future income. E($$$), for you operator fans, increases pretty much monotonically for each day you don't quit or get fired or succumb to a more tragic outcome.

If you're curious as to how this behavior became so deeply ingrained in "Wall Street" culture, start with real-time news. M&A work is often done overnight because priorities change as stock prices move, and because regulatory disclosures during quiet hours are often preferred to the middle of the trading day. Bankers and clients want to act while they have breathing room before news "hits the tape". And during the day, propaganda -- sorry, pitch books -- has to be updated to reflect the market moves and latest news.

This circularity hits the trading side of the business, too. Research analysts are paid to have a fresh view on the markets every day. In my experience this is institutionalized nonsense but it also pays the bills for said analysts. So you spend as much time as humanly possible trying to find quantitative fig leaves to dress up those new things you are obliged to say.

Consider also that a building full of smart people has a skewed and thin-tailed distribution of brain power. Unless you are Mensa material, it can seem easier to establish your claim on a (you hope) fat bonus through back-breaking work than by sleeping well and acting creatively. Naturally this idea has occurred to some of your colleagues as well and pretty soon it's a race to insomniac oblivion.

The guys (and it is almost exclusively guys) who make it to senior levels and get back their sleep while still getting paid have usually figured out how to take credit for others' efforts. That's not meant as a cynical comment but as an observation of what is sometimes euphemistically called "getting lift" from one's team. For a much more entertaining description of this pattern, I highly recommend Stanley Bing's "Sun Tzu Was a Sissy"[1].

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Tzu-Sissy-Stanley-Bing-ebook/dp/B0...

A lot of work an analyst would do is very repetive and dull. Sometimes they may be just changing font size, color, etc. for hours.

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