
Intern’s death puts banking culture under microscope - bitops
http://blog.sfgate.com/hottopics/2013/08/21/interns-death-puts-banking-culture-under-microscope/
======
SeanDav
As someone that worked at that exact office for many years and then thankfully
got out of that rat race I can sympathize with someone being exposed to the
culture that exists there.

Generally people work ridiculous hours because they want to. They do it
because the environment is highly competitive and the rewards can be huge. It
is not the place for sensitive people, or indeed people with ethics and
morals. It is all about the buck$ and screw the rest. People that can make
money are Gods, even if their decisions only make money in the short term, no-
one cares - all that matters is the next quarterly result and the annual
bonus.

There is a reason that Merrill Lynch is now called Bank of America Merrill
Lynch, their short term decisions came back and bit them in the ass and they
got bought out. I doubt that any lessons were learned. Lots of lip service but
I would be beyond stunned with surprise if any meaningful changes have taken
place - the fact of this intern's death probably means I am correct, although
of course nothing has been determined as to any link or otherwise.

I am probably over dramatizing here but if you value your soul, stay the heck
away from Big Investment Trading & Commodities Houses.

~~~
beachstartup
of course you're not over dramatizing.

i'm sure in a few weeks (if not ALREADY) this guy will be the going-joke
around the offices as "don't pull an X. don't be the guy who can't handle the
grind."

~~~
ludston
I find it very hard to believe an attitude like that would be overtly
displayed. Bankers should be attributed _some_ empathy shouldn't they?

~~~
lmartel
You give them too much credit; check out twitter.com/GSElevator for typical
banker humor. Bankers pride themselves on borderline-sociopathic cynicism
mixed with arrogance and workaholism. It's not pretty.

~~~
dylangs1030
I don't think there's any real proof those tweets are submitted based on real
experiences, to be fair. I know a few bankers, and I've spent holidays with
them even. The ones I have seen are pleasant, polite, and more than willing to
talk about things other than money/politics/things they're typically
stereotyped with.

Not that I'm saying they're all like that. But they're not all arrogant or
cynical. Maybe workaholics.

------
jmduke
If you think this stuff is interesting from both a "what the hell is going on
here" standpoint and a "no, really, what's it like in an investment bank?"
standpoint, read _Liar 's Poker_ by Michael Lewis. It's a pretty interesting
look at Wall Street in the late 80's, and it does a good job of avoiding an
outright demonization of the industry while offering an honest appraisal.

As an aside note, I'm always amused when I hear my tech friends lambast
investment bankers' crazy work schedules and then go on to brag about pulling
an all-nighter Thursday and then hit up a hackathon after work on Friday.
(Just because you get free beer and t-shirts doesn't mean its not unhealthy.)

~~~
lmartel
At least in tech it's a choice, though; I know lots of techies who work 40
hours a week (and, you're right, lots who don't), but I don't know a single
banker who doesn't pull this sort of crap. And I know a lot of bankers.

~~~
s3r3nity
eh -- anecdotal evidence != real data though

~~~
lmartel
You're completely right, but while I'm not going to look these numbers up I'm
very confident that the average investment banker works longer hours than the
average software engineer; or even, yes, the average startup founder. I can
promise you Google interns don't die from overwork.

~~~
acchow
> I can promise you Google interns don't die from overwork.

Hah. Overeating and binge drinking, probably.

------
spiredigital
Right out of college I took an investment banking job, and it didn't take me
too long to realize it definitely was NOT what I wanted to be doing for the
next 10 to 20 years of my life.

I had it relatively easy - working for a small firm, our hours were more in 50
to 80 hour range - so not nearly as stressful as many. But it was still pretty
brutal, especially when things got busy.

I worked with good people and it's not true that all bankers are insanely
greedy and immoral. I met some of the best people I've ever known in the
banking world, and also some real scumbbags. But one stereoype is true: just
about everyone I worked with was insanely driven and incrediblely competitive.

Already a skinny guy, I dropped at least another 10 to 15 pounds due to the
long hours and no lunch hour. Most of the guys simply ate soup at their desk
so they could get more work done. I remember my out-of-town girlfriend coming
into town for a rare weekend visit and I spent 8 hours at the office on a
Sunday. That might have been the day I vowed to quit.

So I started saving my money like a miser, and after a few years had enough in
the bank to quit cold turkey. Had no idea what I was going to do, but just let
them know I was done at the end of my two-year commitment.

At my going away party, the wives of my co-workers secretly told my girlfriend
she was incredibley lucky I was getting out and were happy for her.

I ended up starting an eCommerce business and have been doing that - and
loving it - for the last 5+ years. Apart from marrying that incredible woman
who stuck with me when I was in banking, leaving to pursue a more balanced
life was the best decision I've ever made.

If anyone is interested in the full story, I wrote a blog post about it here:

[http://www.ecommercefuel.com/my-corporate-escape-
story/](http://www.ecommercefuel.com/my-corporate-escape-story/)

~~~
lightcatcher
Another question for you:

Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly did your work as an investment banker
consist of? I see below that you mention "cranking out loads of monotonous
pitch books that didn't require too much mental energy". Is there any reason
work like this couldn't be delegated to a separate person? I guess my larger
question is whether or not the 50+ hours of work you needed to do could
trivially be split across multiple people, and if these people would have to
be highly skilled.

I'm asking this because it seems to me that a lot of investment banking falls
into either building models (could you clarify exactly what that means in the
i-banking context) or making presentations to clients/other investment
bankers. I could imagine these 2 things being split up in a way similar to
what product managers and software engineers often do.

~~~
gadders
Some of that work is being offshored to India, but I there is an advantage of
being able to scribble directly on something in front of someone to explain
the changes you want made.

------
mynameishere
What exactly are they doing during those 100+ hours a week? Fiddling with MSFT
Excel? It's easy to imagine a programmer working 100+ a week, since there's
never a real end-point to software. It can literally go on forever if you
please.

But...finance? I can't imagine even Black–Scholes required that kind of crazy
dedication.

~~~
patmcguire
Finance is weirdly disorganized. Everything I hear is you have a long empty
period during the day and then a work dump whenever the MD goes home that you
scramble to do. You wind up throwing out a lot of work halfway through because
someone didn't bother to check whether it was the right thing to be doing or
even relevant, just handed you an assignment. Everything's last minute and
disorganized, but no one cares because the gaps always get filled with heroic
efforts from the interns and junior people.

~~~
lesterbuck
This sounds like the definition of the next place for software to eat an
industry. I guess the number of domain experts is too small, or the knowledge
changes too quickly to build into some extremely profitable process management
software?

~~~
nnq
I think there are a bunch of fields, like medicine, medical research (except
doing some software simulations of stuff), finance (the process management,
not the calculation part), politics and law etc. that are _inherently hostile
to revolution by software_ \- most competent programmers run away screaming
after contact with any such domain and only the dumb ones remain, churning
dumb software that doesn't actually solve the problems. And the few good ones
that stay become dumbed down and only work at ~40% of their iq and
productivity because their minds basically choke on the sheer amount of
disorganized domain specific knowledge they have to absorb.

I think if we were to make an analogy of "information as alcohol", a
programmer's mind is like an installation that only works well with very
"distilled" information (say "vodka" and "whisky" :) ) and may work ok with
"wine", but it completely sluggs down if you give it "beer" (completely
undistilled information). In some domains (medicine is one that I know of),
information is so undistilled, diluted and corrupted that it's basically the
analogue of "beer with piss in it and rats swimming in the kegs" ("the rats"
are my analogue for the "mud minded" people that "just don't get it and never
will" and prevent smart geeks from actually doing their jobs)... that's why I
wouldn't touch it with a 100 foot pol and I imagine lots of people feels the
same about these areas. I imagine this part of finance is a similar "beer
pool".

------
AznHisoka
I worked a couple of years in a company called BlackRock. There's a group
there called PAG (Portfolio Analytics Group), made up of mostly fresh college
graduates. In the beginning, the head of the program would feed us the Kool-
Aid about how the long 16 hour days would be so worth it after a year or 2.
Sure, we'd be half-awake when we came in at 6 AM, and half-dead when we got to
leave at 10 PM.

The kicker was he told us while it'd be tempting to just go home and sleep
after we left, we should instead head straight to the GYM and workout for 30
mins, then go to the bar for a few hours because it would keep our "sanity".
Hah.. sure, you know what else would keep you sane? QUITTING and working
elsewhere.

~~~
vladimirralev
I don't know about that. I often see a huge stream of people at 6PM sharp
leaving the BlackRock building.

~~~
Killah911
Probably the guys who just encouraged the interns to stick it out till 10 :-P

------
aswanson
The banking culture...how can such idiotic counterproductive mores dominate
the allocation of capital...or more colloquially...how does bullshit still
rule. we as makers, innovators, and inventors have to topple the inefficient
stupidity of the system, as is. I honestly believe we are the only ones on the
planet that can correct this stupidity of the suits.

~~~
Killah911
Indeed, this is a very hard problem that needs to be solved. I just learned of
JAK bank, IMHO it's a step in the right direction. Constantly accelerating
systems are not natural or sustainable. Hopefully we can find solutions to
money, banking and investing that are sustainable and productive without being
predatory to parasitic towards most of humanity.

~~~
chad_oliver
> Constantly accelerating systems are not natural or sustainable

You know, all of technology is one giant constantly accelerating system.

~~~
Killah911
I don't know about that. Sure the perception is that "technology" is
constantly accelerating. But if you look at it a more finite, measurable
sense, for eg. Steam Engine/Steam Propulsion technology (I picked an arbitrary
one, based on my assumptions, so apologies if this technology is
"accelerating"), can be said to have decelerated. In this sense, the constant
"acceleration", IMHO is more of a perception thing. However, companies setting
higher and higher sales forecast no matter what, is the type of acceleration
that is quantifiable and not quite sustainable indefinitely. There are limits.
You can keep profiting till you've got a monopoly on EVERYTHING... and then
you just make all the minions work harder, or make people produce more babies
so there are more consumer? That type of acceleration is unsustainable and
quite frankly, absurd.

~~~
lesterbuck
Consider software. No matter what new tools and amazing techniques to reduce
and control complexity, everyone is still operating at or beyond the limits of
the human mind to manage that complexity. That pretty much defines the state
of the art in any technical field. I'm sure that applies in finance, too. And
whoever invents more effective tools to manage complexity will be richly
rewarded, on average.

------
olefoo
Well, clearly the answer is put a price on the lives of the sweet young things
who are so eager to throw themselves into the jaws of Moloch. I mean that
would be the Capitalist solution; and it would make banking into an heroic
activity once again; and if telecast would surely outrank many other reality
shows...

Think of a nine-week show called The Bankers Ordeal that would use go-pros to
record every moment of the grueling work schedule that would not stop until
one of the contestants fell. A riveting tribute to the allure of capitalism,
how heart rending to see the contestants lined up at the start; one of them
sure to die in the service of the only god our society worships unreservedly.
Truly it would be a revival of the ancient tradition of the sacrificial lamb.

------
bigbossman
Another point no one has mentioned...banking summer interns almost never do
anything critical. If he needed to work 70+ hours straight, he probably was
really slow at whatever shit work he was doing. (Young bankers reading this,
learn all the Excel shortcuts!)

Good bankers know how to manage expectations. Who knows what this kid was
working on, but it's easy to ask the graphics department for presentation
help, the India team to pull some data, other bankers for help with numbers,
etc. There's literally nothing he could have been doing that someone else in
his firm hadn't done before.

Erratic hours are part of being an investment banker, but what this kid was
doing _to himself_ sounds completely unnecessary.

------
lhh
I spent two years working as an analyst at a "bulge bracket" (ie top 10)
investment bank in NYC (plus a summer as an intern). It seems that a lot of
HNers are unfamiliar with the world of I-Banking, so here's the my view of
what it's like, or at least what it was like in my group at my bank (though I
believe my experience generalizes fairly well):

Analyst jobs are extremely competitive to land. It's an intensive interview
process, and the vast majority of analysts do an internship first and are then
hired on full time for the following year. As you might imagine, the job pays
very well. Market rate at a bulge bracket firm for a first year analyst is
$10k signing bonus, $70k base salary, and anywhere from $0 to ~$85k in bonus,
though typically bonus is in the $55k - $75k range, depending on individual,
group, and bank performance. As a second year, base and expected bonus each
receive a $10k bump. Plus dinner is paid for every night, and lunches as well
on weekends, which adds up to about another $10k. Most banks have a two year
analyst program. A small percentage of analysts stay for a third year if
offered (maybe 10%), and maybe 50-75% of those continue on to become
associates, which puts them on track to eventually become a senior banker.
Most associates were never analysts, but were instead hired in after doing an
MBA.

After putting in the time as an analyst, a host of other opportunities await.
Those with bulge bracket investment banking experience get all sorts of
attention from recruiters. Many go on to work in private equity or for a hedge
fund, both of which tend to pay significantly more than banking but with much
more sane hours and a far better quality of life. Others do things like biz
dev or take other misc finance roles. A very select few decide to go the
startup route (eg this guy).

The combination of perceived prestige, high pay, and quality exit
opportunities draw legions of juniors and seniors to apply. Senior bankers
know that the role is in extremely high demand, and therefore they tend to be
very tough on their analysts. If one analyst burns out, there are hundreds
more frantically trying to network their way in to take their place.

There's a very clear divide between what a senior banker does and what a
junior banker does. Senior bankers are glorified sales people. Their job is to
maintain relationships (and develop new ones) with clients so that when the
client decides to do a deal (any sort of M&A, financing, or restructuring),
they'll hire the bank that employs said senior banker to execute/advise on the
transaction. A junior banker's job is to do anything and everything that
senior bankers tell them to do.

Junior bankers have very little control over their own lives. They're staffed
on many projects at once (at one point I had 12 different projects I was
juggling), and usually have minimal say on what projects they're assigned.
These projects are generally all with different sets of people. Each senior
banker tends to have a sub-industry and group of clients they cover, but
junior bankers get shuffled around to work on any project that needs staffing.
This staffing is determined by a "staffer" (usually a semi-senior banker),
which is entirely discretion based. They try to make an effort to make the
distribution of work equitable, but they have their job to do outside of being
a staffer, and being a good staffer doesn't advance their career in the
slightest, so they're not incentivized to really get this right. The work
generally goes to the analyst that looks/seems the least busy.

I can't begin to describe how fucked up of a dynamic this creates. Insidious,
underhanded politics. Analysts essentially forced to stay at the office until
everyone above them has left the office regardless of whether or not they have
anything to do. If you leave before the staffer leaves, you're guaranteed to
get hit with the next staffing. If you leave before everyone above your level
has left, they'll be bitching the next day about how they're working so hard
even the analysts are leaving before them. Analysts subtly dropping hints to
senior bankers about how much harder they're working than the other analysts,
both in an effort to get staffing diverted away from themselves and because
analysts all get ranked against each other at the end of the year, which
determines their bonus. Analysts are ranked on a bell curve against each
other, and bonus payouts among them are a zero-sum game. Recruiters and
interviewers will ask you point-blank what your ranking and compensation was.

Analysts carry a blackberry with them at all times, and a staffing can blow up
their next two weeks literally at any moment. You live in constant fear that
that little red light blinking on your blackberry isn't another staffing or
fire drill (ie "emergency" work that needs to be done immediately). You can't
plan anything. Being too slow to respond to emails, including at midnight on
weekends, is grounds for getting sat down for a stern conversation in a
conference room. My blackberry was never more than 20 ft away from me for two
solid years.

My average day was about 9:30am - 12:30am on weekdays, and about noon to 6pm
on weekends. I didn't have my first day off, including weekends, until 4
months into the job. Sometimes it was as light as 50 hours per week, and
sometimes as bad as 110+. Some of the time you actually have so much work to
do that you're eating every meal at your desk and working solid the entire
time, especially if you're working on a live deal, but a lot of the time
you're just waiting around for other people to get back to you. They give you
some work to do on a document or presentation, you spend a few hours doing it
and get it back to them, and then you wait for them to get it back to you for
another round of edits. You'll usually be doing this with 4 or 5 projects at a
time, all with varying levels of complexity and urgency. This is one good part
about the job. During the "day shift", life usually isn't so bad. A lot of
times you can get away with long lunches and frequent starbucks runs without
anyone really noticing. But then after a fairly leisurely day, come around 5pm
or so, the "night shift" starts. You'll get edits to do for all of your
projects at once and occasionally end up pulling an all nighter, even when the
majority of the work you're doing involves formatting charts, transcribing
pages of handwritten notes, and various other trivial, mind-numbing tasks.

You'd be amazed at how much effort we'd be asked to expend on some task
relative to the benefit that that task could possibly hope to provide. Like
put together this 10 page weekly update for every company in X industry,
including what research analysts said about them that week, what the media has
said about them, individual product sales, graphs of their stock price
movements and their valuation multiples, etc. All painfully slow, manual work.
There were 40-50 companies in this industry. For an update that was sent to a
single client. Unsolicited. When the CFO hated the senior banker who ordered
the update and would never do a deal with him in his life. Doing mind-numbing
work is one thing, but spending hours and hours doing it when you know it's
all for nothing is an indescribable feeling. I wanted to bash my head in with
a stapler. It took me THREE MONTHS to finally convince the staffer to tell the
senior banker it wasn't going to happen anymore. All sorts of absurd shit like
this was thrust upon us in the name of potentially winning business.

I could keep going and probably fill several volumes about how horrible of an
experience it was, but I'll stop there. The best day of my life to date was
the day I turned in my blackberry and walked out of the building for the last
time. I don't think that the people I worked with were inherently evil or
anything like that. All else equal, they'd be senstive to our well being. But
at the end of the day, we were just another class of indentured servants, like
the many classes they'd seen before us and the many they'd see after.

When I would describe my life to friends and people I'd meet that weren't a
part of the finance world, they would literally think I was making things up.
The idea that someone would be willing to subject themselves to such insanity,
or more accurately that an employer would demand it, wasn't part of their
world view. I assure you, it was really that bad. I'm a pretty stable person,
but there were a couple times where I came very close to coming unglued.
Somehow we managed to convince ourselves it was all worth it. The jury's still
out on that one.

~~~
sanderjd
Great story, thanks for sharing, but there seems to be an obvious remaining
question: why in the world did you do it for so long? What could you possibly
do with $165k a year that is worth such pointless torture?

~~~
lhh
Ha, good question. In my first year, I learned an absolute ton. A huge portion
of the work I'd be doing was mindless, but there was some really interesting
stuff interwoven. I now know how to build complex financial models. I have a
deep understanding of corporate finance. I know how the sausage is made for
both public and private financing (including IPO) and M&A transactions. I got
to have conversations with CEOs and CFOs of major companies about their
businesses.

The second year was very different. I stopped learning new things. I started
thinking about what I wanted to do next, but all of the traditional exit ops
seemed like more of the same bullshit to me. I started thinking about doing
venture capital, then realized I'd rather just start a startup myself. This
all took several months to figure out, and I needed income (I have massive
student debt), so I stayed in the job in the meantime. I also didn't want to
prematurely cut ties with the people I was working with (leaving before your
two years are up is highly frowned upon). I spent any downtime I could find
reading about startups. In late winter/early spring, I convinced a couple
friends to work on a startup with me, and we used applying to YC as a means to
focus our work. We actually got invited to interview, but didn't get funded.
At that point, it was May, so I only had two more months to go to finish out
my two years and get my bonus, so I trudged on and closed it out.

~~~
jakub_g
Maybe it's a stupid question, but why they don't hire two guys to work 10hrs
for $80k instead of a one working 16h+ for $160k? Especially since you mention
working on multiple unrelated projects simultaneously. This is just insane for
me.

~~~
eru
Because the official fiction is different from reality. Officially they are
hired to work sane hours.

------
robbyking
I had a roommate who worked in the banking industry and kept similar hours.
Her "day off" was an 8 hour work day on Sunday. One (late) night we had a
drink together and figured out that while she made twice my salary annually, I
made three times her's hourly.

~~~
itengelhardt
Effiency For The Win!

------
pilsetnieks
> In Japan, there’s a word for it. Karoshi refers to death by overwork, a
> legal term that allows surviving family to petition a judge for compensation
> for damages [..] we have no such legal designation of protracted corporate
> suicide.

Is _suicide_ really the word that should be used here?

~~~
Havoc
>Is suicide really the word that should be used here?

I don't think there is a right word for it. Its not really murder because the
employee more or less did it voluntarily. And its not really suicide because
there was no intention to kill oneself.

Death by overworking is about as good as it gets imo.

~~~
dclowd9901
How is it not manslaughter or some form of negligent homicide? The company
created a culture that celebrated unhealthy work practices. It's no different
than if a company were paying its employees to smoke cigarettes.

~~~
paulhauggis
Should a site like HN get taken to court if someone dies from working 100 hour
work weeks at their startup? Reading through many articles makes me believe
that's what I need to do to succeed.

~~~
dclowd9901
It's one thing to internalize something you've read and apply it to your life.
It's quite another to fear a) not getting a job or b) losing your job because
the company allows ridiculous work practices to run rampant. They knew what
was up, and the shame is on them.

------
cpncrunch
It's ridiculous to think that working those kind of hours for 6 weeks is
actually productive.

~~~
fatjokes
As the article mentions, it's mostly for face-time.

------
8ig8
This seems like hazing to me. _You don't have to work all these crazy hours,
but it might help if you want to join our club._

Also... Imagine if something even remotely similar happened at Walmart.

~~~
joe_the_user
Walmart just exports its working-to-death to the third world countries like
Bangladesh.

Here, it gets cheaper clerk-hours per dollar with part laborers surviving on
food stamps.

[http://www.post-
gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/foo...](http://www.post-
gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/food-stamps-subsidize-wal-
mart-696042/)

------
readme
American culture does not yet recognize this as a problem. It should. "Hard
work" is severely overvalued and even dangerous. The Japanese even have a word
for it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi)

Whenever someone like Moritz pulls 8 all nighters, there is some greedy,
selfish, entitled, son of a bitch, benefiting from that.

When are we going to realize that capitalism is not the ideal and "free"
system we idealize it as?

~~~
tsotha
>The Japanese even have a word for it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi)

... which was in the article, for those of us who read it.

>Whenever someone like Moritz pulls 8 all nighters, there is some greedy,
selfish, entitled, son of a bitch, benefiting from that.

Yeah, that greedy, selfish, entitled, son of a bitch was Moritz Erhardt. You
don't get this kind of internship by accident, nor are there press gangs
roaming the street looking for people to force into investment banking.

>When are we going to realize that capitalism is not the ideal and "free"
system we idealize it as?

You have an odd notion of freedom. Did B of A keep him chained to the desk,
you figure?

~~~
readme
Literal chains are not the only ones that exist in our society. Unfortunately,
you can't expect all the world's type A personalities to suddenly stop
throwing themselves on the line like Moritz did.

The only way to create a safe working environment for everyone is to legislate
it. Look how effective OSHA was. All I'm suggesting is to legislate that
companies could not assign work to employees beyond what human capacity can
handle.

To you, it is "freedom" to allow the corporation to oppress the worker. To
you, "freedom" is to say "do whatever you want", and allow the corporation to
oppress the worker by controlling his income. To me, freedom is not just "do
whatever you want" the government will stay out of it. Freedom is being able
to live like a human who is not constantly enslaved by some master, whether it
be a corporation or a government. To achieve that, we need to keep
corporations in check, since they will always have their claws around every
worker's lifeblood, which is more than enough to take someone's freedom away
instantly.

Working more than 8-10 hours a day is crossing into dangerous territory.

Your assertion that if someone doesn't like it they could just get up and
leave is naive, since the problem will always be perpetuated by thousands of
other oppressed workers in line to take his place.

~~~
tsotha
>Literal chains are not the only ones that exist in our society.
Unfortunately, you can't expect all the world's type A personalities to
suddenly stop throwing themselves on the line like Moritz did.

Well, your twisted definition of the word aside, that's what freedom is.
Nobody had a gun to Ehrhardt's head (unlike you, I wasn't on a first-name
basis) - he was doing what he did for his own benefit. Would I have done it?
No.

But he wasn't a child. He was an adult capable of making his own decisions.
There's no need for legislation, particularly in light of the fact this is
news because it's highly unusual.

>To you, it is "freedom" to allow the corporation to oppress the worker.

If by "oppress" you mean "allow the employee to decide for himself what he's
willing to do", then yes. That's freedom.

>Your assertion that if someone doesn't like it they could just get up and
leave is naive, since the problem will always be perpetuated by thousands of
other oppressed workers in line to take his place.

With his skills he would have had no trouble finding a job that didn't require
more than 40-50 hours a week. We're not talking about unskilled labor here.

------
navs
I've done much the same while both working and going to university. Still do.
Is not the tech industry just as competitive? It might not force labor on you
but however indirectly, long hours of coding with 0 sleep is considered a
badge of honor. Freenode channels are full of users claiming they only slept x
hours.

------
arbuge
I'm amazed the banking industry puts its interns to work right away - it looks
like they have no difficulty coming up to speed very quickly if they're
working this hard. What exactly is it that banking interns are doing?

It always struck me from my personal interactions with them that lots of what
tech industry interns do is have a good time...

~~~
phyalow
Banking interns are the cream of the crop, they will usually have done a lot
of self study and be fully competent in financial modelling, research etc...
These kids beat out 1000's of applicants for a handful of spots.

Usually though IBD/Corp Finance Summer work consists of assisting with pitches
which includes menial work like powerpoint design, spreadsheeting, pitchbook
creation etc. If they are on a live deal work may include due diligence etc.

~~~
bigbossman
Let's not overstate their qualifications. You could take any smart STEM major
with a good attitude and train them to be a good summer intern in an
afternoon.

~~~
Mikeb85
I doubt that. I'm going to school right now for finance. At the school I
attend, it seems every serious finance student not only knows the basics
(Excel, Bloomberg, Powerpoint), but also statistics packages (R, Minitab), and
several programming languages (everyone knows SQL and VBA, most know at least
one of Python, Java or C++). Knowing how to create trading algorithms is
required knowledge.

On top of that, everyone knows how to do a sales pitch, most are comfortable
in a suit talking to execs, and classes in marketing, management, accounting,
and computer science are all mandatory.

Finance courses at a proper business school are highly demanding, and the
technical abilities of the students who attend are on par with any STEM
major...

~~~
bigbossman
I did M&A at a well known IB, I speak with first hand knowledge. I wonder if
you have done a banking internship yet? It doesn't sound like it, because if
you did, you would know how the work interns actually do differs from all of
the qualifications that you mention. I have no doubt most of your classmates
are exceptionally bright and hard working, that describes most kids entering
banking out of college.

Reread my comment, I could take a kid with a "good attitude and train them to
be a good summer intern in an afternoon." In fact, I have actually done that.
Let's define what I mean by "good." Week 1: a good summer intern needs to know
how to make PIBs, bind books, spread comps, use Google, learn from mistakes,
and most importantly, know when to ask questions. Of course, as they get real
experience and prove themselves, they get more responsibility -- just like
with any other job. For example, I've had superstar interns building merger
models for live deals after a couple months.

Knowing the "basics" (Excel, Bloomberg/FDS/CIQ, etc) isn't that important on
Day 1 since they'll learn those things. I mentioned STEM students, in
particular, because they can usually speed up the learning curve.

And remember, I'm talking about banking. Trading is a whole different animal.

------
morgante
This is just insane, and sadly mirrors the experience of everyone I know
interning in finance.

But do they also treat their tech/engineering employees like this? I can't
imagine an engineer working 80 hours on Wall St. when they could make quite
good money Facebook, etc. as well.

~~~
gadders
No, they don't (15+ years in banking IT)

------
null_ptr
I think one sign of maturity is learning to watch out for your own well being,
as a long-term investment in your own future.

These companies take advantage of young, immature people that are still
finding their way and learning life's many ropes. Unacceptable.

------
PedroBatista
No one will be charged with anything, maybe some pocket money will be offered
to the family (maybe).

Either way, i found this topic kind of a "uneasy" to discuss in many
industries, mostly because the glass houses.

------
jgamman
there's probably some 'thinking fast, thinking slow' decision substitutions
going on in the industry ie, i don't want to acknowledge that i'm vastly
overpaid for doing something that is likely to have net-zero value (or
massively negative in the long term) so my brain switches to thinking that my
salary is justified if i work absurd hours. that plus a chase the cheese
mentality for all those alpha personalities.

------
kenster07
Perhaps the subprime crisis could have been avoided altogether if our banking
sector wasn't so sleep deprived. Seriously.

------
geetee
As the person being overworked, at what point do you put your foot down and
say this is ridiculous?

~~~
tsotha
This was an internship. Normal employees don't work these kinds of hours.

------
kyleblarson
Such a shame that people are willing to literally work themselves to death at
a task that delivers no true value to society. Not really related, but it's
also extremely scary how much of this industry relies on convoluted, fragile
excel spreadsheets.

~~~
rtkwe
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss. Are there shitty practices screwing things
up and misaligned priorities? Certainly, but fundamentally banks and investors
make capital and investment much more fluid and simpler.

~~~
makomk
Are you sure about that after reading the rest of the thread? From what I can
tell, banks are where they are not because they're good at what they do but
because they're solidly entrenched.

------
tonetheman
seriously... how long does it take to fuck people out of their money...

------
hardwaresofton
but for how long?

------
constapop
If someone wants to know how one of those all-nighters in IB looks like, he
should read this: [http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-
ana...](http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/investment-banking-analyst-life-
worst-day/)

I have cousin who worked for Nomura in London and 100+ hours per week are
normal thing in IB industry. I doubt that all-nighters were mandatory for
interns, but it is very competitive environment and there are dozen of other
interns/students waiting for opportunity and ready to do it. Someone wrote its
for the face-time but nobody pulls all-nighter for face time.

~~~
refurb
One thing to remember is that a lot of those 100 hours are sitting around
waiting. Not to say they don't put in a lot of hours, but a friend of mine
(banking intern) was told a 7pm to wait for a signed document to be signed and
faxed in.

It eventually came at 4am. He basically sat around for 8hr waiting for it.

------
avty
Was it worth it?

------
AsymetricCom
Clearly, time has come to nationalize the banking system.

~~~
ha-ha-ha
Clearly, the bankster have privatized and corrupted the political system long
time ago.

