
Pushed to the limit as a banking intern - danso
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24049679
======
No1
What I find most intriguing is that the whole banking intern hours thing is
that it's not the result of a resource constraint - they have plenty of money
and plenty of intern applicants.

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.

~~~
rayiner
The point of an internship is to give candidates an idea of what the job is
really like. At the analyst level, bankers will be subject to abuse. Not
because of resource constraints, but because the job itself is demanding.
Deals are fragile creatures that need to be completed quickly, and F500
C-suite executives are demanding clients. They need everything to be perfect
and they need it done yesterday. That's what leads to having less people work
more hours and the extreme focus on availability.

~~~
zupatol
> They need everything to be perfect and they need it done yesterday.

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

~~~
rayiner
Of course deals would get done if bankers couldn't work at night, but they'd
take longer. To put it in programming terms, it's about latency not bandwidth.
In many cases, reducing latency will make tasks complete faster even if it
comes at the cost of bandwidth.

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.

~~~
iyulaev
So why not have team members work shifts? Get 24 hour coverage in the office
without having frazzled people making poor decisions. Besides, the people
making the decisions aren't these banking interns nor the junior associates.
The more junior guys and gals are, from what I understand, mostly just doing
grunt work.

~~~
rayiner
Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours
then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?

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.

~~~
rdtsc
> Why don't programmers work in shifts? You work on a module for eight hours
> then someone steps in at 6 and picks up where you left off?

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.

------
cliveowen
This is all really, really wrong. I wonder how we, as a society, have managed
to lower our values this much. Working days and nights and for what? Even if
you do become rich, then what? You can't have your health back and you wasted
years of your life chasing a dream. When you're on the patio of your beach
house with your high blood pressure, anxiety and depression, what have you
accomplished? Is reality like the dream you once chased?

I don't think so.

~~~
jmduke
Was it intentional or unintentional that your comment also describes the life
of entrepreneurs/startup founders?

~~~
kenster07
The article described a life where interns basically stayed up for no reason.

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.

~~~
bicknergseng
>>if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason

I imagine most of us do it because we think it's for a good reason.

------
jackgavigan
When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept
at her desk.

"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."

Source:
[http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/223723](http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/223723)

~~~
wavefunction
I'm sorry but that's bullshit and unsustainable imo. I say that as someone who
has worked nearly 100 weeks of 80+ hours over my career and has worked 100
hour weeks for a month or two.

It's not believable that Mayer worked 130 hours per week for 5 years.

~~~
31reasons
Its technically possible, all you have to do is put sleep in your task list.

------
johngalt
Meanwhile someone who learned to become a plumber or electrician at community
college is making more per hour.

~~~
nknighthb
These comparisons never work for me. There's literally no amount you could pay
me that would make me willing to be a plumber or electrician, and I'm grateful
every day that there are a subset of people out there who will do those jobs
competently without completely bankrupting me.

~~~
pavel_lishin
While I understand the hesitation to become a plumber, why would working as an
electrician be so unpleasant?

~~~
ffn
There is inherently nothing wrong with those jobs; both give you adequate
skills one needs to not only survive in a company, but also strike out on
one's own. In addition, both are positions that will always and forever be
needed for as long as women have long hair that clog drains and men build
houses with electricity without killing themselves.

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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well the thing is, not everyone _can_ be fabulously wealthy and dazzlingly
famous. What you're really talking about is a form of zero-sum social status.
Think of how nearly everyone today is literate, whereas 150 years ago anyone
who could read and write at our level belonged to the elite intelligentsia.

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_.

------
w1ntermute
Isn't this all just a matter of supply and demand? There are a lot more young
people willing to work in this industry than there are positions, so those
people who actually get the jobs have to put up with all kinds of stupid shit.

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.

~~~
Mikeb85
Because banking makes a hell of a lot more money.

~~~
danielrmay
The intern was set to make £45,000 / pa (not including bonuses) as an Analyst,
but I suppose it opens doors.

~~~
Mikeb85
In that industry bonuses will increase your salary by double or more... Junior
analysts in a big bank/hedge fund can expect to make as much (or slightly
more) than a senior programmer in Silicon Valley.

~~~
danielrmay
I work in that industry, and that's not quite the case any more. Bonuses for
_junior_ analysts can reach up to around 50% (which nearly every other
profession could never expect), but they would never exceed base 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).

~~~
michaelochurch
100+% bonuses still exist, but for VP and higher and in high-performing
groups. Analysts aren't getting those post-2008.

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).

------
rayiner
People like to dramatize this a bit, I think.

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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
* Three hours of sleep - if that - is far, far too little for any normal human being to function normally. Also yes, working until 6 AM is an all-nighter, it's dawn then.

> 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.

[0]
[http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/overtime.html](http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/overtime.html)

~~~
enraged_camel
College students who pull all-nighters do so two reasons:

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."

~~~
v3rt
I'd like to disagree - at least for my university, which to be fair is
notorious for being brutal in terms of workload. It's not unusual for me and
many of my friends to have so much work for classes and extracurriculars over
the course of a week or month that there literally isn't enough time to do all
of it and also eat and sleep in the 168 hrs/week that you have.

~~~
Cyranix
Allowing that there may be exceptions such as your own case (assuming you are
properly assessing your situation), would you still agree that the
generalization holds for the vast majority of cases?

~~~
v3rt
Not at my university, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat true
generally. I think a valid comparison might be between a hard sciences student
at a top school who's also involved in a lot of extracurriculars and up at all
hours just to stay on top of everything, and someone working on an early stage
company where there's always something burning. The opposite end of that would
be the investment banking intern spending 100+ hours a week at the office
spinning their wheels or college student who does nothing all week and then
stays up to make themselves feel better about failing the exam. That's sleep
deprivation for the sake of appearances.

------
nickthemagicman
What does a banker even do during those long hours? I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
robertha
I worked as an analyst in Investment Banking for a while. To me it seemed that
the analysts who worked the really long hours worked on projects in teams,
where each team member was responsible for a part of a project. No one can
start or continue until that part is done, so they just sit and wait.

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."

~~~
nickthemagicman
What did you do as far as projects that would have such a intense timeline?

Was it basically deals going on that needed to be analyzed quickly so they
could make a decision?

~~~
robertha
I created reports that needed to be presented every time a public finance
analyst went to visit a client. I built tools in R that sped up the analysis
process, but putting everything together took a few hours.

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.

------
marco-fiset
This is stupid behavior from the banking people. Don't they realize that they
are less productive working all-nighters?

~~~
a8da6b0c91d
The product is billable hours in a lot of cases. Productivity doesn't matter.

~~~
andrew_gardener
That actually makes a lot of sense then. They have an overabundance of interns
who are willing to work pointless exhausting hours to prove their mettle
allowing them to make bank on man hours.

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

~~~
Pxtl
FYI, it's mettle. Stupid homophones.

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.

~~~
consultant23522
Welcome to Bank of NoLife. As a new employee and co-owner, here is your
complimentary 1 share of BoN. You now own 0.00000000000001% of the company.

------
mordae
It's sad when the brightest and most competent people end up treated like
that, but when they are abused and used against the rest, it's when I start
feeling like putting up a guillotine.

~~~
7952
I think its sad when anyone is treated like this, and pretending that some
people are different with "best and brightest" bullshit just makes things all
the worse.

------
qq66
This kind of horrible lifestyle is well-known to everyone applying for a job
on Wall Street. Nevertheless, people still apply, and not out of desperation
-- all of the successful applicants could get great jobs elsewhere.

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.

~~~
Nicholas_C
I'm curious which processes you automated in VBA? I'm currently an analyst in
an FP&A role. I use VB for a lot of things but I'm not sure I could automate
that much of my job. I do a lot of smaller tasks, taking the time to write a
macro for each one just doesn't seem to add value. Especially when processes
change frequently. Perhaps IB is more suited for VBA automation.

~~~
qq66
It was pulling in coupon payment data from Bloomberg for an array of
securities (by CUSIP number) and aggregating them to create a payment schedule
for the combined portfolio.

------
millstone
_as an intern, you 're almost functionally useless to your desk. You're not
really adding anything, you're not really doing anything, you're just one more
warm body._

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?

~~~
sam_bwut
I've had other interns vary there description between doing loads and not
doing anything - people aren't going to micro manage you (or manage you at all
half the time...).

------
jordanthoms
Never understood what the obsession is with long hours in finance - I highly
doubt it actually leads to any more productivity, and certainly reduces the
quality of decision making. Surely the better way to impress is to do 40 hours
of great work, not 110 hours of being barely awake.

------
bambax
> _Lots and lots of people, particularly Americans, will use Adderall, Ritalin
> and Modafinil._

I don't understand. Are we supposed to feel sorry for them?

~~~
yogo
Naively when I see a job ad asking for a rockstar programmer I assume there
will be a supply of coke :P. Asking for a ninja... well that doesn't seem as
much fun.

~~~
consultant23522
I had a gig once where the manager pulled us into a meeting and with a
straight face told that in order to finish this project on time (really a week
early) we were expected to work 12 hour days and be on call. If we got a call
and had to respond we were still expected to come in and work the 12 hour
shift. I politely raised my hand and with a straight face asked if the company
health benefits would include meth-amphetamines.

~~~
yogo
Hahaha, that's the thing, companies expect employees to do whatever they have
to for results. In many ways I feel like professional athletes that do the
same by doping should get a pass. It's not an even playing field but at the
end of the day everyone wants results.

------
axilmar
Although his death was a sad fact, the truth is it was his choice. In a free
world, every adult is responsible for his/her actions. If he did not feel nice
working such long hours, he should have quit.

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.

------
mason240
>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.

That really doesn't sound any different from doing field operations the
military. Except without the shower.

------
31reasons
Computers have increased people's productivity through the roof and still we
see people working more than 100 hour/week. Are they working on something that
can't be automated or they don't want to automate ? Are they doing something
that can't be done by two people instead of one ? Something is not right.

~~~
jbooth
They do small bits of work that would be hard to automate, accompanied by
metric shitloads of reporting and process so that the people at the top can
look at an oversimplified graph of what's going on.

------
aaron695
No one has to be a banker, if they take you in it means you're smart enough to
go elsewhere. It's no secret how hard it is.

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.

------
gerhardi
This kind of work in investment banking sector seems quite sad - you are no
longer doing work for living, but the other way around.

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?

------
yason
It makes sense if you get enough money out of it. You can do that for some
time. If you don't get paid enough in correspondence to the shit they throw at
you, then you must remember that nobody forces you to be there and you can
just leave if you think it's stupid.

------
lhh
In case you're interested and missed it, I wrote about my time as an analyst a
few weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6255290](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6255290)

------
asdf2
But just think of all the important and valuable work they are doing...oh
wait...

------
Pro_bity
This type of environment is not exclusive to banking. Both doctors (during
internship and residency) and lawyers (during the first few years at big
firms) go through similar experiences.

------
nnoitra
Working more than 40 hours in a week is not something to be proud of. In fact,
people should be ashamed of it because it displays that they seriously lack
intelligence or discipline.

------
sklivvz1971
I think it's a way of rationalizing the insane amount of money they make and
fighting off the guilt they have for basically not deserving most of it.

But of course, I'm not a banker.

~~~
Mikeb85
Our economy doesn't reward workers based on merit, but on dynamics like
supply/demand, risk, scarcity, etc...

~~~
sklivvz1971
Our economy certainly doesn't reward one based on hours worked, however it's
clearly implicit in this behaviour that extra hours are expected of people
because they make more. Why? Clearly that's nor justified by economics...

------
zobzu
Well,I'm not taking that job.

------
JimmaDaRustla
Glad I work for a Canadian/American bank...

~~~
danielrmay
The bank referenced in the article is Bank Of America Merrill Lynch.

~~~
sklivvz1971
Yes, and they are still on IE7, poor souls. Doesn't sound like a place I'd
work for... nope.

~~~
JimmaDaRustla
We got upgraded to IE8 from IE6 last year! :rollseyes:

------
Fando
This incident is tragically comical.

------
static_typed
You have to experience working in an IB to appreciate the article. They are
very very much swamped down in politics process and paperwork (albeit
electronic these days). It takes ages to do small things, forever to do the
rest. No one has a long-term view beyond the next quarter, and most believe in
doing just enough to grab some bonus and run. You will encounter big swinging
dicks who like to lord it over the interns, making them stay late, just
because they can. You will see many many unhappy faces everyday, and you will
feel a little bit more lost with each day you remain there.

~~~
mcdougle
sounds like grad school....

------
michaelochurch
I might sound like a dick here, but I'm just trying to be matter-of-fact about
it.

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.

------
Kudzu_Bob
This is just like how the North Koreans used humiliation and sleep deprivation
to brainwash American POWs.

