
Goldman Sachs Tells Interns to End the Late, Late Show - powertry
http://www.wsj.com/articles/goldman-sachs-tells-interns-to-end-the-late-late-show-1434562103?mod=e2fb
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rdl
What do investment banking interns (and bankers) do which benefits from such
long hours? Lots of manual data processing? Reading? I absolutely benefit from
uninterrupted stretches of 12-24h working on problems sometimes, but only
infrequently -- usually hit diminishing returns between 4-12h. The only times
where I've been useful >24h was when the task was more "set up this thing
which has lots of waiting on other people or long-running processes", or in
some cases where external factors (transportation costs, outage window) meant
a single 48-72h sprint was worth more than maximum productivity during that
period -- and even then, some level of rest during some stage made a huge
difference.

An entire summer of 17h days is difficult to imagine as a productive way to
work.

"It's just hazing" is a reasonable answer, but surely that would create a
market opportunity for some alternative entity, or at least would mean the
hazing has to be limited in duration.

~~~
leroy_masochist
Former GS IBD associate here.

You basically have two workdays: the client-facing workday, and the
preparation-for-the-next-day workday. Client-facing workday goes roughly
9am-6pm. Preparation workday goes from 6pm to anything from midnight (on a
good day) to 5am (on a bad day).

During the client-facing workday you're spending about 1-2 total hours having
meetings with clients, usually on conference calls, occasionally in person;
the more senior you are, the more personal interaction you have with clients.
The remainder of the time is spent reviewing the materials you generated the
previous night, talking about what needs to be done, etc -- basically a
constant planning / execution workflow around multiple concurrent streams of
deliverables.

In the evening, managing directors go home around 6pm and vice presidents go
home around 8pm. That's when you become really "free" to hunker down and start
jamming out work. It's a lot harder to be productive when your time is hacked
into 30-minute chunks the way it is during the client-facing day.

It is quite common to have nothing to do for hours at a time, both during the
day and evening, while you wait for people to get back to you with further
instructions on what to prepare and/or instructions for changing what you've
already made. So, a 16-hour workday isn't usually a full 16 hours straight.
You usually have time to go to the very nice on-site gym, for example.

The deliverables you're making are usually PowerPoint presentations with a lot
of model-driven Excel outputs in them. Occasionally the underlying models are
intellectually interesting, but they usually are pretty monotonous to put
together....you're building something to a clear spec, and the challenge is
being 100.000% certain you did it without errors, not figuring out how to do
it.

To answer the question about whether you're productive working such long
hours: the time commitment and the stress certainly don't foster creativity,
happiness, or high productivity, but they really don't need you to be doing
inspired work. At a junior level they're looking for people who can follow
defined processes at a high level of throughput with a low error rate, while
contributing occasional flashes of original thought -- for example, when you
have to build a new model based on a unique client situation. Those situations
are actually really exciting (especially when you're working on a big problem
for a big client) but the flipside of the excitement is the stress around the
consequences of fucking it up -- e.g., if the client just got a "bear hug"
letter from a competitor expressing interest in a merger and you have to model
out whether it makes financial sense.

The downside is that it's a miserable and unhealthy way to spend a couple of
years. The upside is that you ride an incredibly steep learning curve and gain
a ton of knowledge on valuation models, the inner workings of various
industries, corporate governance, and how to run merger / fundraising /
hostile-defense processes.

Hope this was helpful.

~~~
rdl
Wow, great description.

Parts of that actually seem really fun, but mainly the learning about
industries and the model-building. I suspect I'd be a bad IBD intern.

(I've been talking with some people about a technology-focused turnaround
firm; capital is cheap, but being able to do PE/etc. turnarounds by buying
existing failing companies and replacing tech, rather than building a startup
to disrupt the industry, might be interesting in certain sectors where
distribution, IP, etc. really matter.)

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tdees40
A thought experiment: you have a job that pays exorbitantly well, and you want
to offer it to someone. It isn't particularly difficult, and any reasonably
well-informed, self-motivated college graduate can handle it. How do you hire
for that job? The demand is likely insanely high.

Spoiler alert: you create an insanely complicated funnel to weed through huge
quantities of candidates. And if talent isn't the primary determiner of
success (remember that the job isn't that hard), how do you distinguish
people? Simple, you work them nearly to death and see who comes out alive.

I'm not saying that is exactly the situation here, but I think as a mental
model it's not that far off.

~~~
Chinjut
If the demand is so high, why not simply lower the pay to winnow the candidate
pool? Why bother with the insanely complicated funnel instead?

~~~
georgehotelling
Well it's already $0 in some situations, so... charging people to be interns?
You just might have a future in finance.

~~~
dkuntz2
Not in finance they're not. Finance wants the best interns who can actually
perform at least some work, and doesn't want to get busted for breaking
employment law in regards to unpaid interns.

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logicallee
Just a note that a policy to head home at midnight doesn't end the late, late
show. It institutionizes it. Midnight is not a reasonable time to leave work.

------
shepardrtc
So interns are expected to stay out of the office from 12am to 7am on
weekdays. That's great... Now they're only expected to be there 17 hours a
day! But, during those off hours, does that mean that they can remote in and
still work?

~~~
joezydeco
_on weekdays_.

Very sneaky, Goldman. I guess weekends are wide open to work as much as
needed, right? Gotta prep that big PowerPoint for Monday morning's meeting.

This all reeks of polishing the optics and nothing to do with treating their
interns with any respect.

~~~
leroy_masochist
As of about a year ago GS IBD analysts and associates are required to be out
of the office from 9pm Friday to 9am Sunday unless they are granted specific
permission to work extra hours by the head of the group.

It is stupid that the new rule makes people go home from midnight-7am. It
would be a lot more aligned with the working hours of investment bankers if
that were changed to a 2am-9am embargo. However, the optics would probably
look bad; "midnight" sounds a lot more wholesome than "2am". So instead,
summer analysts are going to have to be waking up at 5:30 or 6 to make it in
by 7am sharp, which is going to absolutely suck for them.

------
adamnemecek
So what exactly do they do there for so many hours a day? I'm having a hard
time imagining anyone doing anything productive for that long.

~~~
tinbad
Investment banking is all about dealing with other people's money and the
customers usually are pretty demanding when it's well, about their money. From
what I hear from my investment banker friends a lot of the day is spent
socializing and going on client meetings, lunches, dinners to satisfy the
relationship and then usually back to the office to do the 'actual work'. It's
a lot of hard work but that's why these guys get paid $200-300k soon after
joining.

~~~
CornerKicks
Investment banking is about helping companies raise equity, debt and engage in
M&A, not dealing with other people's money (maybe your friends were in wealth
or asset management, which sometimes sit within the investment bank?)

Having been a junior banker myself (and with friends at most banks across wall
street) I can tell you that virtually no one is being taken to events or
spending days socializing as an intern, let alone as an analyst or associate.
You spend your days preparing pitchbooks (to pitch companies on why you should
be the bank representing them), building financial models and putting together
management presentations (in addition to any one-off requests your senior
people or the client have). Can go into more detail but it's covered pretty
well in comments above.

(Also there's no such thing as shadowing a manager in investment banking -
just doesn't exist. There are mentorship programs that the banks run, but the
vast majority of the time they consist of getting coffee at most once a month)

~~~
001sky
I think your response is way too literal. junior people routinely sit
(quitely) in higher-level meetings so mid level people don't need to
regurgitate stuff. They also spend alot of time developing lower-level social
networks so they can function and get stuff done (doesn't need to be
socializing with ceo). and all investment banks are (essentially) dealing with
other peoples money unless they are prop trading, which is of course not how
actual ipos are financed. etc.

------
nickbauman
Investment banking is a religion or something. Long hours of repetitive
supplication and devotion wins the day.

But then again I do find that what clothes I'm wearing _does_ affect my code.
When I wear a bowtie, for instance, I find I use more curly-braces!
(facepalm).

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s_dev
It's behind a pay wall. Not fair to make submissions many people can't read.
All content I get on HackerNews should be free to read without an implication
of paying to join the discussion.

The Irish Times allows current articles to be read publicly but anything that
gets archived (a few days old) must be payed for to be read. I prefer and pay
for this model - would be nice if WSJ adopted it.

~~~
kelukelugames
Here you go.

[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fgoldman-
sachs-tells-interns-to-end-the-late-late-
show-1434562103&ei=PfGCVe7lLY_xoATFooDIDQ&usg=AFQjCNF2yVfsKx8W03C_eSlJ5ePwTr_6Bg&bvm=bv.96042044,d.cGU&cad=rja)

~~~
s_dev
Thanks!

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whatok
This is a good thing. There may be some work piling up as a result of this but
it's not like analysts are lacking for hours in a day to get work done. Since
these changes are well-publicized, senior people will have to abide by them
and clients will hopefully be more understanding on increased turnaround time.

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cherry_su
Note that the curfew (seemingly) does not apply to full-time employees, so a
fresh grad could be working the night shift.

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sjg007
Herd mentality.

