6 ms·

This is all really, really wrong. I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. Working days and nights and for what? Even if you d

This is all really, really wrong. I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. Working days and nights and for what? Even if you do become rich, then what? You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream. When you're on the patio of your beach house with your high blood pressure, anxiety and depression, what have you accomplished? Is reality like the dream you once chased? I don't think so.

jmduke 13y ago
Was it intentional or unintentional that your comment also describes the life of entrepreneurs/startup founders?
- coolnow 13y ago
  Through a startup, most times at least you can say you provided a service (like Dropbox). With banking, you're pretty much a devil in a lot of people's eyes and you're working purely for the profit of your employer.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Silicon valley types are the devil to the unwashed San Francisco hippies. As an investment banker you also provide a service. When Google buys a startup for $50 million, that transaction doesn't make itself happen.
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      No -- but the banks are overcompensated for their work on M&A. You could hire a strategic consulting firm -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG -- to do M&A due diligence for half of what the investments banks charge. They hire from the same pool of 25-year-old Ivy League graduates. I doubt they'd do a worse job than the banks. IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is how Google itself went public. It's true that the investment banks have access to a larger pool of investors. But that's circular reasoning. If the investment banks didn't exist, then these capitalists would be investing in IPOs through a Dutch auction like OpenIPO. Structured products? The investment banks earn a 50% profit margin on structured products. The people who buy structured products could double their returns by constructing their own structured products on the options and future markets. And if they're not sophisticated enough to do that without an investment bank, then they probably don't understand what they're buying!
      - yetanotherphd 13y ago
        Theoretically, the main reason to prefer traditional IPO's to dutch auctions, is the auctions in general may not give sufficient rewards for "price discovery". That is, everyone is relying on everyone else to research the firm and discover its true value. That's not to say there is NO incentive for price discovery in auctions, just not as much as through the traditional process. In my corporate finance class they described how some countries (I forget which) had experimented with auctions instead of using i-bank underwriting, and in the end they had all gone back to using i-banks. I don't know anything about M&A, but on structured products I agree they are just for customers who don't know any better.
      - refurb 13y ago
        90% of what you're buying when you bring an IB firm to help with your IPO is the name. Why? Because the name has value, it helps sell stock. I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it". It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.
      - refurb 13y ago
        90% of what you're buying when you bring an IB firm to help with your IPO is the name. Why? Because the name has value, it helps sell stock. I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it". It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.
- kenster07 13y ago
  The article described a life where interns basically stayed up for no reason. And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.
  - bicknergseng 13y ago
    >>if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason I imagine most of us do it because we think it's for a good reason.
Mikeb85 13y ago
Plenty of people also work these hours not to get rich, but just to get by. Over-working is a problem in our society in general, not just banks.
rayiner 13y ago
So the article is describing investment banking, which is particularly demanding because it's a service job. You're helping a client do a deal, and clients are demanding and deals are time-sensitive. People generally do not go into investment banking expecting to make a career out of it. A few-year stint as an analyst is a great way to get into HBS/GSB/Wharton, and from there into a CFO-track position at an F500. It's also a good way to get into a PE/VC firm or a hedge fund. Because those firms do their own deals and have a lot of autonomy from their "clients" (LPs), the jobs aren't quite so demanding. Finally, some people just want to stick it out for 8-10 years, save up a couple of million dollars, and do something else after.
- gpvos 13y ago
  All that doesn't make it any less wrong.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    You said: "You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream." Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America and ideally a bunch of money saved up. For the majority of people who aren't looking to be career bankers, it wasn't "chasing a dream" but rather using a job as a stepping stone.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      The problem is that you typically build your habits in your first few years in your 20s. Many (not all) investment bankers build the habit of being consumed by work, neglecting exercise, eating unhealthily, and substituting money for happiness. I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again." My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)
harryh 13y ago
It might sound wrong to you, but that's fine. You can do something else. There are plenty of people who love working in banking with this sort of culture (and the financial rewards it brings). There's nothing wrong with different people having different goals.
- DanBC 13y ago
  It is clear that perverse incentives exist in some industries, and that those industries have failed to self-regulate. They now need regulation forced upon them. Luckily, in the UK, we have the European Working Times directive, and so interns should not feel forced to work 70 continuous hours.
  - Jacqued 13y ago
    The problem lies not in the rules, but in their enforcement. I can't speak for the UK but in France it is not allowed for an intern to work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstances, yet in many industries you still see 60+h workweeks as a standard for interns... Because by any means, an intern subject to this kind of unacceptable working conditions will not speak up since that would annihilate his chances to get a job at the end of his internship (and might even discredit him at other companies in the same industry)
  - harryh 13y ago
    How is "you'll have to work insane hours, but we'll pay you a shit ton of money" a perverse incentive?
    - DanBC 13y ago
      The guy says that he wasn't doing any work. He was just a warm body. Thus "You'll have to be at your desk for insane hours. You won't be doing much work. You increase the chance of fat-finger[1] errors. We know you'll probably have to take illegal drugs to stay awake that long. We're borderline illegal. We're opening ourselves up to serious legal liability (eg, causing harm to our workers). But hey, you'll get a shitton of money. (Where shitton is not that much, and less than you'd get from other more normal jobs)" It's a perverse incentive because there's money slopping round in banking, and there are not adequate controls on how that money makes its way from A to B to C. The bank does $SOMETHING, and the customers are happy and pay, and the bank pays $BONUS. But there's randomness in the system and often the $SOMETHING has very little to do with actually making any money.
michalu 13y ago
"for what?" I don't think you are a measure of what is meaningful for other person and what's not. If I choose to work 12 hours it's my free choice, not affecting you, and I may have my own reasons. If I don't want to do so I will find another job. If there are more capable people like me employers will have to change conditions to attract talent. But I won't modify my reasons to other peoples ideas about what is meaningful and what is not.
- ApertureHour 13y ago
  I think part of the complaint is not that people have different goals and motivations for doing things; it's that they often engage in behaviour that is actively counter-productive to achieving their stated aims.
  - michalu 13y ago
    I agree with you, many peoples acts are not in harmony with their values but I am not sure society can solve this in an effective way, without imposing limits. If your acts are not crossing the boundaries of another's rights then in my opinion as long as you have options to make a change then this battle is for everyone to win by themselves.
  - crusso 13y ago
    Isn't the measure of all that what the free exchange of labor for pay or a career is all about?
- OGC 13y ago
  > If I choose to work 12 hours it's my free choice, not affecting you That really depends on what you're doing.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.
- crusso 13y ago
  Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism. So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government. That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them. Do I have that about right?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take. The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.
    - crusso 13y ago
      in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state No Lord God Mises necessary. The rules for "pure" capitalism are the minimum set needed to allow free exchange between individuals.

jmduke 13y ago

Was it intentional or unintentional that your comment also describes the life of entrepreneurs/startup founders?

coolnow 13y ago
Through a startup, most times at least you can say you provided a service (like Dropbox). With banking, you're pretty much a devil in a lot of people's eyes and you're working purely for the profit of your employer.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Silicon valley types are the devil to the unwashed San Francisco hippies. As an investment banker you also provide a service. When Google buys a startup for $50 million, that transaction doesn't make itself happen.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    No -- but the banks are overcompensated for their work on M&A. You could hire a strategic consulting firm -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG -- to do M&A due diligence for half of what the investments banks charge. They hire from the same pool of 25-year-old Ivy League graduates. I doubt they'd do a worse job than the banks. IPOs? You shouldn't need an underwriter to do an IPO. That's the whole idea behind OpenIPO -- which is how Google itself went public. It's true that the investment banks have access to a larger pool of investors. But that's circular reasoning. If the investment banks didn't exist, then these capitalists would be investing in IPOs through a Dutch auction like OpenIPO. Structured products? The investment banks earn a 50% profit margin on structured products. The people who buy structured products could double their returns by constructing their own structured products on the options and future markets. And if they're not sophisticated enough to do that without an investment bank, then they probably don't understand what they're buying!
    - yetanotherphd 13y ago
      Theoretically, the main reason to prefer traditional IPO's to dutch auctions, is the auctions in general may not give sufficient rewards for "price discovery". That is, everyone is relying on everyone else to research the firm and discover its true value. That's not to say there is NO incentive for price discovery in auctions, just not as much as through the traditional process. In my corporate finance class they described how some countries (I forget which) had experimented with auctions instead of using i-bank underwriting, and in the end they had all gone back to using i-banks. I don't know anything about M&A, but on structured products I agree they are just for customers who don't know any better.
    - refurb 13y ago
      90% of what you're buying when you bring an IB firm to help with your IPO is the name. Why? Because the name has value, it helps sell stock. I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it". It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.
    - refurb 13y ago
      90% of what you're buying when you bring an IB firm to help with your IPO is the name. Why? Because the name has value, it helps sell stock. I have a good friend who is a COO a very successful start-up. He said "When we IPO you better believe we're getting Goldman to do it". It's a free market, no one HAS to use these IB firms and take a 10% haircut on the money they raise. However, they choose to do it.
kenster07 13y ago
The article described a life where interns basically stayed up for no reason. And if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason, he is probably doing it wrong. Sleep is worth its weight in gold, and you don't give it up for anything less.
- bicknergseng 13y ago
  >>if an entrepreneur is regularly pulling all-nighters for no good reason I imagine most of us do it because we think it's for a good reason.

Mikeb85 13y ago

Plenty of people also work these hours not to get rich, but just to get by. Over-working is a problem in our society in general, not just banks.

rayiner 13y ago

So the article is describing investment banking, which is particularly demanding because it's a service job. You're helping a client do a deal, and clients are demanding and deals are time-sensitive. People generally do not go into investment banking expecting to make a career out of it. A few-year stint as an analyst is a great way to get into HBS/GSB/Wharton, and from there into a CFO-track position at an F500. It's also a good way to get into a PE/VC firm or a hedge fund. Because those firms do their own deals and have a lot of autonomy from their "clients" (LPs), the jobs aren't quite so demanding. Finally, some people just want to stick it out for 8-10 years, save up a couple of million dollars, and do something else after.

gpvos 13y ago
All that doesn't make it any less wrong.
- rayiner 13y ago
  You said: "You can't have your health back and you wasted years of your life chasing a dream." Your health is unlikely to suffer in any appreciable long-term way working banking hours for a few years in your 20's. And at the end it's not like you're some factory worker that has sacrificed your body and is spit out with nothing to show for it. You've got a credential that is tremendously valuable in corporate America and ideally a bunch of money saved up. For the majority of people who aren't looking to be career bankers, it wasn't "chasing a dream" but rather using a job as a stepping stone.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    The problem is that you typically build your habits in your first few years in your 20s. Many (not all) investment bankers build the habit of being consumed by work, neglecting exercise, eating unhealthily, and substituting money for happiness. I worked in a financial software startup my first job out of college. Our CFO was a former investment banker, one of the determined ones who got out. He said "Everybody in investment banking has their number, the amount they have to make before they get out of the career and sit on a beach somewhere. Very few actually make it, because once they hit their number their number just doubles again." My girlfriend used to work in finance (in proprietary trading, not IB) and said the same about many of her IB friends: they all want to get out, but very few of them actually do. (The ones that do have a nice chunk of change, which is good, but it requires really knowing yourself and your goals and acting on that, which few people can do.)

harryh 13y ago

It might sound wrong to you, but that's fine. You can do something else. There are plenty of people who love working in banking with this sort of culture (and the financial rewards it brings). There's nothing wrong with different people having different goals.

DanBC 13y ago
It is clear that perverse incentives exist in some industries, and that those industries have failed to self-regulate. They now need regulation forced upon them. Luckily, in the UK, we have the European Working Times directive, and so interns should not feel forced to work 70 continuous hours.
- Jacqued 13y ago
  The problem lies not in the rules, but in their enforcement. I can't speak for the UK but in France it is not allowed for an intern to work more than 40 hours a week under any circumstances, yet in many industries you still see 60+h workweeks as a standard for interns... Because by any means, an intern subject to this kind of unacceptable working conditions will not speak up since that would annihilate his chances to get a job at the end of his internship (and might even discredit him at other companies in the same industry)
- harryh 13y ago
  How is "you'll have to work insane hours, but we'll pay you a shit ton of money" a perverse incentive?
  - DanBC 13y ago
    The guy says that he wasn't doing any work. He was just a warm body. Thus "You'll have to be at your desk for insane hours. You won't be doing much work. You increase the chance of fat-finger[1] errors. We know you'll probably have to take illegal drugs to stay awake that long. We're borderline illegal. We're opening ourselves up to serious legal liability (eg, causing harm to our workers). But hey, you'll get a shitton of money. (Where shitton is not that much, and less than you'd get from other more normal jobs)" It's a perverse incentive because there's money slopping round in banking, and there are not adequate controls on how that money makes its way from A to B to C. The bank does $SOMETHING, and the customers are happy and pay, and the bank pays $BONUS. But there's randomness in the system and often the $SOMETHING has very little to do with actually making any money.

michalu 13y ago

"for what?" I don't think you are a measure of what is meaningful for other person and what's not. If I choose to work 12 hours it's my free choice, not affecting you, and I may have my own reasons. If I don't want to do so I will find another job. If there are more capable people like me employers will have to change conditions to attract talent. But I won't modify my reasons to other peoples ideas about what is meaningful and what is not.

ApertureHour 13y ago
I think part of the complaint is not that people have different goals and motivations for doing things; it's that they often engage in behaviour that is actively counter-productive to achieving their stated aims.
- michalu 13y ago
  I agree with you, many peoples acts are not in harmony with their values but I am not sure society can solve this in an effective way, without imposing limits. If your acts are not crossing the boundaries of another's rights then in my opinion as long as you have options to make a change then this battle is for everyone to win by themselves.
- crusso 13y ago
  Isn't the measure of all that what the free exchange of labor for pay or a career is all about?
OGC 13y ago
> If I choose to work 12 hours it's my free choice, not affecting you That really depends on what you're doing.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

I wonder how we, as a society, have managed to lower our values this much. We decided to let capitalism tell us what to do instead of our telling it what to do. It is proceeding in the only institutionalized imperative it has: convert the entire planet into money.

crusso 13y ago
Capitalism is just engaging in free exchange with others. You can't have real freedom without having capitalism. So when you say that capitalism should be told what to do, you're saying that people should not be free to exchange with others as they will. The alternative is to be coerced, manipulated, and controlled by some overarching authority. In a democracy, presumably that authority would be the government. That brings us full circle... the people too stupid to voluntarily participate in free exchange are somehow smart enough to elect benevolent intelligent leaders who will instead make their choices for them. Do I have that about right?
- rayiner 13y ago
  Traditional capitalism is exchange against the background threat of violence by the government against people who break contracts or take property. People give up their basic freedoms, e.g. the freedom to say one thing and do another or to take whatever they have the physical ability to take. The difference between capitalism and regulated economies is not freedom, because in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state. Rather, the difference is what rules exist and who makes them. In a purely capitalist society, we defer to the Lord God Mises and declare a a particular set of rules (private property, private contracts, etc) to be sacrosanct and worthy of government protection. In a democratic society, we get to vote on the rules.
  - crusso 13y ago
    in both cases true freedom is constrained by a background set of rules enforced by the state No Lord God Mises necessary. The rules for "pure" capitalism are the minimum set needed to allow free exchange between individuals.