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What exactly are they doing during those 100+ hours a week? Fiddling with MSFT Excel? It's easy to imagine a programmer working 100+ a week, since there's nev

What exactly are they doing during those 100+ hours a week? Fiddling with MSFT Excel? It's easy to imagine a programmer working 100+ a week, since there's never a real end-point to software. It can literally go on forever if you please. But...finance? I can't imagine even Black–Scholes required that kind of crazy dedication.

loganfrederick 13y ago
Speaking of Fischer Black, while he worked quite a bit because he enjoyed it and was given a lot of flexibility due to his reputation, he took great pride in having the smallest percent ownership in Goldman Sachs out of any of the partners while he was there. He was not a banker himself, and was known to play Super Mario Bros. in his office and spend his evenings at comedy clubs. And he had a bigger impact on finance than arguably any banker since JPMorgan, without working their hours. Perry Mehrling wrote a great biography of Black which I can't recommend enough. http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finance/dp/0471457329 http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finan...
mathattack 13y ago
In an internship it's all about the face time of proving you can work hard enough to survive an associate position or 2 year analyst stint. The competition is amplified because firms don't want to hire someone who got rejected from their prior place of employment. The reason such a strange system exists is the top positions are so lucrative but it's hard to screen for the right abilities so they base it on brute work ethic. I'm not defending, just explaining.
- throwit1979 13y ago
  That's not an answer to the question, though. I'm also genuinely curious. What do people "in finance" actually do on a day to day basis? My naive understanding is that the industry is highly automated already, so what activities are these 100 hour weeks spent doing?
  - etherael 13y ago
    The OP answer reads to me like a very polite and indirect way of saying "partially self-inflicted pointless busywork".
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    I can only imagine they are like programmers, except instead of developing code they are developing models on which to base decisions.
  - mtew38 13y ago
    Investment bankers are masters of Excel, Powerpoint, and Word and they're messing around in one of those all day long. Mostly building financial models and writing or formatting presentations. The work to do is endless, and if it's not the senior members of a team will make something up for you to do. A huge part of what i-bankers do is pitch - either pitch to a company that you'd like to bring on as a client, or pitch to potential buyers of your client (and variations of that). Junior guys basically make the presentations for those pitches. There's generally horrible project management going on at the senior level as well, and senior team members have no qualms about making you make pointless updates to a presentation (for example, update the numbers in the presentation for the stock price today even though nobody will see the presentation for a week, and you'll have to update it then anyway). In fact, it's sort of part of the deal.
    - cmbaus 13y ago
      This closely aligns with what I've seen in the field.
    - lesterbuck 13y ago
      I guess showing them a live data source for the stock price in the presentation would just make their heads explode. I thought that was a reasonably out-of-the-box Office feature?
      - phyalow 13y ago
        Unlikely, most data points in presentations are specifically given to paint a certain view! Last weeks figure will be last weeks low or high, not some arbitrary figure pulled from the middle of a session...
patmcguire 13y ago
Finance is weirdly disorganized. Everything I hear is you have a long empty period during the day and then a work dump whenever the MD goes home that you scramble to do. You wind up throwing out a lot of work halfway through because someone didn't bother to check whether it was the right thing to be doing or even relevant, just handed you an assignment. Everything's last minute and disorganized, but no one cares because the gaps always get filled with heroic efforts from the interns and junior people.
- lesterbuck 13y ago
  This sounds like the definition of the next place for software to eat an industry. I guess the number of domain experts is too small, or the knowledge changes too quickly to build into some extremely profitable process management software?
  - nnq 13y ago
    I think there are a bunch of fields, like medicine, medical research (except doing some software simulations of stuff), finance (the process management, not the calculation part), politics and law etc. that are inherently hostile to revolution by software - most competent programmers run away screaming after contact with any such domain and only the dumb ones remain, churning dumb software that doesn't actually solve the problems. And the few good ones that stay become dumbed down and only work at ~40% of their iq and productivity because their minds basically choke on the sheer amount of disorganized domain specific knowledge they have to absorb. I think if we were to make an analogy of "information as alcohol", a programmer's mind is like an installation that only works well with very "distilled" information (say "vodka" and "whisky" :) ) and may work ok with "wine", but it completely sluggs down if you give it "beer" (completely undistilled information). In some domains (medicine is one that I know of), information is so undistilled, diluted and corrupted that it's basically the analogue of "beer with piss in it and rats swimming in the kegs" ("the rats" are my analogue for the "mud minded" people that "just don't get it and never will" and prevent smart geeks from actually doing their jobs)... that's why I wouldn't touch it with a 100 foot pol and I imagine lots of people feels the same about these areas. I imagine this part of finance is a similar "beer pool".
constapop 13y ago
Job of a Summer Analyst: 1. Excel work. Valuing companies or modeling a merger or acquisition or financing. Sometimes it goes beyond this, but that’s the bread and butter of what you do in Excel. 2. Writing (PowerPoint or Word). For pitches you’ll write slides on industry trends, executive summaries and explanations of your analysis… for deals you will create marketing documents that “sell” your client in Word or PowerPoint. 3. Research. This can be finding reports for senior bankers, doing industry research, or Googling for hours on end trying to find the adoption rate of cell phones in a southern province of Kazakhstan. 4. Administrative Tasks. I hope you like scheduling meetings, taking notes, and sending out status updates to your team, because you’ll be doing a lot of that.

loganfrederick 13y ago

Speaking of Fischer Black, while he worked quite a bit because he enjoyed it and was given a lot of flexibility due to his reputation, he took great pride in having the smallest percent ownership in Goldman Sachs out of any of the partners while he was there. He was not a banker himself, and was known to play Super Mario Bros. in his office and spend his evenings at comedy clubs. And he had a bigger impact on finance than arguably any banker since JPMorgan, without working their hours. Perry Mehrling wrote a great biography of Black which I can't recommend enough. http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finance/dp/0471457329 http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finan...

mathattack 13y ago

In an internship it's all about the face time of proving you can work hard enough to survive an associate position or 2 year analyst stint. The competition is amplified because firms don't want to hire someone who got rejected from their prior place of employment. The reason such a strange system exists is the top positions are so lucrative but it's hard to screen for the right abilities so they base it on brute work ethic. I'm not defending, just explaining.

throwit1979 13y ago
That's not an answer to the question, though. I'm also genuinely curious. What do people "in finance" actually do on a day to day basis? My naive understanding is that the industry is highly automated already, so what activities are these 100 hour weeks spent doing?
- etherael 13y ago
  The OP answer reads to me like a very polite and indirect way of saying "partially self-inflicted pointless busywork".
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I can only imagine they are like programmers, except instead of developing code they are developing models on which to base decisions.
- mtew38 13y ago
  Investment bankers are masters of Excel, Powerpoint, and Word and they're messing around in one of those all day long. Mostly building financial models and writing or formatting presentations. The work to do is endless, and if it's not the senior members of a team will make something up for you to do. A huge part of what i-bankers do is pitch - either pitch to a company that you'd like to bring on as a client, or pitch to potential buyers of your client (and variations of that). Junior guys basically make the presentations for those pitches. There's generally horrible project management going on at the senior level as well, and senior team members have no qualms about making you make pointless updates to a presentation (for example, update the numbers in the presentation for the stock price today even though nobody will see the presentation for a week, and you'll have to update it then anyway). In fact, it's sort of part of the deal.
  - cmbaus 13y ago
    This closely aligns with what I've seen in the field.
  - lesterbuck 13y ago
    I guess showing them a live data source for the stock price in the presentation would just make their heads explode. I thought that was a reasonably out-of-the-box Office feature?
    - phyalow 13y ago
      Unlikely, most data points in presentations are specifically given to paint a certain view! Last weeks figure will be last weeks low or high, not some arbitrary figure pulled from the middle of a session...

patmcguire 13y ago

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

lesterbuck 13y ago
This sounds like the definition of the next place for software to eat an industry. I guess the number of domain experts is too small, or the knowledge changes too quickly to build into some extremely profitable process management software?
- nnq 13y ago
  I think there are a bunch of fields, like medicine, medical research (except doing some software simulations of stuff), finance (the process management, not the calculation part), politics and law etc. that are inherently hostile to revolution by software - most competent programmers run away screaming after contact with any such domain and only the dumb ones remain, churning dumb software that doesn't actually solve the problems. And the few good ones that stay become dumbed down and only work at ~40% of their iq and productivity because their minds basically choke on the sheer amount of disorganized domain specific knowledge they have to absorb. I think if we were to make an analogy of "information as alcohol", a programmer's mind is like an installation that only works well with very "distilled" information (say "vodka" and "whisky" :) ) and may work ok with "wine", but it completely sluggs down if you give it "beer" (completely undistilled information). In some domains (medicine is one that I know of), information is so undistilled, diluted and corrupted that it's basically the analogue of "beer with piss in it and rats swimming in the kegs" ("the rats" are my analogue for the "mud minded" people that "just don't get it and never will" and prevent smart geeks from actually doing their jobs)... that's why I wouldn't touch it with a 100 foot pol and I imagine lots of people feels the same about these areas. I imagine this part of finance is a similar "beer pool".

constapop 13y ago

Job of a Summer Analyst: 1. Excel work. Valuing companies or modeling a merger or acquisition or financing. Sometimes it goes beyond this, but that’s the bread and butter of what you do in Excel. 2. Writing (PowerPoint or Word). For pitches you’ll write slides on industry trends, executive summaries and explanations of your analysis… for deals you will create marketing documents that “sell” your client in Word or PowerPoint. 3. Research. This can be finding reports for senior bankers, doing industry research, or Googling for hours on end trying to find the adoption rate of cell phones in a southern province of Kazakhstan. 4. Administrative Tasks. I hope you like scheduling meetings, taking notes, and sending out status updates to your team, because you’ll be doing a lot of that.