24 ms·

Young Goldman Sachs bankers ask for 80-hour week cap

313 points by wheybags 6y ago

WanderPanda 6y ago
I always wondered why it would make sense to let a single person work > 80h? Are these task they are doing soo sequential in nature, that its not possible to split them to two persons with 40h (and half the pay)? Edit: Especially keeping in mind that half the pay probably nets the 40h person much more than half the salary due to tax progrssion
- tkiolp4 6y ago
  40hours/week looks already excessive to me. Perhaps for Goldman Sachs 80hours/week looks fine.
  - doovd 6y ago
    40 hours is excessive? From a philosophical standpoint, yes, but from the way things are in the world that's totally normal lol
    - qaq 6y ago
      If you remove excessive meetings and other unproductive crap I'd be surprised if median meaningful work hours were above 20h for Soft. Eng.
      - dbattaglia 6y ago
        Totally agree, although for myself personally the other piece that chews up my time is customer support. In previous jobs with standard SaaS applications the support load was there but it was easy enough to just file a bug report in the backlog. Now I’m building managed managed infrastructure and there’s so much that can go wrong that it’s hard to not get sucked in, especially for more senior and tenured folks. 20 hours a week of meetings, OTOH, is brutal amd I don’t miss it. These days I’m much closer to about 5/week average.
- 1cvmask 6y ago
  Would they accept half the pay?
- hikingsimulator 6y ago
  The current way work is done in Mergers & Acquisitions for instance is that you are expected to be on-site for a long time because you never know when a new project/opportunity must be answered. So you may effectively be at work for 80-100h but it doesn't mean you are consistently working. The second reason is that work is siloed. If you and your team takes on an opportunity, for instance creating a buy-side valuation or a sell-side offer, you and your team only will work on it. It has ties with how teams are split by specialities and know-hows, but also with how your end-of-year bonus is calculated.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > because you never know when a new project/opportunity must be answered Is there any reason this answer cannot wait until 9am the next morning?
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Presumably because if you don't answer, another firm will.
      - sgt101 6y ago
        Possibly, or maybe sociopaths in firm A can use the threat of a potential capture by firm B as an excuse to pulverize juniors and consume their souls for personal gratification?
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        I... guess. But if the inquirer chooses the other firm simply on the fact that they responded faster, do you really want to work with them? I’m fairly certain Goldman Sachs doesn’t have to do any (bottom of the) barrel scraping.
- gregw2 6y ago
  I never worked at Goldman or had close friends there, but I have spent a modest amount of time in circles where people went to or came from Goldman. Possibilities: * Yes, it's sequential. It's hard to partition the task of creating a model of some analysis in a spreadsheet to multiple parties. Amdahl's law affects humans too. * Context. Transferring context -- implicit knowledge -- from a client to partner to a junior associates is hard. Transferring it to two junior associates is harder. The more skilled or more domain knowledge someone gets, the harder the skill/KT transfer gets. * Coordination. Partitioning a task to two associates coherently, getting both to equally understand it, execute on it, having them communicate effectively with each other on it, getting results back that are coherent and consistent, is all a burden you don't have if you have one person working longer. Brooks's law basically. * Competitive culture. Goldman recruits from the most competitive academic institutions and thus gets people who are very bright and work very hard and have spent years competing with others and harnessing those two capabilities when competing with each other or the standard of pleasing someone (professor, client, etc). Even without management pushing, in an environment competing as junior associates, they will continue to use both of those strengths to their utmost in an attempt to dominate (or keep their head above water). * Deadlines - Tight deadlines make all the above problems worse. The sooner the deadline the harder to partition the problem and the easier to just "work more hours" Meta-dynamics: * Firm competitive advantage/moat - If a firm can hire the very brightest people who also work the hardest, they can promise the best results on the tightest deadline. By promising a tight deadline of X quality, they can then offer something their competitors don't/can't. If they sacrifice either of those hiring approaches, they are subject to significant competitive pressures. Thus a firm in Goldman's position is led for competitive reasons to push for shortest deadlines possible which leads to the above effects. * Normally salaries would limit the amount of abuse people would take but there is extra capital for pay available in the financial sector in part because the monetary focus and measurements and payoffs can be so clear and direct (for management). The higher pay allows associates to more quickly pay off college loans and accumulate capital. Ironically, this in turn is partially used by elite universities to justify charging more tuition which then requires a certain set of poeople in those universities to need to go work in a place like Goldman to more quickly recoup their educational investment ... a vicious cycle/positive-feedback-loop. I'm sure there are more and better explanations, but that's what I see...
Jonnax 6y ago
What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to work 80 hour weeks? Also is the salary high? Or is it one of those jobs where juniors employees have low salaries with the carrot of promotion dangled in front of them? These companies are also not cash strapped. If I was leading a team, I'd prefer two employees working a normal set of hours versus a single employee working themselves to the bone.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oflanac52 6y ago
  According to a website "efinancialcareers" or something, I think first could be getting £90k, and that before the bonus. And yes that is very IMO but in their career trajectory it seems to be small.
  - albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    For someone in their early 20s in the UK, that is a massive salary
    - kowlo 6y ago
      For someone of any age, that is a massive salary. Average salary in UK is £36k
      - gambiting 6y ago
        Literally on another thread someone(American) was trying to tell me that if you don't make at least $150k/year as a dev you should immediately quit and find another job. I was just like.....are you familiar with the pay levels in the UK lol? It's incredibly hard to cross the £100k/year barrier as a dev, with some very rare exceptions, nearly all of them in the financial industry and down in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).
homero 6y ago
What exactly do they do? Study company financials?
- dd36 6y ago
  We would do underwriting of deals. Prepping spreadsheets, decks, etc. It’s a dollar volume game. I got out after a few years.
FizBack 6y ago
Funny to assume this has anything to do with squeezing productivity out of young graduates: it's rather a rite of passage institutionalized at the scale of the industry with more senior people abusing junior analysts because "they've been through that" and earned their pay/status raise.
monster_group 6y ago
I find it amazing that people are willing to sacrifice their health and relationships for more money. Even if I was offered a million dollar salary I wouldn't do it. Aren't these grads from top notch business schools supposed to be smart and see that it's not worth it?
- cletus 6y ago
  It's really no different to being a medical resident in THE US. 8 years of college, $250k in student loans and you make $25k salary working 80+ hours a week for 2-6 years. Why do that? Because at a later point you're a specialist or a surgeon who can make $300k-1m+ (depending on specialty). These investment bankers are all trying to get promoted from being an associate. By the time they're 30, assuming they've survived that long, they'll likely have 7 figure salaries. Back in the mid 2000s I remember reading about top Wall Street traders taking home $50m annual bonuses. So that's why they do it. What's wrong with that? Is it really any different to working 100 hours a week on a startup for nothing, possibly for years?
  - qaq 6y ago
    There was a discussion on fintech and one of the HN users chipped in that he was making 7 figures but at the end of the day he never had time for family/kids and now sitting in huge empty house was reflecting that this was pretty sad way to approach life.
    - cletus 6y ago
      So part of getting on the ride at Six Flags is knowing when to get off. How much money is enough, exactly? To cover your needs and a comfortable life, that'd be $2m of even lower. If you're making 7 figures, you could make that pretty damn quick and then get out if you wanted to. Some people do this. I've seen stories about people who quit finance by the time their 30 because it's not what their passion is, they want to spend time with family or whatever. But money can be a trap. If you're making $5m/year, it's easy to think that if you stay another year you'll walk away with another $2-3m (after taxes). I bet that's hard to walk away from. Also, people's standard of living often rises with income so you might be making $5m/year but now you have to pay the mortgage on a 4000 sq ft apartment overlooking Central Park, your house in Southhampton, your 4 cars and a boat. Anthony Levandowski was a classic example of this. Paid $120m+ by Google. That's more money than any reasonable person needs for a lifetime. But he got greedy. Think about that. Why get greedy when you have more than you could possibly need? For some I suspect it's not to much the money but it's the power and the ego. You like being seen as a huge success. You like the attention that gets you. So I have no issues with business grads seeking to make their fortune in investment banking (even though I think that industry as a whole adds pretty limited value to humanity; but that's a separate topic). But if you can't get out and lose everything else as you chase even more money... well, that's on you.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Beats me why an investment bank needs workers working at all?
- unixhero 6y ago
  Spinning plates.
- caoilte 6y ago
  To weed out the non-psychopaths
catchmilk 6y ago
Throughout my professional career, I've worked as an engineer for the buy-side (arguably better work-life balance compared to sell-side, i.e. banks). More often than not, I was working under a manager/team lead that made it abundantly clear to the team that one "will not progress in the company if they think they can leave everyday at 5pm". I've also had a manager who was speechless to find out that we did not, in fact, sign waivers that meant we give up regular working hours and can therefore be forced to work long hours every day or on the weekends. Funnily enough, I can't count the number of times I had an interview and the interviewer described the company as the 'Google of Finance', with an emphasis on work-life balance. It couldn't be further away from the truth in my experience. Management in the financial industry is unfortunately still plagued with people who think that more working hours is perfectly correlated with more productivity.
- AndyMcConachie 6y ago
  I think it's often less about productivity than it is about instilling a sense of allegiance. Certain companies like it when their employees have no life outside of work because they are less likely to cause trouble and more likely to do what they're told. Management in these places wants to own your time and wants you close so they can keep an eye on you.
  - evgen 6y ago
    The long hours also serves as a sort of hazing ritual that can increase bonding to a particular world-view. If you are a company like GS you know you can pull in the cream of the crop by dangling huge payouts at the end of the apprenticeship period. The apprentices will eat entire pies filled with shit day in and day out until they can't take it anymore and quit. Those who survive are now much more closely bonded to both their peers and upper-management (who endured the same thing in the past) and are more likely to take the company world-view as axiomatic from that point onward. You see this in finance, medicine, elite military units, and more close to home you see it all over the startup world.
    - chii 6y ago
Aeolun 6y ago
It seems to me that people that work 95 hour weeks should develop some backbone. That’s far beyond death by overwork level even in Japan.
- GolDDranks 6y ago
  Yeah, we have 40 hours of maximum "standard" work hours in Japan. Additionally, there's some limits for overtime, such as max. 15 hours overtime per week, and 45 hours per month. At my workplace, these are strictly enforced, but I've heard that there's some culture of not reporting one's actual work hours in some companies.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I was referring more to the 100hr per month limit where a random death from heart failure will be investigated as caused by work :)
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  I think we can not assume that the people who take pride in their 100h work week actually are honest to themselves. Maybe they are 100h in their office but I can not imagine that they are fully concentrated and don‘t get distracted at all
high_derivative 6y ago
One thing I find interesting is that banking is still a way to make a large salary almost purely on grind. It's not an intellectual competition, it's much easier to get into than good FAANG jobs with better work life balance. It purely rewards the grind. I totally get why people want this.
- eof 6y ago
  What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort?
  - iamacyborg 6y ago
    Money, presumably.
  - cube00 6y ago
    More hours at work means more deals then the other guy who went home at 5pm.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort? There is a sharp divide between those who bring in revenue and everyone else. Analysts and associates do not bring revenue. Their work is to idle until a deal is imminent. At that moment, being the team that can immediately whip together materials for a client, that can immediately generate closing documents, that can be the difference between winning and losing the deal. Between tens or hundreds millions of dollars in fees for the firm or zero. Between those intense bursts it's mostly farting around. At the higher level, more work means more selling. Unless you're in a real bum corner of the market, there is always another deal you could pick up. If you start reaching diminishing returns, empire build--branch out. One of the biggest breaks I had in my career was moving from a finance culture to an engineering-led one. The finance culture works. But it optimises for short-term results and it optimises for the partners, those at the top.
    - ghaff 6y ago
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
As others have commented, the long hours essentially have to do with hazing and conformance vs productivity. It is almost impossible to expect "leaders" that have gone through the same grinder to treat new employees differently. "I have suffered, hence you must suffer" For those considering a job at GS, or, for that matter, any job, examining the core culture, and asking about it early in the recruitment process, is a must.
vishnugupta 6y ago
Being a knowledge worker I’ve noticed the following when I push beyond 8hrs of focused work per day. 1. Tasks take 50% more time to complete. 2. The probability of screw up increases. And it really shoots up beyond 10hrs or so. 3. Net result, I take more time cleaning up the mess I created than if I had worked on them at a normal pace. It’s like a over speeding car taking more time to reach the destination because it either took a wrong route or its engine broke down and had to be replaced.
- sscarduzio 6y ago
  I can confirm this running my own company, I work less (albeit, with very high concentration) to achieve more. When I bring up my concentration, my brain is much faster and I'm more impatient. So I had to buy a very fast computer
- vnglst 6y ago
  Bankers don't need focus, any monkey can beat the market [1], but monkeys can't bill 80 hours a week for it. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey-can-beat-the-market/?sh=3c9f4693630a https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Bankers don't need focus, any monkey can beat the market This isn't what bankers do.
- risyachka 6y ago
  I'd argue that really effective mind work is max 4 hours per day (max concentration and productivity suited for solving hard problems). Less intensive work can be done for a few hours more, after that it is pure wasting of time.
  - gbronner 6y ago
    PowerPoint jockeying isn't mind work. You need them to be there, do the work, and not complain because everyone is on a crazy tight deadline and everyone is tired. Unfortunately, you can't split the work between people as the communication overhead and loss of secrecy overwhelms the savings in time
OliverJones 6y ago
I wonder if Goldman Sachs sells tiny violin futures? They sound like a good investment right about now.
ak39 6y ago
Yeah, by all means, make you employees put in those extra hours, but please pay them additionally for their extra hours fairly. The moral hazard (for abuse) is squarely in the employer's camp if the financial consequence of allowing a culture of 80-100 hours per week does not dent the payroll budget.
- totalZero 6y ago
  This is a good point. But even if you set policies in place, those people who complain will eventually be let go and get blackballed by the rest of the industry. In theory the end-of-year bonus is supposed to reward you for your effort. For analysts, that bonus is not entirely discretionary; there are generally three or four buckets, selected in coordination with HR, all of them meager by the industry's standards.
payamb 6y ago
Direct link to the Goldman Sachs employee’s survey https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INoP_Nnb/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INo...
necrotic_comp 6y ago
I worked as a dev at GS - it's a much smaller bank than its competitors (40k vs 204k at Citi, for example) but completes the same amount of work. This means that every employee is expected to do the job of multiple people, and is expected to manage their time appropriately to be able to handle this. For me, I joked about working two shifts, and starting 'second shift' after the trading day ended and I handed off monitoring to Asia. I'd grab dinner and then start working on my coding assignments. At the end of my tenure, it wasn't uncommon for me to work 15 hours a day and be on call 24/7. Now, this isn't healthy by a long shot, but it is what's expected. You get used to it and you allocate your time to make sure you don't go crazy. When I hear about these kids going through the ringer and working these 100 hour weeks, I'm almost incredulous because: a) this is the amount you're going to be expected to work in the future, but you need to figure out how to manage it and b) you've heard the stories, what did you think was going to happen ? I have sympathy because it's hard, and I've been there, but that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's awesome. It's pretty inspiring to figure out what you're capable of under dire circumstances, you develop great skills quickly, and after GS everything else has the volume turned down. Also, you can tap out and there's no shame in that.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's awesome It's also a clear signal to everyone later in your career that you can handle that sort of throughput and not fuzz out.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    I highly doubt that. Those people are unmarried (probably not even dating), have very few friends outside of work, and definitely not any kids. That’s literally the only time in their life they can work like that without “fuzzing out” Later in life priorities change for good reasons.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      Priorities change, but you can influence those by paying more. The ability to work 70+ hours week after week after week and keeping the quality reasonably high, that doesn't change as much. It's also something you can't convince people to be able to by offering more money.
jpz 6y ago
I've worked all through many London investment banks, mainly front office tech, I have rarely seen traders working weekends, and I was not compelled to work many hours greatly exceeding 40-ish. I don't know what these jobs are that they are talking about that are greater than 60 hours. I've seen a little of it maybe in the mergers and acquisitions side of things.
- maest 6y ago
  British work culture is more relaxed than the very intense US approach. Also, traders work very little outside of market hours. It's usually IB analysts that burn through weekends and late nights when working on deals.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > have rarely seen traders working weekends Traders don't work these hours. Bankers do. As the old joke goes, a bank trusts young bankers with PowerPoint, young traders with its balance sheet. A sleepy trader could lose the bank millions. A sleepy analyst might, at worst, typo a spreadsheet that gets reviewed by an associate. Banks are incentivized to avoid sleepless traders in a way they aren't with analysts. Also, exchanges shut down at night--nobody is gaining an edge by staying up until 3AM. (Counterfactual: FX.) (Disclaimer: I chose trading over banking. Mostly because the people were more fun. But being able to go home at 6PM on Friday, having put in your 60 hours, and turn off until 6AM on Monday was no small matter, either.)
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    > But being able to go home at 6PM on Friday, having put in your 60 hours I know you are phrasing this as a better sign, but even here, I would see 60 hours/week as extreme overwork. I started tracking my hours to get a sense for how much I work in a typical week, and found that both my quality of output and my emotional state are impacted greatly by the number of hours. At 40-50 hours/week, everything is pretty reasonable. I can do 50-65 hours/week in short bursts, but not over a prolonged period. 80 hour weeks are barely possible, and will leave me absolutely shot at the end of the week, and the following week will be spent recovering from the overwork. (Side note, my personal tracking has only gone down to a minimum of 40 hours/week, but it would be interesting to track productivity with a shorter work day/week as well.)
horstmeyer 6y ago
No sympathy. They are horrible people doing horrible things for detestable motives. Nobody forces them except their greed and vanity.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Horrible things like what? Mergers and IPOs? They're twenty-somethings who got a somewhat high-paying job coming out of college. Above average but not the pick of the litter. And they don't know what they're in for until they've already signed on the dotted line. The way you get treated as an intern is orders of magnitude better than the way you're treated as an analyst, because the bank is still trying to entice you to step through the full-time door.
  - JasonFruit 6y ago
    I imagine they may be referring to how Goldman Sachs is a pipeline into the most entrenched and detestable levels of government, in both major parties, where they encourage policies beneficial to the financial industry but costly to the people, and generally act out regulatory capture in the most mercenary possible way.
  - horstmeyer 6y ago
    Goldman & Sachs is a notorious money making machine that's optimized to squeezing as much money as possible out of everything they deal with. They will do everything they can get away with to achieve that. Where do you think the 50 million bonuses are coming from? And of course individuals who sign up for it know what they're getting into and why.
cynusx 6y ago
M&A work is mostly speculative work (pitching to potential buyers), the more opportunities you find and present properly the more money you make. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of work that can be done and a pool of hungry junior analysts that is willing to do the maximum amount of work they can to promote into the few positions that actually talk to the clients. When a deal is actually in the works the buyer, the seller and the investment bank want to close it as soon as possible putting all the time pressure on the lawyers and investment bank analysts to finish everything as soon as possible. In this case you need a team that's used to work 100 hours a week to deliver. There's a saying that "time kills all deals". Adding more analysts is not going to "fix" that periodically the team needs to have no personal life. It's only a small step to go from this level of commitment 15-25 times per year, to fill up all their remaining time with speculative work that could bring a deal to the table. The work they do is not specifically high-skill, most university grads can do it and the starting pay is higher then other options so they get ambitious, money-oriented grads willing to churn and burn for a while in the hopes of promoting. Now let's consider what happens when HR decides to institute normal working hours. Letting them work like normal employees goes directly against your bottom line (less profit, less bonus for the MD's) and come crunch-time if a deal fails because your clients are waiting for a junior analyst to do his work, your clients will +hate+ you and tell everybody. Personally, I never thought getting into that line of work is worth it but nobody is forcing those analysts to work there. The slavery is entirely voluntary, they can and often do leave for more normal jobs. They are very easily replaced for an equally skilled worker. Add that investment banks are riddled with zero-empathy psychopaths and you get a perfectly toxic culture that attracts and retains precisely the types of people that are willing to work in and perpetuate such an environment.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > come crunch-time if a deal fails because your clients are waiting for a junior analyst to do his work There is a solution to this: a coördinated global team. FX traders manage this just fine. The problem is, at its root, that high finance is insanely competitive across almost every dimension. One of these is the ease with which senior bankers can leave and found a boutique, taking a good share of their clients with them. That limits how much banks can rein in their rainmakers. It also makes bankers protective of their relationships. The former makes it difficult to add staff to teams. The latter adds friction to a banker in New York trusting a colleague in London with their prized relationships. As you say, at least in my time, it was made abundantly clear that if you go into banking, you won't have a life for a few years. After that, you will have a gold star on your resume. It will enable you to leave for a better work-life balance. Or stay for more money.
submeta 6y ago
Do they work 7 days a week? That would mean 11.4 hours a day, 8am-7pm. Or do they work 6 days a week? That would mean 13.3h a day, 8am-9pm. This is insane. Edit: This means no workout-time, no family-life, no social life at all, no learning/reading/taking a walk, no meditation, no visiting your parents, no nothing.
- kingaillas 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I had a friend at one of these places in Manhattan, trying to make it out of provisional status (or whatever the next level up on the ladder was). He pulled 15 hours (9am to midnight) Monday to Friday, and 8-10 hours on Sat. His employer was gracious enough to allow them Sundays off, and call it a day as early as 6 pm on Fri depending on workload. ;) So that was ~65 to 70 hours a week, and I thought it was an insane workload. He wound up leaving after year to take a "normal" finance job in corporate America in another state.
keiferski 6y ago
I believe this is the PDF employees presented: https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rim9z3X.NpYk/v0 https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rim9z3X.... (It was in Matt Levine’s newsletter)
totalZero 6y ago
Several people in this thread are trying to find a reason for these practices, but at the end of the day it's just abuse. I started my career in an analyst program at a different investment bank several years ago. People pile their work onto you and your boss doesn't do anything about it because he doesn't want to piss them off. And they abuse you when they have a bad day. In my first three weeks of work, I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss," occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working. Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept it. I saw my boss's boss get publicly humiliated by his boss's boss a couple times. Difference is, the junior guys don't have anyone to whom they can pass off work that rolls down to them, so they just end up doing the work of several others on their team. They're the backstop. There's no profit-oriented reason for the culture, just like there's no good reason for prison abuse. It simply manifests due to the nature of bullying in a hierarchical culture that rewards imbalanced personalities.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss," occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working. This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. Not from my short time in banking and longer time in trading (around lots of bankers). Not from anyone I know in the field. I'm sorry you had to go through that--you may want to talk to a lawyer.
  - matwood 6y ago
    > This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. I agree it's abuse, but it's more normal than people realize when there is a lot of money on the line in high stress situations. The solution is to remove some of the stress, but I'm not sure how easily that can be done when so much money is on the line since they naturally go together. I remember working in a 'startup' in the 90s with people routinely yelling at each other. I remember hearing the owner stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss (who was awesome). Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours so he could present it and hopefully get the next check. Let's just say I may have then yelled at the computer while coding. Fun times :) Heck, one of the owners decked the other one in a meeting, walked out, and we never saw him again.
f_allwein 6y ago
There was actually a banking intern a few years ago who died after working for three nights in a row: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/05/moritz-erhardt-internship-banking https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/05/moritz-erha...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cryptica 6y ago
They have great, extremely privileged positions with ridiculously high pay. They have no right to complain. If they don't love it, they should leave. My work as an indie cryptocurrency developer is more mentally challenging, requires more hours, requires me to take more risks, requires me to make more enemies and so far I've been getting paid a lot less too.
- walshemj 6y ago
  A crypto developer whose burning god knows home much carbon is in no place to make that sort of of comment "check your privilge mate"
  - cryptica 6y ago
    I work on a "Proof of Stake" blockchain which uses very little electricity (no miners) so actually I'm helping to save the planet from both a rotten monetary system which encourages mass consumption and endless growth and also from carbon emissions which would otherwise have been generated by cryptocurrency miners on Proof of Work blockchains. It's an even better alternative to a better alternative.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> but at the end of the day it's just abuse. to this day, im not sure how i feel about this topic. I saw the US Navy undergo a lot of changes in this regard while i was serving. historically, various forms of hazing and abuse have been a part of the culture and advancement process. this has fallen out of favor and policy has either eliminated or taken the teeth out of these older practices. im not convinced it has been a net positive. there are certainly some positives, but there are also some negatives. having abuse in the pipeline means that the only people that make it through are strong enough to withstand abuse and this strength is a positive quality. however, good people that might otherwise have performed well are sometimes lost. ive known people that have had psychotic breaks or jumped off the ship in the middle of the ocean, but i also knew concentrated forces of willpower, warfighting engineers that inspire me to this day. would more or less hazing have changed either one of those groups?
- __jem 6y ago
  > having abuse in the pipeline means that the only people that make it through are strong enough to withstand abuse and this strength is a positive quality Having an assembly line process to create abusers isn't a positive. After they're done abusing the cadets, these men go home and beat their wives and children.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    Not to mention their captive "non-military combatants".
- bdauvergne 6y ago
  What about an organization that would build such willpower into people instead of just selecting those which already have it ? Maybe it's possible, and I think it would economize more of the available human resource. A bit like lean management applied to people. It seems to me that self confidence and willpower is a direct result of social confidence. If you know the group is behind you it's simpler to become strong, maybe.
- chrisgd 6y ago
dmje 6y ago
I just have no understanding of why anyone would work at anything for 95/80/crazy hours per week. Unless: it’s your own thing and you’re committed in a personal way, eg a startup or first business or whatever. But even then, life is too short to do this for any protracted length of time. But then I also don’t understand anyone working solely for money, and I double don’t understand anyone wanting to get into finance, so what do I know...
commandlinefan 6y ago
> 80 hour week cap Understandable, but ultimately pointless: employers don’t demand the hours per se, they just pile so much work on you that you need 100 hours to complete it. The unspoken implication is that if you can’t complete it all in a reasonable amount of time, the fault is with you, not the workload.
- sneak 6y ago
  The funny part is that they're right: if you continue to consistently work 80+ hour weeks, the fault is with you.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    Touché.
ykevinator 6y ago
It's not abuse it's a choice
sriram_malhar 6y ago
I think what they should have is a salary cap. A maximum-wage, in addition to a minimum wage ... there would be less and less incentive to make an extra buck, fewer alpha males strutting about, and no chance of too-big-to-fail. Sorry, my cynicism talking.
bobthechef 6y ago
Here's a question: why work for GS if it's so bad? Sure, that sounds like a pretty terrible job to me (E&Y is also known to grind junior employees in their infamous rat race). I mean, do you really expect me to feel sympathy for people in FINANCE? If this article was about underpaid, low income workers with no other options and barely able to survive having to work 80+ hours, then you might have my ear, but finance? And at GS? Where's the world's tiniest violin when you need it. The only reason GS does this isn't because they're exploiting some starving group of people. They're doing this because young brats out of college have fixated on GS and ultimately the promise of making the big bucks in finance. The only thing keeping them there are their egos.
iancmceachern 6y ago
Or they (Goldman) could make less profit and allow for its employees to have reasonable lives. Anything over 40 hours just isn't needed unless one is living in poverty. Once one gets out of poverty, why work so much?
lucian1900 6y ago
They should unionise. Then they can strengthen their demand with the threat of industrial action.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Goldman Sachs has a lower yield than Harvard. Meaning they accept a fewer % of applicants. Industrial action against GS would be completely ineffective because a million other grads would be willing and eager to cross the strike line.
  - lucian1900 6y ago
    Strike breaking has been dealt with before, it's not an intractable problem. If nothing else, it's difficult to fire workers for striking. Eventually most of those scab graduates could be part of the union as well. If there are 80+h to be worked, united workers could push for 2+ 40h jobs.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      I think the strikers would get hungry before Goldman ran out of enthusiastic hires. Do you think they'd want to give up their twenties holding signs on 200 West Street?
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
Easy solution. Fat finger a couple of 0s into my account please and tell them to Foff.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
> An internal survey among 13 employees showed they averaged 95 hours of work a week and slept five hours a night. I'm always curious about this, about people who say they routinely sleep < 6 hours a night. Now, I know there are some very small percentage of people who, genetically, need very little sleep, but for the vast majority of humans, I don't think this is really physically possible. I can certainly pull an all nighter once in a blue moon, or go two nights on a couple hours of sleep. But honestly, I feel like total shit after a single night with less than 6 hours of sleep, and if I do this more than a night or two in a row I always get sick and I can barely think straight. I honestly think I would die or at the very least end up in the hospital if I was continually on 5 hours of sleep a night. I know I need more sleep than most people (I'm fine on 8 hours but my "natural" preference, e.g. with no alarm clock, is 9), but I always wonder about people who say they go months on 5 hours of sleep a night. I always think they're either superhuman or exaggerating their sleep loss.
- secabeen 6y ago
  > I always think they're either superhuman or exaggerating their sleep loss. I think stimulants also play a factor, legal or otherwise.
- blowfish721 6y ago
  I used to need 8-9 hours of sleep to even function. Two kids later (one almost three and one three months old) I go to bed between 1-2am and get woken up between 5-7am now. After a while you sort of adapt to it but the mind is nowhere near as sharp as it used to be. I would never do that to myself working for someone else however I should add.
  - smu 6y ago
    I’m in the same boat. Can’t wait until the nights stabilise in a couple of months and I get my mind and my good mood back (those are the main symptoms for me).
    - cycomanic 6y ago
mraza007 6y ago
Just out curiousity what does a day in a life of investment banker looks like at work And what kind of work they do that requires them to work more than 80hrs of weeks
ipsocannibal 6y ago
Sounds like they need a union to increase their collective bargaining power in order to achieve better working conditions.
hx2a 6y ago
Around 2003 I worked at Merrill Lynch, on the IT side supporting investment banking. Our users were creating Pitchbooks, which are these 100 page PowerPoint presentations that contain a lot of financial data taken from various financial statements. The junior employees toil for hours putting these things together for senior managers. We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial statements and generate complete decks. What previously took dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the junior employees an enormous amount of time. The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the sake of work.
- easterncalculus 6y ago
  I'm sure there are practical issues for not doing this, but at that point if it's not too much trouble I would just make and release this project to the junior employees without telling the managers. What, they weren't that fast when they started? In all seriousness I'm convinced this comes from people putting too much value on the institution. It's Merrill Lynch, not the army. What's so bad about people doing their work better? Why do they feel it invalidates some specific, all-important experience?
  - hx2a 6y ago
    We wouldn't have been able to build it without some kind of approval and agreement of who we would bill our time to. Although I should point out that "vigilante projects" (as I call them) do have a place in investment banks, and people who can write code on their own can do a lot to improve their situation. I remember a different job where myself and one other person each created vigilante projects that later turned out to be absolutely critical for properly monitoring internal systems. Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management.
    - heavenlyblue 6y ago
      > Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management. This is where you should anticipate the upper management saying no and then just never ask, using an excuse that “you thought that wouldn’t be such a big issue”
riffic 6y ago
Perhaps they should form a union and collectively bargain for better working conditions.
leroy_masochist 6y ago
Former Goldman IBD associate here. Don't have any major insights to add to the discussion, but a few observations: - I'm not sure what to make of the N=13. Maybe it means that the survey was circulated within a small, trusted group out of discretion; maybe it means that this represents the opinions of the 13 most pissed off analysts currently working in IBD. - Analyst revolts at Goldman have been happening for decades. Having worked at GS at a time when Solomon was co-head of IBD and there was a fair amount of analyst grumbling, my strong hunch is that he views this situation as, "here we go again". - Investment banking is going to be an interesting space to watch as AI improves. The singularly important skillset of an investment banking analyst lies in taking an excel spreadsheet that contains a company's filed financial statements and then 1) building an integrated three-statement financial model with five years of forecasts and valuation outputs and 2) reading the company's recent financial filings and any pertinent news, then making adjustments to the figures contained in the filings in order to calculate "true" pro forma historical financial performance upon which the projections are based. I'm no AI expert, but if that's not already doable by AI, we've got to be pretty close, right? My hunch is that we will soon see small groups of entrepreneurial managing directors working with small groups of engineers to build a platform that offers deliverable-intensive investment banking client service without analyst/associate headcount.
eschaton 6y ago
They should get together and form an organization that can negotiate with the bank on their behalf, all “unified” if you will.
currymj 6y ago
so the work being done is so important that people have to stay up all night to get it done in time -- it absolutely can't be postponed even by a few hours. but also, it must not be very important at all, because it's being left to junior employees in a state of extreme mental impairment from sleep deprivation. what kind of work are they doing where both of these things can be true?
inv13 6y ago
My very TLDR summary: The older people at the firm had the same experience coming into this business. So they expect every new comer to behave the same. Its that simple. Doctors do that with residents which I think is more concerning. I read about it in a book called why we sleep[1] about sleep. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144316 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
lai-yin 6y ago
I majored in Finance over 10 years ago and this was common knowledge then. A recruiter even warned us about it. Graduates still applied for the program. It's just bankers larping as Navy SEALs in BUD/S training.
the_only_law 6y ago
Are the companies really getting much out of driving employees like this? I’ve had myself a few hours with sleep deprivation and it doesn’t take long before my productivity significantly collapsed and my thought streams are borderline delusional and erratic.
sneak 6y ago
Imagine tolerating a job that would fire you for "only" working 70 hours per week, when software is free and so easy to learn.
cratermoon 6y ago
They're gonna need a union.
didibus 6y ago
Anyone else thought the bit about David the software engineer felt like completely out of place? I just don't get it, who is this David, how is he relevent, he works a different job, and then chooses to have side projects on top, like is a big chunk of the article missing?
anonu 6y ago
From the slide deck I saw, n=13. So this tells me there are 100+ others who are either not complaining or dont want to step up. Yes, its BS and you don't need to live like that. There's a famous Goldman intern story: a high-ranking managing director asked to meet a bunch of the interns at 5pm on Friday afternoon, before a long 3-day weekend. He didn't show up until 8pm, at which time 3/4th of the interns had already left to get their weekend started. They were all fired.
DukeBaset 6y ago
The Goldman method is to live in the office from 6 to 9 at night 7 days a week is 105 hours. Just sleep with your secretary. Hang out with your bros and expense it. Always be billing. No one who's is office for a 100 hours a week is actually working a 100 hours. Just expense everything, snort coffee and drink cocaine. This is the way.

313 points by wheybags 6y ago

I always wondered why it would make sense to let a single person work > 80h? Are these task they are doing soo sequential in nature, that its not possible to split them to two persons with 40h (and half the pay)? Edit: Especially keeping in mind that half the pay probably nets the 40h person much more than half the salary due to tax progrssion

tkiolp4 6y ago
40hours/week looks already excessive to me. Perhaps for Goldman Sachs 80hours/week looks fine.
- doovd 6y ago
  40 hours is excessive? From a philosophical standpoint, yes, but from the way things are in the world that's totally normal lol
  - qaq 6y ago
    If you remove excessive meetings and other unproductive crap I'd be surprised if median meaningful work hours were above 20h for Soft. Eng.
    - dbattaglia 6y ago
      Totally agree, although for myself personally the other piece that chews up my time is customer support. In previous jobs with standard SaaS applications the support load was there but it was easy enough to just file a bug report in the backlog. Now I’m building managed managed infrastructure and there’s so much that can go wrong that it’s hard to not get sucked in, especially for more senior and tenured folks. 20 hours a week of meetings, OTOH, is brutal amd I don’t miss it. These days I’m much closer to about 5/week average.
1cvmask 6y ago
Would they accept half the pay?
hikingsimulator 6y ago
The current way work is done in Mergers & Acquisitions for instance is that you are expected to be on-site for a long time because you never know when a new project/opportunity must be answered. So you may effectively be at work for 80-100h but it doesn't mean you are consistently working. The second reason is that work is siloed. If you and your team takes on an opportunity, for instance creating a buy-side valuation or a sell-side offer, you and your team only will work on it. It has ties with how teams are split by specialities and know-hows, but also with how your end-of-year bonus is calculated.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > because you never know when a new project/opportunity must be answered Is there any reason this answer cannot wait until 9am the next morning?
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Presumably because if you don't answer, another firm will.
    - sgt101 6y ago
      Possibly, or maybe sociopaths in firm A can use the threat of a potential capture by firm B as an excuse to pulverize juniors and consume their souls for personal gratification?
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      I... guess. But if the inquirer chooses the other firm simply on the fact that they responded faster, do you really want to work with them? I’m fairly certain Goldman Sachs doesn’t have to do any (bottom of the) barrel scraping.
gregw2 6y ago
I never worked at Goldman or had close friends there, but I have spent a modest amount of time in circles where people went to or came from Goldman. Possibilities: * Yes, it's sequential. It's hard to partition the task of creating a model of some analysis in a spreadsheet to multiple parties. Amdahl's law affects humans too. * Context. Transferring context -- implicit knowledge -- from a client to partner to a junior associates is hard. Transferring it to two junior associates is harder. The more skilled or more domain knowledge someone gets, the harder the skill/KT transfer gets. * Coordination. Partitioning a task to two associates coherently, getting both to equally understand it, execute on it, having them communicate effectively with each other on it, getting results back that are coherent and consistent, is all a burden you don't have if you have one person working longer. Brooks's law basically. * Competitive culture. Goldman recruits from the most competitive academic institutions and thus gets people who are very bright and work very hard and have spent years competing with others and harnessing those two capabilities when competing with each other or the standard of pleasing someone (professor, client, etc). Even without management pushing, in an environment competing as junior associates, they will continue to use both of those strengths to their utmost in an attempt to dominate (or keep their head above water). * Deadlines - Tight deadlines make all the above problems worse. The sooner the deadline the harder to partition the problem and the easier to just "work more hours" Meta-dynamics: * Firm competitive advantage/moat - If a firm can hire the very brightest people who also work the hardest, they can promise the best results on the tightest deadline. By promising a tight deadline of X quality, they can then offer something their competitors don't/can't. If they sacrifice either of those hiring approaches, they are subject to significant competitive pressures. Thus a firm in Goldman's position is led for competitive reasons to push for shortest deadlines possible which leads to the above effects. * Normally salaries would limit the amount of abuse people would take but there is extra capital for pay available in the financial sector in part because the monetary focus and measurements and payoffs can be so clear and direct (for management). The higher pay allows associates to more quickly pay off college loans and accumulate capital. Ironically, this in turn is partially used by elite universities to justify charging more tuition which then requires a certain set of poeople in those universities to need to go work in a place like Goldman to more quickly recoup their educational investment ... a vicious cycle/positive-feedback-loop. I'm sure there are more and better explanations, but that's what I see...

Jonnax 6y ago

What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to work 80 hour weeks? Also is the salary high? Or is it one of those jobs where juniors employees have low salaries with the carrot of promotion dangled in front of them? These companies are also not cash strapped. If I was leading a team, I'd prefer two employees working a normal set of hours versus a single employee working themselves to the bone.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
oflanac52 6y ago
According to a website "efinancialcareers" or something, I think first could be getting £90k, and that before the bonus. And yes that is very IMO but in their career trajectory it seems to be small.
- albertgoeswoof 6y ago
  For someone in their early 20s in the UK, that is a massive salary
  - kowlo 6y ago
    For someone of any age, that is a massive salary. Average salary in UK is £36k
    - gambiting 6y ago
      Literally on another thread someone(American) was trying to tell me that if you don't make at least $150k/year as a dev you should immediately quit and find another job. I was just like.....are you familiar with the pay levels in the UK lol? It's incredibly hard to cross the £100k/year barrier as a dev, with some very rare exceptions, nearly all of them in the financial industry and down in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).

homero 6y ago

What exactly do they do? Study company financials?

dd36 6y ago
We would do underwriting of deals. Prepping spreadsheets, decks, etc. It’s a dollar volume game. I got out after a few years.

FizBack 6y ago

Funny to assume this has anything to do with squeezing productivity out of young graduates: it's rather a rite of passage institutionalized at the scale of the industry with more senior people abusing junior analysts because "they've been through that" and earned their pay/status raise.

monster_group 6y ago

I find it amazing that people are willing to sacrifice their health and relationships for more money. Even if I was offered a million dollar salary I wouldn't do it. Aren't these grads from top notch business schools supposed to be smart and see that it's not worth it?

cletus 6y ago
It's really no different to being a medical resident in THE US. 8 years of college, $250k in student loans and you make $25k salary working 80+ hours a week for 2-6 years. Why do that? Because at a later point you're a specialist or a surgeon who can make $300k-1m+ (depending on specialty). These investment bankers are all trying to get promoted from being an associate. By the time they're 30, assuming they've survived that long, they'll likely have 7 figure salaries. Back in the mid 2000s I remember reading about top Wall Street traders taking home $50m annual bonuses. So that's why they do it. What's wrong with that? Is it really any different to working 100 hours a week on a startup for nothing, possibly for years?
- qaq 6y ago
  There was a discussion on fintech and one of the HN users chipped in that he was making 7 figures but at the end of the day he never had time for family/kids and now sitting in huge empty house was reflecting that this was pretty sad way to approach life.
  - cletus 6y ago
    So part of getting on the ride at Six Flags is knowing when to get off. How much money is enough, exactly? To cover your needs and a comfortable life, that'd be $2m of even lower. If you're making 7 figures, you could make that pretty damn quick and then get out if you wanted to. Some people do this. I've seen stories about people who quit finance by the time their 30 because it's not what their passion is, they want to spend time with family or whatever. But money can be a trap. If you're making $5m/year, it's easy to think that if you stay another year you'll walk away with another $2-3m (after taxes). I bet that's hard to walk away from. Also, people's standard of living often rises with income so you might be making $5m/year but now you have to pay the mortgage on a 4000 sq ft apartment overlooking Central Park, your house in Southhampton, your 4 cars and a boat. Anthony Levandowski was a classic example of this. Paid $120m+ by Google. That's more money than any reasonable person needs for a lifetime. But he got greedy. Think about that. Why get greedy when you have more than you could possibly need? For some I suspect it's not to much the money but it's the power and the ego. You like being seen as a huge success. You like the attention that gets you. So I have no issues with business grads seeking to make their fortune in investment banking (even though I think that industry as a whole adds pretty limited value to humanity; but that's a separate topic). But if you can't get out and lose everything else as you chase even more money... well, that's on you.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Beats me why an investment bank needs workers working at all?

unixhero 6y ago
Spinning plates.
caoilte 6y ago
To weed out the non-psychopaths

catchmilk 6y ago

Throughout my professional career, I've worked as an engineer for the buy-side (arguably better work-life balance compared to sell-side, i.e. banks). More often than not, I was working under a manager/team lead that made it abundantly clear to the team that one "will not progress in the company if they think they can leave everyday at 5pm". I've also had a manager who was speechless to find out that we did not, in fact, sign waivers that meant we give up regular working hours and can therefore be forced to work long hours every day or on the weekends. Funnily enough, I can't count the number of times I had an interview and the interviewer described the company as the 'Google of Finance', with an emphasis on work-life balance. It couldn't be further away from the truth in my experience. Management in the financial industry is unfortunately still plagued with people who think that more working hours is perfectly correlated with more productivity.

AndyMcConachie 6y ago
I think it's often less about productivity than it is about instilling a sense of allegiance. Certain companies like it when their employees have no life outside of work because they are less likely to cause trouble and more likely to do what they're told. Management in these places wants to own your time and wants you close so they can keep an eye on you.
- evgen 6y ago
  The long hours also serves as a sort of hazing ritual that can increase bonding to a particular world-view. If you are a company like GS you know you can pull in the cream of the crop by dangling huge payouts at the end of the apprenticeship period. The apprentices will eat entire pies filled with shit day in and day out until they can't take it anymore and quit. Those who survive are now much more closely bonded to both their peers and upper-management (who endured the same thing in the past) and are more likely to take the company world-view as axiomatic from that point onward. You see this in finance, medicine, elite military units, and more close to home you see it all over the startup world.
  - chii 6y ago

Aeolun 6y ago

It seems to me that people that work 95 hour weeks should develop some backbone. That’s far beyond death by overwork level even in Japan.

GolDDranks 6y ago
Yeah, we have 40 hours of maximum "standard" work hours in Japan. Additionally, there's some limits for overtime, such as max. 15 hours overtime per week, and 45 hours per month. At my workplace, these are strictly enforced, but I've heard that there's some culture of not reporting one's actual work hours in some companies.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I was referring more to the 100hr per month limit where a random death from heart failure will be investigated as caused by work :)
WanderPanda 6y ago
I think we can not assume that the people who take pride in their 100h work week actually are honest to themselves. Maybe they are 100h in their office but I can not imagine that they are fully concentrated and don‘t get distracted at all

high_derivative 6y ago

One thing I find interesting is that banking is still a way to make a large salary almost purely on grind. It's not an intellectual competition, it's much easier to get into than good FAANG jobs with better work life balance. It purely rewards the grind. I totally get why people want this.

eof 6y ago
What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort?
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  Money, presumably.
- cube00 6y ago
  More hours at work means more deals then the other guy who went home at 5pm.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort? There is a sharp divide between those who bring in revenue and everyone else. Analysts and associates do not bring revenue. Their work is to idle until a deal is imminent. At that moment, being the team that can immediately whip together materials for a client, that can immediately generate closing documents, that can be the difference between winning and losing the deal. Between tens or hundreds millions of dollars in fees for the firm or zero. Between those intense bursts it's mostly farting around. At the higher level, more work means more selling. Unless you're in a real bum corner of the market, there is always another deal you could pick up. If you start reaching diminishing returns, empire build--branch out. One of the biggest breaks I had in my career was moving from a finance culture to an engineering-led one. The finance culture works. But it optimises for short-term results and it optimises for the partners, those at the top.
  - ghaff 6y ago

NotPavlovsDog 6y ago

As others have commented, the long hours essentially have to do with hazing and conformance vs productivity. It is almost impossible to expect "leaders" that have gone through the same grinder to treat new employees differently. "I have suffered, hence you must suffer" For those considering a job at GS, or, for that matter, any job, examining the core culture, and asking about it early in the recruitment process, is a must.

vishnugupta 6y ago

Being a knowledge worker I’ve noticed the following when I push beyond 8hrs of focused work per day. 1. Tasks take 50% more time to complete. 2. The probability of screw up increases. And it really shoots up beyond 10hrs or so. 3. Net result, I take more time cleaning up the mess I created than if I had worked on them at a normal pace. It’s like a over speeding car taking more time to reach the destination because it either took a wrong route or its engine broke down and had to be replaced.

sscarduzio 6y ago
I can confirm this running my own company, I work less (albeit, with very high concentration) to achieve more. When I bring up my concentration, my brain is much faster and I'm more impatient. So I had to buy a very fast computer
vnglst 6y ago
Bankers don't need focus, any monkey can beat the market [1], but monkeys can't bill 80 hours a week for it. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey-can-beat-the-market/?sh=3c9f4693630a https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Bankers don't need focus, any monkey can beat the market This isn't what bankers do.
risyachka 6y ago
I'd argue that really effective mind work is max 4 hours per day (max concentration and productivity suited for solving hard problems). Less intensive work can be done for a few hours more, after that it is pure wasting of time.
- gbronner 6y ago
  PowerPoint jockeying isn't mind work. You need them to be there, do the work, and not complain because everyone is on a crazy tight deadline and everyone is tired. Unfortunately, you can't split the work between people as the communication overhead and loss of secrecy overwhelms the savings in time

OliverJones 6y ago

I wonder if Goldman Sachs sells tiny violin futures? They sound like a good investment right about now.

ak39 6y ago

Yeah, by all means, make you employees put in those extra hours, but please pay them additionally for their extra hours fairly. The moral hazard (for abuse) is squarely in the employer's camp if the financial consequence of allowing a culture of 80-100 hours per week does not dent the payroll budget.

totalZero 6y ago
This is a good point. But even if you set policies in place, those people who complain will eventually be let go and get blackballed by the rest of the industry. In theory the end-of-year bonus is supposed to reward you for your effort. For analysts, that bonus is not entirely discretionary; there are generally three or four buckets, selected in coordination with HR, all of them meager by the industry's standards.

payamb 6y ago

Direct link to the Goldman Sachs employee’s survey https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INoP_Nnb/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INo...

necrotic_comp 6y ago

I worked as a dev at GS - it's a much smaller bank than its competitors (40k vs 204k at Citi, for example) but completes the same amount of work. This means that every employee is expected to do the job of multiple people, and is expected to manage their time appropriately to be able to handle this. For me, I joked about working two shifts, and starting 'second shift' after the trading day ended and I handed off monitoring to Asia. I'd grab dinner and then start working on my coding assignments. At the end of my tenure, it wasn't uncommon for me to work 15 hours a day and be on call 24/7. Now, this isn't healthy by a long shot, but it is what's expected. You get used to it and you allocate your time to make sure you don't go crazy. When I hear about these kids going through the ringer and working these 100 hour weeks, I'm almost incredulous because: a) this is the amount you're going to be expected to work in the future, but you need to figure out how to manage it and b) you've heard the stories, what did you think was going to happen ? I have sympathy because it's hard, and I've been there, but that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's awesome. It's pretty inspiring to figure out what you're capable of under dire circumstances, you develop great skills quickly, and after GS everything else has the volume turned down. Also, you can tap out and there's no shame in that.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's awesome It's also a clear signal to everyone later in your career that you can handle that sort of throughput and not fuzz out.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I highly doubt that. Those people are unmarried (probably not even dating), have very few friends outside of work, and definitely not any kids. That’s literally the only time in their life they can work like that without “fuzzing out” Later in life priorities change for good reasons.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Priorities change, but you can influence those by paying more. The ability to work 70+ hours week after week after week and keeping the quality reasonably high, that doesn't change as much. It's also something you can't convince people to be able to by offering more money.

jpz 6y ago

I've worked all through many London investment banks, mainly front office tech, I have rarely seen traders working weekends, and I was not compelled to work many hours greatly exceeding 40-ish. I don't know what these jobs are that they are talking about that are greater than 60 hours. I've seen a little of it maybe in the mergers and acquisitions side of things.

maest 6y ago
British work culture is more relaxed than the very intense US approach. Also, traders work very little outside of market hours. It's usually IB analysts that burn through weekends and late nights when working on deals.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> have rarely seen traders working weekends Traders don't work these hours. Bankers do. As the old joke goes, a bank trusts young bankers with PowerPoint, young traders with its balance sheet. A sleepy trader could lose the bank millions. A sleepy analyst might, at worst, typo a spreadsheet that gets reviewed by an associate. Banks are incentivized to avoid sleepless traders in a way they aren't with analysts. Also, exchanges shut down at night--nobody is gaining an edge by staying up until 3AM. (Counterfactual: FX.) (Disclaimer: I chose trading over banking. Mostly because the people were more fun. But being able to go home at 6PM on Friday, having put in your 60 hours, and turn off until 6AM on Monday was no small matter, either.)
- MereInterest 6y ago
  > But being able to go home at 6PM on Friday, having put in your 60 hours I know you are phrasing this as a better sign, but even here, I would see 60 hours/week as extreme overwork. I started tracking my hours to get a sense for how much I work in a typical week, and found that both my quality of output and my emotional state are impacted greatly by the number of hours. At 40-50 hours/week, everything is pretty reasonable. I can do 50-65 hours/week in short bursts, but not over a prolonged period. 80 hour weeks are barely possible, and will leave me absolutely shot at the end of the week, and the following week will be spent recovering from the overwork. (Side note, my personal tracking has only gone down to a minimum of 40 hours/week, but it would be interesting to track productivity with a shorter work day/week as well.)

horstmeyer 6y ago

No sympathy. They are horrible people doing horrible things for detestable motives. Nobody forces them except their greed and vanity.

totalZero 6y ago
Horrible things like what? Mergers and IPOs? They're twenty-somethings who got a somewhat high-paying job coming out of college. Above average but not the pick of the litter. And they don't know what they're in for until they've already signed on the dotted line. The way you get treated as an intern is orders of magnitude better than the way you're treated as an analyst, because the bank is still trying to entice you to step through the full-time door.
- JasonFruit 6y ago
  I imagine they may be referring to how Goldman Sachs is a pipeline into the most entrenched and detestable levels of government, in both major parties, where they encourage policies beneficial to the financial industry but costly to the people, and generally act out regulatory capture in the most mercenary possible way.
- horstmeyer 6y ago
  Goldman & Sachs is a notorious money making machine that's optimized to squeezing as much money as possible out of everything they deal with. They will do everything they can get away with to achieve that. Where do you think the 50 million bonuses are coming from? And of course individuals who sign up for it know what they're getting into and why.

cynusx 6y ago

M&A work is mostly speculative work (pitching to potential buyers), the more opportunities you find and present properly the more money you make. As a consequence, there is an infinite amount of work that can be done and a pool of hungry junior analysts that is willing to do the maximum amount of work they can to promote into the few positions that actually talk to the clients. When a deal is actually in the works the buyer, the seller and the investment bank want to close it as soon as possible putting all the time pressure on the lawyers and investment bank analysts to finish everything as soon as possible. In this case you need a team that's used to work 100 hours a week to deliver. There's a saying that "time kills all deals". Adding more analysts is not going to "fix" that periodically the team needs to have no personal life. It's only a small step to go from this level of commitment 15-25 times per year, to fill up all their remaining time with speculative work that could bring a deal to the table. The work they do is not specifically high-skill, most university grads can do it and the starting pay is higher then other options so they get ambitious, money-oriented grads willing to churn and burn for a while in the hopes of promoting. Now let's consider what happens when HR decides to institute normal working hours. Letting them work like normal employees goes directly against your bottom line (less profit, less bonus for the MD's) and come crunch-time if a deal fails because your clients are waiting for a junior analyst to do his work, your clients will +hate+ you and tell everybody. Personally, I never thought getting into that line of work is worth it but nobody is forcing those analysts to work there. The slavery is entirely voluntary, they can and often do leave for more normal jobs. They are very easily replaced for an equally skilled worker. Add that investment banks are riddled with zero-empathy psychopaths and you get a perfectly toxic culture that attracts and retains precisely the types of people that are willing to work in and perpetuate such an environment.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> come crunch-time if a deal fails because your clients are waiting for a junior analyst to do his work There is a solution to this: a coördinated global team. FX traders manage this just fine. The problem is, at its root, that high finance is insanely competitive across almost every dimension. One of these is the ease with which senior bankers can leave and found a boutique, taking a good share of their clients with them. That limits how much banks can rein in their rainmakers. It also makes bankers protective of their relationships. The former makes it difficult to add staff to teams. The latter adds friction to a banker in New York trusting a colleague in London with their prized relationships. As you say, at least in my time, it was made abundantly clear that if you go into banking, you won't have a life for a few years. After that, you will have a gold star on your resume. It will enable you to leave for a better work-life balance. Or stay for more money.

submeta 6y ago

Do they work 7 days a week? That would mean 11.4 hours a day, 8am-7pm. Or do they work 6 days a week? That would mean 13.3h a day, 8am-9pm. This is insane. Edit: This means no workout-time, no family-life, no social life at all, no learning/reading/taking a walk, no meditation, no visiting your parents, no nothing.

kingaillas 6y ago
Anecdotally, I had a friend at one of these places in Manhattan, trying to make it out of provisional status (or whatever the next level up on the ladder was). He pulled 15 hours (9am to midnight) Monday to Friday, and 8-10 hours on Sat. His employer was gracious enough to allow them Sundays off, and call it a day as early as 6 pm on Fri depending on workload. ;) So that was ~65 to 70 hours a week, and I thought it was an insane workload. He wound up leaving after year to take a "normal" finance job in corporate America in another state.

keiferski 6y ago

I believe this is the PDF employees presented: https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rim9z3X.NpYk/v0 https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rim9z3X.... (It was in Matt Levine’s newsletter)

totalZero 6y ago

Several people in this thread are trying to find a reason for these practices, but at the end of the day it's just abuse. I started my career in an analyst program at a different investment bank several years ago. People pile their work onto you and your boss doesn't do anything about it because he doesn't want to piss them off. And they abuse you when they have a bad day. In my first three weeks of work, I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss," occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working. Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept it. I saw my boss's boss get publicly humiliated by his boss's boss a couple times. Difference is, the junior guys don't have anyone to whom they can pass off work that rolls down to them, so they just end up doing the work of several others on their team. They're the backstop. There's no profit-oriented reason for the culture, just like there's no good reason for prison abuse. It simply manifests due to the nature of bullying in a hierarchical culture that rewards imbalanced personalities.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to "show me who is boss," occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like "I own your soul" to me while I was working. This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. Not from my short time in banking and longer time in trading (around lots of bankers). Not from anyone I know in the field. I'm sorry you had to go through that--you may want to talk to a lawyer.
- matwood 6y ago
  > This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. I agree it's abuse, but it's more normal than people realize when there is a lot of money on the line in high stress situations. The solution is to remove some of the stress, but I'm not sure how easily that can be done when so much money is on the line since they naturally go together. I remember working in a 'startup' in the 90s with people routinely yelling at each other. I remember hearing the owner stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss (who was awesome). Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours so he could present it and hopefully get the next check. Let's just say I may have then yelled at the computer while coding. Fun times :) Heck, one of the owners decked the other one in a meeting, walked out, and we never saw him again.

f_allwein 6y ago

There was actually a banking intern a few years ago who died after working for three nights in a row: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/05/moritz-erhardt-internship-banking https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/05/moritz-erha...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cryptica 6y ago

They have great, extremely privileged positions with ridiculously high pay. They have no right to complain. If they don't love it, they should leave. My work as an indie cryptocurrency developer is more mentally challenging, requires more hours, requires me to take more risks, requires me to make more enemies and so far I've been getting paid a lot less too.

walshemj 6y ago
A crypto developer whose burning god knows home much carbon is in no place to make that sort of of comment "check your privilge mate"
- cryptica 6y ago
  I work on a "Proof of Stake" blockchain which uses very little electricity (no miners) so actually I'm helping to save the planet from both a rotten monetary system which encourages mass consumption and endless growth and also from carbon emissions which would otherwise have been generated by cryptocurrency miners on Proof of Work blockchains. It's an even better alternative to a better alternative.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> but at the end of the day it's just abuse. to this day, im not sure how i feel about this topic. I saw the US Navy undergo a lot of changes in this regard while i was serving. historically, various forms of hazing and abuse have been a part of the culture and advancement process. this has fallen out of favor and policy has either eliminated or taken the teeth out of these older practices. im not convinced it has been a net positive. there are certainly some positives, but there are also some negatives. having abuse in the pipeline means that the only people that make it through are strong enough to withstand abuse and this strength is a positive quality. however, good people that might otherwise have performed well are sometimes lost. ive known people that have had psychotic breaks or jumped off the ship in the middle of the ocean, but i also knew concentrated forces of willpower, warfighting engineers that inspire me to this day. would more or less hazing have changed either one of those groups?

__jem 6y ago
> having abuse in the pipeline means that the only people that make it through are strong enough to withstand abuse and this strength is a positive quality Having an assembly line process to create abusers isn't a positive. After they're done abusing the cadets, these men go home and beat their wives and children.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  Not to mention their captive "non-military combatants".
bdauvergne 6y ago
What about an organization that would build such willpower into people instead of just selecting those which already have it ? Maybe it's possible, and I think it would economize more of the available human resource. A bit like lean management applied to people. It seems to me that self confidence and willpower is a direct result of social confidence. If you know the group is behind you it's simpler to become strong, maybe.
chrisgd 6y ago

dmje 6y ago

I just have no understanding of why anyone would work at anything for 95/80/crazy hours per week. Unless: it’s your own thing and you’re committed in a personal way, eg a startup or first business or whatever. But even then, life is too short to do this for any protracted length of time. But then I also don’t understand anyone working solely for money, and I double don’t understand anyone wanting to get into finance, so what do I know...

commandlinefan 6y ago

> 80 hour week cap Understandable, but ultimately pointless: employers don’t demand the hours per se, they just pile so much work on you that you need 100 hours to complete it. The unspoken implication is that if you can’t complete it all in a reasonable amount of time, the fault is with you, not the workload.

sneak 6y ago
The funny part is that they're right: if you continue to consistently work 80+ hour weeks, the fault is with you.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Touché.

ykevinator 6y ago

It's not abuse it's a choice

sriram_malhar 6y ago

I think what they should have is a salary cap. A maximum-wage, in addition to a minimum wage ... there would be less and less incentive to make an extra buck, fewer alpha males strutting about, and no chance of too-big-to-fail. Sorry, my cynicism talking.

bobthechef 6y ago

Here's a question: why work for GS if it's so bad? Sure, that sounds like a pretty terrible job to me (E&Y is also known to grind junior employees in their infamous rat race). I mean, do you really expect me to feel sympathy for people in FINANCE? If this article was about underpaid, low income workers with no other options and barely able to survive having to work 80+ hours, then you might have my ear, but finance? And at GS? Where's the world's tiniest violin when you need it. The only reason GS does this isn't because they're exploiting some starving group of people. They're doing this because young brats out of college have fixated on GS and ultimately the promise of making the big bucks in finance. The only thing keeping them there are their egos.

iancmceachern 6y ago

Or they (Goldman) could make less profit and allow for its employees to have reasonable lives. Anything over 40 hours just isn't needed unless one is living in poverty. Once one gets out of poverty, why work so much?

lucian1900 6y ago

They should unionise. Then they can strengthen their demand with the threat of industrial action.

missedthecue 6y ago
Goldman Sachs has a lower yield than Harvard. Meaning they accept a fewer % of applicants. Industrial action against GS would be completely ineffective because a million other grads would be willing and eager to cross the strike line.
- lucian1900 6y ago
  Strike breaking has been dealt with before, it's not an intractable problem. If nothing else, it's difficult to fire workers for striking. Eventually most of those scab graduates could be part of the union as well. If there are 80+h to be worked, united workers could push for 2+ 40h jobs.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    I think the strikers would get hungry before Goldman ran out of enthusiastic hires. Do you think they'd want to give up their twenties holding signs on 200 West Street?

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

Easy solution. Fat finger a couple of 0s into my account please and tell them to Foff.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

> An internal survey among 13 employees showed they averaged 95 hours of work a week and slept five hours a night. I'm always curious about this, about people who say they routinely sleep < 6 hours a night. Now, I know there are some very small percentage of people who, genetically, need very little sleep, but for the vast majority of humans, I don't think this is really physically possible. I can certainly pull an all nighter once in a blue moon, or go two nights on a couple hours of sleep. But honestly, I feel like total shit after a single night with less than 6 hours of sleep, and if I do this more than a night or two in a row I always get sick and I can barely think straight. I honestly think I would die or at the very least end up in the hospital if I was continually on 5 hours of sleep a night. I know I need more sleep than most people (I'm fine on 8 hours but my "natural" preference, e.g. with no alarm clock, is 9), but I always wonder about people who say they go months on 5 hours of sleep a night. I always think they're either superhuman or exaggerating their sleep loss.

secabeen 6y ago
> I always think they're either superhuman or exaggerating their sleep loss. I think stimulants also play a factor, legal or otherwise.
blowfish721 6y ago
I used to need 8-9 hours of sleep to even function. Two kids later (one almost three and one three months old) I go to bed between 1-2am and get woken up between 5-7am now. After a while you sort of adapt to it but the mind is nowhere near as sharp as it used to be. I would never do that to myself working for someone else however I should add.
- smu 6y ago
  I’m in the same boat. Can’t wait until the nights stabilise in a couple of months and I get my mind and my good mood back (those are the main symptoms for me).
  - cycomanic 6y ago

mraza007 6y ago

Just out curiousity what does a day in a life of investment banker looks like at work And what kind of work they do that requires them to work more than 80hrs of weeks

ipsocannibal 6y ago

Sounds like they need a union to increase their collective bargaining power in order to achieve better working conditions.

hx2a 6y ago

Around 2003 I worked at Merrill Lynch, on the IT side supporting investment banking. Our users were creating Pitchbooks, which are these 100 page PowerPoint presentations that contain a lot of financial data taken from various financial statements. The junior employees toil for hours putting these things together for senior managers. We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial statements and generate complete decks. What previously took dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the junior employees an enormous amount of time. The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the sake of work.

easterncalculus 6y ago
I'm sure there are practical issues for not doing this, but at that point if it's not too much trouble I would just make and release this project to the junior employees without telling the managers. What, they weren't that fast when they started? In all seriousness I'm convinced this comes from people putting too much value on the institution. It's Merrill Lynch, not the army. What's so bad about people doing their work better? Why do they feel it invalidates some specific, all-important experience?
- hx2a 6y ago
  We wouldn't have been able to build it without some kind of approval and agreement of who we would bill our time to. Although I should point out that "vigilante projects" (as I call them) do have a place in investment banks, and people who can write code on their own can do a lot to improve their situation. I remember a different job where myself and one other person each created vigilante projects that later turned out to be absolutely critical for properly monitoring internal systems. Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    > Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management. This is where you should anticipate the upper management saying no and then just never ask, using an excuse that “you thought that wouldn’t be such a big issue”

riffic 6y ago

Perhaps they should form a union and collectively bargain for better working conditions.

leroy_masochist 6y ago

Former Goldman IBD associate here. Don't have any major insights to add to the discussion, but a few observations: - I'm not sure what to make of the N=13. Maybe it means that the survey was circulated within a small, trusted group out of discretion; maybe it means that this represents the opinions of the 13 most pissed off analysts currently working in IBD. - Analyst revolts at Goldman have been happening for decades. Having worked at GS at a time when Solomon was co-head of IBD and there was a fair amount of analyst grumbling, my strong hunch is that he views this situation as, "here we go again". - Investment banking is going to be an interesting space to watch as AI improves. The singularly important skillset of an investment banking analyst lies in taking an excel spreadsheet that contains a company's filed financial statements and then 1) building an integrated three-statement financial model with five years of forecasts and valuation outputs and 2) reading the company's recent financial filings and any pertinent news, then making adjustments to the figures contained in the filings in order to calculate "true" pro forma historical financial performance upon which the projections are based. I'm no AI expert, but if that's not already doable by AI, we've got to be pretty close, right? My hunch is that we will soon see small groups of entrepreneurial managing directors working with small groups of engineers to build a platform that offers deliverable-intensive investment banking client service without analyst/associate headcount.

eschaton 6y ago

They should get together and form an organization that can negotiate with the bank on their behalf, all “unified” if you will.

currymj 6y ago

so the work being done is so important that people have to stay up all night to get it done in time -- it absolutely can't be postponed even by a few hours. but also, it must not be very important at all, because it's being left to junior employees in a state of extreme mental impairment from sleep deprivation. what kind of work are they doing where both of these things can be true?

inv13 6y ago

My very TLDR summary: The older people at the firm had the same experience coming into this business. So they expect every new comer to behave the same. Its that simple. Doctors do that with residents which I think is more concerning. I read about it in a book called why we sleep[1] about sleep. [1] - https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144316 https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...

lai-yin 6y ago

I majored in Finance over 10 years ago and this was common knowledge then. A recruiter even warned us about it. Graduates still applied for the program. It's just bankers larping as Navy SEALs in BUD/S training.

the_only_law 6y ago

Are the companies really getting much out of driving employees like this? I’ve had myself a few hours with sleep deprivation and it doesn’t take long before my productivity significantly collapsed and my thought streams are borderline delusional and erratic.

sneak 6y ago

Imagine tolerating a job that would fire you for "only" working 70 hours per week, when software is free and so easy to learn.

cratermoon 6y ago

They're gonna need a union.

didibus 6y ago

Anyone else thought the bit about David the software engineer felt like completely out of place? I just don't get it, who is this David, how is he relevent, he works a different job, and then chooses to have side projects on top, like is a big chunk of the article missing?

anonu 6y ago

From the slide deck I saw, n=13. So this tells me there are 100+ others who are either not complaining or dont want to step up. Yes, its BS and you don't need to live like that. There's a famous Goldman intern story: a high-ranking managing director asked to meet a bunch of the interns at 5pm on Friday afternoon, before a long 3-day weekend. He didn't show up until 8pm, at which time 3/4th of the interns had already left to get their weekend started. They were all fired.

DukeBaset 6y ago

The Goldman method is to live in the office from 6 to 9 at night 7 days a week is 105 hours. Just sleep with your secretary. Hang out with your bros and expense it. Always be billing. No one who's is office for a 100 hours a week is actually working a 100 hours. Just expense everything, snort coffee and drink cocaine. This is the way.