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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 prog

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.
  - uncledave 6y ago
    Yeah it’s not abnormal unfortunately. Anywhere that “alpha personalities” are likely to clash is bound to result in some physical clashes. My own experience was getting into a fist fight with someone after I told them to fuck off and open a ticket because I wasn’t going to drop everything and fix his shit right there right then. Fist fights never go how you expect them to which was fortunate for me in the end. We’re still friends 20 years later :) Edit: I’d like to clarify that this is in no way acceptable but it is normal to some degree.
    - scsilver 6y ago
      Thank you for sharing this. Its crazy how worked uo we get in the crucible of the moment. Do either of you even remember what the ticket was fixing?
      - uncledave 6y ago
        Not a clue. Wasn’t really important though in the scale of things. You only work that out as you get older.
        onli 6y ago
        Sounds like it wasn't about the ticket, but about not accepting abuse. Likely worth it and the right reaction. That's what I don't get in these abusive industries: Just because someone is higher up in a hierarchy he is not strong, he is not untouchable, the police is not on his side. Those pencil pusher bullies get in the face of the wrong young new intern and they get trashed. Should happen all the time. Should end such behaviour very fast. But doesn't. Seems like it's baked into recruiting, only hiring people that wouldn't even think about defending themselves.
      - sdwr 6y ago
        crucible of the moment. I like that phrase!
        6y ago
- tclancy 6y ago
  Isn’t it? Michael Lewis’ book Liars Poker describes much the same in his experience at Lehman Brothers.
  - smabie 6y ago
    *Solomon
    - dctoedt 6y ago
      Salomon.
      - smabie 6y ago
        *salmon
        dctoedt 6y ago
        No, the reference is to Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker, which is about his time as a trainee and bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, which at that time was a Wall Street firm (now part of Citigroup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker
        smabie 6y ago
        it was a joke
  - tedunangst 6y ago
    Which was tail end of 80s. Normal is supposed to be a little nicer now.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    Saloman Brothers.
- smt88 6y ago
  My anecdotal experience suggests that it's normal. Bear and Lehman were among the worst, but every major firm has/had its own flavor of it, and all of them were really bad.
- CryptoBanker 6y ago
  Trading is nowhere near the same as IB
- ineedasername 6y ago
  It's also not normal It's unfortunately common in many places. Maybe "normal" denotes the default state, and perhaps abuse of this sort isn't the default, but it seems to occur in lots of high-competition, high-stress workplace hierarchies. I experienced it working in a sales branch for enterprise business equipment (pre- and post-sales support) where there were junior sales, sales, team managers, branch manager, regional manager, regional VP, and this sort of verbal & even physical intimidation was an every day thing. I was "fortunate" that I reported to the branch manager and couldn't be pushed around too much by the rest: "Take it up with my boss" became a mantra, and no one ever wanted to do that because they'd get shat on in some form or another, but that just meant I had lots of shouting matches with people who wanted me to do things but couldn't actually force me to do it-- and most of the time their issue was that someone else had already reserved my time and I wasn't available for them. I still had to endure a verbal tirade from the branch manager, complete with common macho comparisons to a little girl, when I decided to take a better position with corporate headquarters. (My whole experience at the branch level left a bad taste in my mouth though, so I didn't stay much longer... it didn't help that I became part of a team with an incredibly competent manager that had already automated away most work, leaving mostly boring tasks. Interesting work was on the horizon with a new system implementation coming up, which is why they kept a full team, but as I said-- bad taste. That second manager did however leave an impression, and I've tried to be strategically lazy in automating my own work ever since)
lr4444lr 6y ago
What do you mean "got physical"?
IgorPartola 6y ago
I suspect I already know the answer (they have the best lawyers), but these organizations seem like such a juicy target especially for a class action lawsuit. Has anyone tried that at any point and how are their leg bones?
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  you better hope you get rich enough from the lawsuit to never work in the business again, and as a member of a class action suit that's not going to happen. I'm sure there are many lawyers who would happily target them, but good luck signing up enough claimants to certify.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    As the person starting the class action lawsuit, don’t you get a whole lot more? Moreover, wouldn’t these companies be terrified of such lawsuits?
- fakedang 6y ago
  There are lawsuits once in a while, but you get risked being blackballed in the industry eternally.
  - rdtwo 6y ago
    They typically get silently settled with a gag clause
- hogFeast 6y ago
  Kids have died working these jobs. Nothing happened.
etempleton 6y ago
Marketing agencies often function the same way and with a similar culture. Many end up damaging their personal relationships and suffering mental health issues. Work is passed down to the lowest person in the org chart. Most junior employees burn out in a couple years and are replaced with a fresh college grad. Rinse, repeat.
sjg007 6y ago
This is not normal or acceptable. It's not even their money so if the bullies have this extreme loss aversion they should not even be in the job. Normalizing abuse is also a problem. In graduate school I was in a lab where the professor was abusive from day one. In retrospect I should've quit that same day! That being said we just spent 4 years being abused by the President.
ibthrowaway 6y ago
There is never justification for abusive treatment of others at work, but there are business reasons for the prevalence of overnight and weekend work by junior bankers. This post has an insider’s perspective explaining how the daily flow of the business in corporate finance and M&A requires a lot of the work done by junior bankers to be completed at night or on weekends: http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fine-disregard-for-rules.html http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fine-disreg...
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  > Of course, there is another very real, very important reason lots of work gets done in investment banks during weekends. It is the obvious, best time to consummate mergers and acquisitions, when public markets are closed and the last minute scrambling on deals can’t kick up disruptive rumors or market movements. Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence. Bankers are perpetually late on shit. The industry can barely manage to transfer money expediently. Listen to yourself. The abuse - which by the way is totally orthogonal to whether or not you work through the evening - is absolutely not about the workflow or timing or whatever, because I can’t think of a white collar professional more dogshit at doing things on schedule than an investment banker. I’m confident 40 years ago the abuse was worse. And the money was worse too! They’re just not correlated. That’s the misconception, there’s no brilliant insight into how the abuse translates into more dollars. The real transformation in the industry is that the computers are better at making the real money than the human beings are, and like in many white collar professions, there are givers and takers of all that computer-generated surplus. Fortunately, when you work for a money printer, like at a giant tech company, some of whom have trading desks with AUM bigger than many hedge funds, you can relax a little.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    > Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence. No. The justifications come in around making employees also work a 9-5 shift. If they just hired night-quants it would be fine. It's simply a fact that some work needs to be done by the next morning like stocking shelves. Or 24/7 like tech support.
macNchz 6y ago
Yeah my roommate right after college worked at a major investment bank and the “culture” struck me as purely abusive hazing...he worked 6-7 days a week and was out of the apartment before 8am and home after midnight most days. The working environment he described sounded godawful...cruel for the sake of being cruel. Assignments delivered at midnight and due at 7am. People using the strict hierarchy to make junior people suffer. Young people with serious stress-induced health problems. Heavy drinking on the occasional night off to dull the pain.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Why on earth didn’t people quit? Money isn’t more important than your mental/physical health/safety.
  - ghufran_syed 6y ago
    IMO, the whole point of such a culture is to select out people for whom making money (for the firm, of which a % goes to the employee) is more important than anything else, including mental / physical health / safety
    - mbrodersen 6y ago
      Yep that makes perfect sense.
julienreszka 6y ago
That's just a huge larp
baron816 6y ago
Whenever I hear people describe tech workplaces as “toxic”, I think about this kind of stuff. I’ve heard some anecdotes about bosses at small startups who just really didn’t know what they were doing, but nothing systematic like this. Tech isn’t quite a paradise, but compared to finance, or a bunch of other industries, it’s pretty close. The tech media would still have you believe it’s on the same plane though.
lordnacho 6y ago
Sadly I think you're right. The macho chest-beating kind of stuff you mention is definitely abuse in the common sense. However I'll warn people about the more bearable, long-term stress of this kind of job, which is abusive in a slightly different way. When I finished uni, I shared a flat with a friend with one of these jobs. Apart from at night, I had the whole flat to myself every weekday night for years. He'd rarely be home for dinner, often our only contact was him standing at my doorway at eleven or midnight, with me basically in bed already chatting with him about how his day went. I remember locking myself out of the flat once, and I just walked to his work to get his key. My main problem was staying up to wait for him at the end of the day. During all this time, I never got the impression that IB work was important or interesting. He'd clamour to get his hands on spreadsheet ("model") work, but it never struck me as actually sensible. There were simply too many moving parts on these giant Excel sheets to actually be a real, predictive model. There was no evidence that such a model was a good representation of a supermarket or whatever. But most of all, the bit that seemed abusive was the way work seemed to happen. Having barely slept, he'd drag himself into the office in the morning. Amazingly, there'd be very little to do. He'd sit around all day until the afternoon, when the MD would come in and demand a 100-page deck done by the next morning. We never did anything like a movie or a dinner without it being at the very least interrupted by work. Really important stuff like "you have to change the font on p57-89". This was massively stressful on his relationship as well, and it eventually ended. Work was not the only factor, but it was surely a major contributor. The trouble is young bankers see the older guys who've made it and think they can make it too. They don't see the survivorship bias, because when you've gone through a top school and uni, you ARE the survivor. The bank makes you think you're the cream of the cream. (One thing that seemed to not cause concern was that a lot of the young bankers were the children of important people, eg CEOs. You'd think that makes your own odd a lot worse.) My housemate duly looked up to his boss, a guy with a similar background to himself. Perhaps he could work himself up on that team, and build a similar life for himself. One day, the boss didn't come to work. The bank put out a statement that he'd suffered a heart attack at home, in his 40s. My friend knew that he hadn't. Not long after he left the bank, and shook off the idea of working himself to death.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Anton Kriel had a series of YT videos that crap all over the Investment Banking industry. This is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjWRu5heGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjWRu5heGs
nickthemagicman 6y ago
That is so beyond insane it's comical. It's literally something a crazy Will Ferrell character like Ashley Schaeffer would do. It's so hard to believe it even happens but for some reason I feel like in Finance these types of insane people are common.
jplr8922 6y ago
When I was a junior in the financial industry, I worked in small trading shops where stone-age behaviors was the norm. I had a boss who wanted me to join him at a strip club. Another one did drink on lunchtime before trading in the afternoon. I once had a manager who wanted to discuss the number of women he had sex with during happy hours. I've seen sport bets with big numbers simply to impress the colleagues. I could go on and on. They all had this toxic kind of ''work hard play hard'' mentality, where work hard = do everything I tell you and play hard = some toxic way to deal with the stress. This kind of ''hockey team leadership'' works well when all players have the same hard skills and backgrounds, but quickly crumble if the team size gets higher and more diverse. Its easy to fake group cohesion if all members are the same douchebag.
- antihero 6y ago
  It's like financialised toxic masculinity.
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    Stop mansplaining
    - antihero 6y ago
      So long as I can bid on mainsplaining futures.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  In the UK (London at least) it's not unheard of to have a pint at lunchtime, and not just in the finance industry.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    Sure, but I think the parent was referring to much heavier drinking than that. Most people can drink a pint of beer at lunch without much or any negative affect on their afternoon work performance. But I expect here we're talking about two (or more) cocktails, glasses of wine, or even hard liquor at lunch.
kelnos 6y ago
> 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. And that's why it continues: because everyone accepts it and allows it. I'm lucky to be in a position where it's not difficult for me to find a job (so I can understand that this sort of principled stand is not available to everyone), so if a boss ever behaved like that to me, I would quit on the spot, and tell them, very loudly, in front of the whole floor, why I was quitting. Zero question about it.
- TrackerFF 6y ago
  It continues because it's a high-stakes situation. If you endure the period of 1-3 years with abuse and horrible working conditions, you have that golden star in your resume, and can move on to something better. But that's how the system is designed. Work young analysts to the bone, send them off to business school/hedge funds/private equity firms/corporate dev. jobs/whatever, and take in the next batch. The people that rock the boat can easily get punished. And then their financial careers go up in smoke. Not an ideal situation for high-achievers that have sacrificed their youth on getting good grades, extracurriculars, and in general maximizing their chances of getting into some investment bank.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    This seems like it must reflect that the job isn't that difficult to do, or something like that. With many other highly qualified professionals in specialist roles, you can't get away with this behavior as much because they can easily find a better employer.
the_gipsy 6y ago
Does the company provide the cocaine or do you have to bring your own?
ta988 6y ago
Do they reproduce that or do they leave to a better place once they got the experience?
rixrax 6y ago
I’ve had this ’theory’ for a while that first jobs and first bosses and co-workers matter a lot because this is where you develop your sense of what is ‘normal’. E.g. over the years I’ve worked with all kinds of people, and I’ve taken a habit to at some point engage into conversations about first jobs we’ve had and how was the work environment. As a result, I feel that many of the individuals that started in hostile environments have been damaged for life and come to new jobs bringing their twisted ‘normal’ with them. I consider myself lucky to have had what I consider excellent bosses and work environment in a couple of my first jobs. So at least when I finally landed into abusive and hostile job, I could with some confidence say that this is not normal, no one should be tolerating this, and hey boss, watch me go! Whether this ‘theory’ actually holds true, I don’t know. But having had it in my head has certainly allowed me to curtail my bad behaviors over the years. And hopefully has allowed me to be one of the better examples for the next generations. All this of course assumes that leadership wants to optimize for humane treatment of people.
davidf18 6y ago
I worked long hours in finance and was well compensated. If you don't like the job, then quit and work somewhere else. Why is that so difficult? I am much more concerned for people that work in restaurants that really have no other employment choices and work for paltry wages.

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.
- uncledave 6y ago
  Yeah it’s not abnormal unfortunately. Anywhere that “alpha personalities” are likely to clash is bound to result in some physical clashes. My own experience was getting into a fist fight with someone after I told them to fuck off and open a ticket because I wasn’t going to drop everything and fix his shit right there right then. Fist fights never go how you expect them to which was fortunate for me in the end. We’re still friends 20 years later :) Edit: I’d like to clarify that this is in no way acceptable but it is normal to some degree.
  - scsilver 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing this. Its crazy how worked uo we get in the crucible of the moment. Do either of you even remember what the ticket was fixing?
    - uncledave 6y ago
      Not a clue. Wasn’t really important though in the scale of things. You only work that out as you get older.
      - onli 6y ago
        Sounds like it wasn't about the ticket, but about not accepting abuse. Likely worth it and the right reaction. That's what I don't get in these abusive industries: Just because someone is higher up in a hierarchy he is not strong, he is not untouchable, the police is not on his side. Those pencil pusher bullies get in the face of the wrong young new intern and they get trashed. Should happen all the time. Should end such behaviour very fast. But doesn't. Seems like it's baked into recruiting, only hiring people that wouldn't even think about defending themselves.
    - sdwr 6y ago
      crucible of the moment. I like that phrase!
      - 6y ago
tclancy 6y ago
Isn’t it? Michael Lewis’ book Liars Poker describes much the same in his experience at Lehman Brothers.
- smabie 6y ago
  *Solomon
  - dctoedt 6y ago
    Salomon.
    - smabie 6y ago
      *salmon
      - dctoedt 6y ago
        No, the reference is to Michael Lewis's book Liar's Poker, which is about his time as a trainee and bond salesman at Salomon Brothers, which at that time was a Wall Street firm (now part of Citigroup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker
        smabie 6y ago
        it was a joke
- tedunangst 6y ago
  Which was tail end of 80s. Normal is supposed to be a little nicer now.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  Saloman Brothers.
smt88 6y ago
My anecdotal experience suggests that it's normal. Bear and Lehman were among the worst, but every major firm has/had its own flavor of it, and all of them were really bad.
CryptoBanker 6y ago
Trading is nowhere near the same as IB
ineedasername 6y ago
It's also not normal It's unfortunately common in many places. Maybe "normal" denotes the default state, and perhaps abuse of this sort isn't the default, but it seems to occur in lots of high-competition, high-stress workplace hierarchies. I experienced it working in a sales branch for enterprise business equipment (pre- and post-sales support) where there were junior sales, sales, team managers, branch manager, regional manager, regional VP, and this sort of verbal & even physical intimidation was an every day thing. I was "fortunate" that I reported to the branch manager and couldn't be pushed around too much by the rest: "Take it up with my boss" became a mantra, and no one ever wanted to do that because they'd get shat on in some form or another, but that just meant I had lots of shouting matches with people who wanted me to do things but couldn't actually force me to do it-- and most of the time their issue was that someone else had already reserved my time and I wasn't available for them. I still had to endure a verbal tirade from the branch manager, complete with common macho comparisons to a little girl, when I decided to take a better position with corporate headquarters. (My whole experience at the branch level left a bad taste in my mouth though, so I didn't stay much longer... it didn't help that I became part of a team with an incredibly competent manager that had already automated away most work, leaving mostly boring tasks. Interesting work was on the horizon with a new system implementation coming up, which is why they kept a full team, but as I said-- bad taste. That second manager did however leave an impression, and I've tried to be strategically lazy in automating my own work ever since)

lr4444lr 6y ago

What do you mean "got physical"?

IgorPartola 6y ago

I suspect I already know the answer (they have the best lawyers), but these organizations seem like such a juicy target especially for a class action lawsuit. Has anyone tried that at any point and how are their leg bones?

skeeter2020 6y ago
you better hope you get rich enough from the lawsuit to never work in the business again, and as a member of a class action suit that's not going to happen. I'm sure there are many lawyers who would happily target them, but good luck signing up enough claimants to certify.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  As the person starting the class action lawsuit, don’t you get a whole lot more? Moreover, wouldn’t these companies be terrified of such lawsuits?
fakedang 6y ago
There are lawsuits once in a while, but you get risked being blackballed in the industry eternally.
- rdtwo 6y ago
  They typically get silently settled with a gag clause
hogFeast 6y ago
Kids have died working these jobs. Nothing happened.

etempleton 6y ago

Marketing agencies often function the same way and with a similar culture. Many end up damaging their personal relationships and suffering mental health issues. Work is passed down to the lowest person in the org chart. Most junior employees burn out in a couple years and are replaced with a fresh college grad. Rinse, repeat.

sjg007 6y ago

This is not normal or acceptable. It's not even their money so if the bullies have this extreme loss aversion they should not even be in the job. Normalizing abuse is also a problem. In graduate school I was in a lab where the professor was abusive from day one. In retrospect I should've quit that same day! That being said we just spent 4 years being abused by the President.

ibthrowaway 6y ago

There is never justification for abusive treatment of others at work, but there are business reasons for the prevalence of overnight and weekend work by junior bankers. This post has an insider’s perspective explaining how the daily flow of the business in corporate finance and M&A requires a lot of the work done by junior bankers to be completed at night or on weekends: http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fine-disregard-for-rules.html http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fine-disreg...

an_opabinia 6y ago
> Of course, there is another very real, very important reason lots of work gets done in investment banks during weekends. It is the obvious, best time to consummate mergers and acquisitions, when public markets are closed and the last minute scrambling on deals can’t kick up disruptive rumors or market movements. Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence. Bankers are perpetually late on shit. The industry can barely manage to transfer money expediently. Listen to yourself. The abuse - which by the way is totally orthogonal to whether or not you work through the evening - is absolutely not about the workflow or timing or whatever, because I can’t think of a white collar professional more dogshit at doing things on schedule than an investment banker. I’m confident 40 years ago the abuse was worse. And the money was worse too! They’re just not correlated. That’s the misconception, there’s no brilliant insight into how the abuse translates into more dollars. The real transformation in the industry is that the computers are better at making the real money than the human beings are, and like in many white collar professions, there are givers and takers of all that computer-generated surplus. Fortunately, when you work for a money printer, like at a giant tech company, some of whom have trading desks with AUM bigger than many hedge funds, you can relax a little.
- Rule35 6y ago
  > Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence. No. The justifications come in around making employees also work a 9-5 shift. If they just hired night-quants it would be fine. It's simply a fact that some work needs to be done by the next morning like stocking shelves. Or 24/7 like tech support.

macNchz 6y ago

Yeah my roommate right after college worked at a major investment bank and the “culture” struck me as purely abusive hazing...he worked 6-7 days a week and was out of the apartment before 8am and home after midnight most days. The working environment he described sounded godawful...cruel for the sake of being cruel. Assignments delivered at midnight and due at 7am. People using the strict hierarchy to make junior people suffer. Young people with serious stress-induced health problems. Heavy drinking on the occasional night off to dull the pain.

mbrodersen 6y ago
Why on earth didn’t people quit? Money isn’t more important than your mental/physical health/safety.
- ghufran_syed 6y ago
  IMO, the whole point of such a culture is to select out people for whom making money (for the firm, of which a % goes to the employee) is more important than anything else, including mental / physical health / safety
  - mbrodersen 6y ago
    Yep that makes perfect sense.

julienreszka 6y ago

That's just a huge larp

baron816 6y ago

Whenever I hear people describe tech workplaces as “toxic”, I think about this kind of stuff. I’ve heard some anecdotes about bosses at small startups who just really didn’t know what they were doing, but nothing systematic like this. Tech isn’t quite a paradise, but compared to finance, or a bunch of other industries, it’s pretty close. The tech media would still have you believe it’s on the same plane though.

lordnacho 6y ago

Sadly I think you're right. The macho chest-beating kind of stuff you mention is definitely abuse in the common sense. However I'll warn people about the more bearable, long-term stress of this kind of job, which is abusive in a slightly different way. When I finished uni, I shared a flat with a friend with one of these jobs. Apart from at night, I had the whole flat to myself every weekday night for years. He'd rarely be home for dinner, often our only contact was him standing at my doorway at eleven or midnight, with me basically in bed already chatting with him about how his day went. I remember locking myself out of the flat once, and I just walked to his work to get his key. My main problem was staying up to wait for him at the end of the day. During all this time, I never got the impression that IB work was important or interesting. He'd clamour to get his hands on spreadsheet ("model") work, but it never struck me as actually sensible. There were simply too many moving parts on these giant Excel sheets to actually be a real, predictive model. There was no evidence that such a model was a good representation of a supermarket or whatever. But most of all, the bit that seemed abusive was the way work seemed to happen. Having barely slept, he'd drag himself into the office in the morning. Amazingly, there'd be very little to do. He'd sit around all day until the afternoon, when the MD would come in and demand a 100-page deck done by the next morning. We never did anything like a movie or a dinner without it being at the very least interrupted by work. Really important stuff like "you have to change the font on p57-89". This was massively stressful on his relationship as well, and it eventually ended. Work was not the only factor, but it was surely a major contributor. The trouble is young bankers see the older guys who've made it and think they can make it too. They don't see the survivorship bias, because when you've gone through a top school and uni, you ARE the survivor. The bank makes you think you're the cream of the cream. (One thing that seemed to not cause concern was that a lot of the young bankers were the children of important people, eg CEOs. You'd think that makes your own odd a lot worse.) My housemate duly looked up to his boss, a guy with a similar background to himself. Perhaps he could work himself up on that team, and build a similar life for himself. One day, the boss didn't come to work. The bank put out a statement that he'd suffered a heart attack at home, in his 40s. My friend knew that he hadn't. Not long after he left the bank, and shook off the idea of working himself to death.

secondcoming 6y ago
Anton Kriel had a series of YT videos that crap all over the Investment Banking industry. This is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjWRu5heGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPjWRu5heGs

nickthemagicman 6y ago

That is so beyond insane it's comical. It's literally something a crazy Will Ferrell character like Ashley Schaeffer would do. It's so hard to believe it even happens but for some reason I feel like in Finance these types of insane people are common.

jplr8922 6y ago

When I was a junior in the financial industry, I worked in small trading shops where stone-age behaviors was the norm. I had a boss who wanted me to join him at a strip club. Another one did drink on lunchtime before trading in the afternoon. I once had a manager who wanted to discuss the number of women he had sex with during happy hours. I've seen sport bets with big numbers simply to impress the colleagues. I could go on and on. They all had this toxic kind of ''work hard play hard'' mentality, where work hard = do everything I tell you and play hard = some toxic way to deal with the stress. This kind of ''hockey team leadership'' works well when all players have the same hard skills and backgrounds, but quickly crumble if the team size gets higher and more diverse. Its easy to fake group cohesion if all members are the same douchebag.

antihero 6y ago
It's like financialised toxic masculinity.
- suifbwish 6y ago
  Stop mansplaining
  - antihero 6y ago
    So long as I can bid on mainsplaining futures.
secondcoming 6y ago
In the UK (London at least) it's not unheard of to have a pint at lunchtime, and not just in the finance industry.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Sure, but I think the parent was referring to much heavier drinking than that. Most people can drink a pint of beer at lunch without much or any negative affect on their afternoon work performance. But I expect here we're talking about two (or more) cocktails, glasses of wine, or even hard liquor at lunch.

kelnos 6y ago

> 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. And that's why it continues: because everyone accepts it and allows it. I'm lucky to be in a position where it's not difficult for me to find a job (so I can understand that this sort of principled stand is not available to everyone), so if a boss ever behaved like that to me, I would quit on the spot, and tell them, very loudly, in front of the whole floor, why I was quitting. Zero question about it.

TrackerFF 6y ago
It continues because it's a high-stakes situation. If you endure the period of 1-3 years with abuse and horrible working conditions, you have that golden star in your resume, and can move on to something better. But that's how the system is designed. Work young analysts to the bone, send them off to business school/hedge funds/private equity firms/corporate dev. jobs/whatever, and take in the next batch. The people that rock the boat can easily get punished. And then their financial careers go up in smoke. Not an ideal situation for high-achievers that have sacrificed their youth on getting good grades, extracurriculars, and in general maximizing their chances of getting into some investment bank.
- antonvs 6y ago
  This seems like it must reflect that the job isn't that difficult to do, or something like that. With many other highly qualified professionals in specialist roles, you can't get away with this behavior as much because they can easily find a better employer.

the_gipsy 6y ago

Does the company provide the cocaine or do you have to bring your own?

ta988 6y ago

Do they reproduce that or do they leave to a better place once they got the experience?

rixrax 6y ago

I’ve had this ’theory’ for a while that first jobs and first bosses and co-workers matter a lot because this is where you develop your sense of what is ‘normal’. E.g. over the years I’ve worked with all kinds of people, and I’ve taken a habit to at some point engage into conversations about first jobs we’ve had and how was the work environment. As a result, I feel that many of the individuals that started in hostile environments have been damaged for life and come to new jobs bringing their twisted ‘normal’ with them. I consider myself lucky to have had what I consider excellent bosses and work environment in a couple of my first jobs. So at least when I finally landed into abusive and hostile job, I could with some confidence say that this is not normal, no one should be tolerating this, and hey boss, watch me go! Whether this ‘theory’ actually holds true, I don’t know. But having had it in my head has certainly allowed me to curtail my bad behaviors over the years. And hopefully has allowed me to be one of the better examples for the next generations. All this of course assumes that leadership wants to optimize for humane treatment of people.

davidf18 6y ago

I worked long hours in finance and was well compensated. If you don't like the job, then quit and work somewhere else. Why is that so difficult? I am much more concerned for people that work in restaurants that really have no other employment choices and work for paltry wages.