9 ms·

Reflections on Stress and Long Hours on Wall Street

63 points by trustfundbaby 11y ago

dwolfson 11y ago
>> "But as long as young analysts are expected to work 80 to 100 hours a week, invariably some run the risk of finding themselves in a situation they cannot handle." Doubly true for medical residents. And far, far more dangerous.
bgentry 11y ago
Non-mobile link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflections-on-stress-and-long-hours-on-wall-street.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflecti...
CurtMonash 11y ago
When I was a young stock analyst (a more senior role than described here, in a different department) in the 1980s, I was regarded as weird because I pulled the occasional all-nighter. But that was a different role in a different era. The lives of investment banking analyst types indeed sound pretty awful. It's one of those careers that nobody would possibly pursue except in the hope of making money. I'd say that's a bad characteristic for a job to have, but of course the large majority of the working population does just that, albeit for less money and in most cases fewer hours as well.
ForHackernews 11y ago
I don't really have that much sympathy. All these Wall Street types knew what they were signing up for: obscene hours and tons of pressure in return for obscene compensation. If we're going to worry about overworked, stressed out people, let's start by caring about poor people stringing together three or four part-time jobs trying to make ends meet with no benefits.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - jblow 11y ago
    I flagged your comment and downvoted you. If a Wall Street worker feels unduly stressed, that person can easily quit and work a nicer job; it is only greed holding them there. A poor person working multiple part-time jobs probably hasn't much of a choice. So whereas sure, we can empathize with everyone, the problems of one group are much less real than the problems of the other.
    - logicchains 11y ago
      >A poor person working multiple part-time jobs probably hasn't much of a choice. They may not have a choice over that, but they may have had control over many of the decisions that led them into that situation. E.g. they could have chosen to study harder, to go back to school, not to have children when they lacked the money to support them, etc. They could have chosen to spend less money on consumables like cigarettes and alcohol. I suspect this is particularly true in countries with socialised education/healthcare (most 'western' countries apart from the US). Most of the poor people I've met here in Australia, for instance, are either poor because a: they're happy with a low paying job, or b: they continually make bad decisions and have an anti-intellectual attitude, a distaste for learning and self-betterment. In my experience the ones who actively work towards improving their situation rarely stay in poverty for long.
      - jmngomes 11y ago
        Consider that a lot of people that are in that situation probably come from a background that is less positive than the one that you use for reference when making those statements. It's a parent's duty to guide and assist their children's choices, but a lot of people don't get such guidance, and in may cases they don't get the basic nurting needed to become an independent adult in today's world. So they do have less chances.
        logicchains 11y ago
- jacobolus 11y ago
  The reason to worry is not (per se) because the folks who choose to go into corporate law, finance, business consulting, etc. deserve sympathy, but because when they get no sleep, are stressed and depressed, and have no time to reflect, they start making choices based narrowly on perceived short-term self interest, often very bad choices which leave the systems they are involved in (and therefore all of the rest of us, and often themselves as well) screwed. Of course, having a little empathy for them doesn’t hurt either. Plenty of people I knew in college went to work in finance, and while I personally think the financial services industry is in many ways a toxic plague, they aren’t individually bad people. They don’t strike me as all that different from the software engineers who went to work for Google or Facebook: it just seemed like the path of least resistance, a way to make a nice pile of money and work on some interesting problems for a few years on something that would look okay on a resumé, without needing to commit to anything long term.
- pizza 11y ago
  I can assure you Mr. Gupta would not have taken the job if he knew it would lead to his suicide. Your comment is obscenely callous, and there is no need for a false dichotomy of which problems we can concern ourselves with. No suicide is unimportant. We can discuss more than one problem at a time.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    But this article isn't talking about providing better funding for mental health services in the US, or lessing the stigma on seeking help for mental health problems, or changing America's success-at-all-costs culture. Instead, this article is narrowly focused on the question of improving working conditions for some of the wealthiest, most privileged workers anywhere in world.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      I'm not sure its ok to abuse anyone, not even wealth-seekers. The stories are horrific.
      - ForHackernews 11y ago
        They should quit, then. It sounds like this poor guy did quit, but then inexplicably went back. At any rate, these are highly educated, competitive people. They would easily be employable in any number of other industries, anywhere in the world. I'd give the same advice to software engineers. If you're being taken advantage of, leave.
        rrss1122 11y ago
        I think that he inexplicably went back shows how hard it is to quit. They are facing immense pressure from family and management to not quit, and working long hours like that drains them of the mental resources they need to resist.
BadassFractal 11y ago
The part that I totally don't grok about big name consulting companies, or Wall Street, is how people there are able to get any work done while sleeping 3-4 hours a night for months at a time. Most will agree that you need a continuous stream of good nights of sleep if you're doing any kind of work that requires creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles etc. Sure, you can miss sleep once or twice here and there, and you can still get away with doing menial repetitive tasks, but even those are going to be a bit of a struggle. In software, we clearly understand that people who continuously work 14 hour days are not actually producing 14 hours worth of clear-headed work. In fact, once you factor in the damage generated by the low quality of deliverables, they might be producing far less than even 8 hours of work. As an industry we've done decades of deathmarches, and we mostly know that those things don't really work. Has this realization not hit the rest of the work world, or are we as developers simply wimpier than other professions? How does this work in the Wall Street world? Is the idea that it doesn't matter how good your work is, as long as you show martyr-level dedication to the company? Or, are these people superhuman, and are they able to do 14 hours worth of quality work every day for ever? In which case, can I have whatever they're having? I'd really love to understand this.
- dwolfson 11y ago
  I can't answer this first hand, but my impression is that not necessarily the entirety of those 14 hours on Wall Street is usually spent doing work that requires "creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles." One reason for the long hours is that most of the difficult work piles on later in the day due to bottlenecks, or waiting for feedback/turnaround. Another is the unspoken rule on "face time."
- dmagee 11y ago
  You're assuming that big name consulting companies etc are actually doing complex work. They're not. As an analyst/associate you're spending most of your time crunching out excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. Something the average highschooler could do.
curiousDog 11y ago
And the pressure is more intense on middle class Indians (most of whom come here for a Bachelors or Masters) and are on a H1-B. The H1-B is basically corporate enslavement and add to that the sadistic societal structure of Indian culture, you have a perfect recipe where young professionals are caught in-between the devil and the deep blue sea: Either work your ass off (I used to work 80+ hrs) to please your manager (most of the time without any recognition) or say FU and head back to India to face the shameful wrath of both your parents and relatives (you're a failure now. You couldn't make it unlike Mr. Rahul's son who is now a manager).
- bch 11y ago
  What's the "corporate enslavement" aspect of an H1-B ? What would be a preferred "work-a-like" ?
  - curiousDog 11y ago
    I actually agree with Prof. Norman Matloff's proposal: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf Section 10.3. The rest of the document is a great primer on the whole H1-B system as well. Currently, there is an incredible amount of fraud in this area.
    - GFischer 11y ago
      That article is awful, and made wholly unaccurate predictions (that's not to say that H1B is bad): "the American software developer will become extinct within the next few years" "the Impact Innovations Group even estimates a precise date at which the “extinction” of the American programmer will occur—2006" I understand that American developers can feel that H1B's depresses their salaries (it probably does, if I went to the U.S. I'd probably accept a lower rate than I would have were I a native born American). I also see that H1B is not a good place to be as an inmigrant (and that's why I chose not to accept it and I'm not going to the U.S.)
      - bch 11y ago
hristov 11y ago
I think a lot of these suicides are not actual suicides, but accidents resulting from exhaustion. I used to have a job where I pulled all nighters and worked 48 hours straight some times, and let me tell ya the exhaustion sometimes makes you act like you are drunk. You do not have very good motor control, all of your muscles hurt and you tend to forget obvious things. I think it is quite possible that the subject of this article simply collapsed and fell over a parapet rather than jump intentionally.
hkmurakami 11y ago
>Mr. Gupta, who was universally liked by his colleagues and whom several said was so good at his job that he had become one of the “go-to” analysts. A friend who is an associate at a big law firm in SV has a similar problem where she is so good at her job that the partners give her the toughest tasks they have on their plates. It's pretty crappy that your life suffers because you are excellent at your work.
- gadders 11y ago
  If you want something done, give it to a busy person. Or in a slightly longer form, the classic "Letter to Garcia": http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Unfortunately, today, he'd probably be laid off in favor of more predictable employees. Perhaps Agile employees doing Pair Programming.

63 points by trustfundbaby 11y ago

>> "But as long as young analysts are expected to work 80 to 100 hours a week, invariably some run the risk of finding themselves in a situation they cannot handle." Doubly true for medical residents. And far, far more dangerous.

bgentry 11y ago

Non-mobile link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflections-on-stress-and-long-hours-on-wall-street.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflecti...

CurtMonash 11y ago

When I was a young stock analyst (a more senior role than described here, in a different department) in the 1980s, I was regarded as weird because I pulled the occasional all-nighter. But that was a different role in a different era. The lives of investment banking analyst types indeed sound pretty awful. It's one of those careers that nobody would possibly pursue except in the hope of making money. I'd say that's a bad characteristic for a job to have, but of course the large majority of the working population does just that, albeit for less money and in most cases fewer hours as well.

ForHackernews 11y ago

I don't really have that much sympathy. All these Wall Street types knew what they were signing up for: obscene hours and tons of pressure in return for obscene compensation. If we're going to worry about overworked, stressed out people, let's start by caring about poor people stringing together three or four part-time jobs trying to make ends meet with no benefits.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- jblow 11y ago
  I flagged your comment and downvoted you. If a Wall Street worker feels unduly stressed, that person can easily quit and work a nicer job; it is only greed holding them there. A poor person working multiple part-time jobs probably hasn't much of a choice. So whereas sure, we can empathize with everyone, the problems of one group are much less real than the problems of the other.
  - logicchains 11y ago
    >A poor person working multiple part-time jobs probably hasn't much of a choice. They may not have a choice over that, but they may have had control over many of the decisions that led them into that situation. E.g. they could have chosen to study harder, to go back to school, not to have children when they lacked the money to support them, etc. They could have chosen to spend less money on consumables like cigarettes and alcohol. I suspect this is particularly true in countries with socialised education/healthcare (most 'western' countries apart from the US). Most of the poor people I've met here in Australia, for instance, are either poor because a: they're happy with a low paying job, or b: they continually make bad decisions and have an anti-intellectual attitude, a distaste for learning and self-betterment. In my experience the ones who actively work towards improving their situation rarely stay in poverty for long.
    - jmngomes 11y ago
      Consider that a lot of people that are in that situation probably come from a background that is less positive than the one that you use for reference when making those statements. It's a parent's duty to guide and assist their children's choices, but a lot of people don't get such guidance, and in may cases they don't get the basic nurting needed to become an independent adult in today's world. So they do have less chances.
      - logicchains 11y ago
jacobolus 11y ago
The reason to worry is not (per se) because the folks who choose to go into corporate law, finance, business consulting, etc. deserve sympathy, but because when they get no sleep, are stressed and depressed, and have no time to reflect, they start making choices based narrowly on perceived short-term self interest, often very bad choices which leave the systems they are involved in (and therefore all of the rest of us, and often themselves as well) screwed. Of course, having a little empathy for them doesn’t hurt either. Plenty of people I knew in college went to work in finance, and while I personally think the financial services industry is in many ways a toxic plague, they aren’t individually bad people. They don’t strike me as all that different from the software engineers who went to work for Google or Facebook: it just seemed like the path of least resistance, a way to make a nice pile of money and work on some interesting problems for a few years on something that would look okay on a resumé, without needing to commit to anything long term.
pizza 11y ago
I can assure you Mr. Gupta would not have taken the job if he knew it would lead to his suicide. Your comment is obscenely callous, and there is no need for a false dichotomy of which problems we can concern ourselves with. No suicide is unimportant. We can discuss more than one problem at a time.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  But this article isn't talking about providing better funding for mental health services in the US, or lessing the stigma on seeking help for mental health problems, or changing America's success-at-all-costs culture. Instead, this article is narrowly focused on the question of improving working conditions for some of the wealthiest, most privileged workers anywhere in world.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I'm not sure its ok to abuse anyone, not even wealth-seekers. The stories are horrific.
    - ForHackernews 11y ago
      They should quit, then. It sounds like this poor guy did quit, but then inexplicably went back. At any rate, these are highly educated, competitive people. They would easily be employable in any number of other industries, anywhere in the world. I'd give the same advice to software engineers. If you're being taken advantage of, leave.
      - rrss1122 11y ago
        I think that he inexplicably went back shows how hard it is to quit. They are facing immense pressure from family and management to not quit, and working long hours like that drains them of the mental resources they need to resist.

BadassFractal 11y ago

The part that I totally don't grok about big name consulting companies, or Wall Street, is how people there are able to get any work done while sleeping 3-4 hours a night for months at a time. Most will agree that you need a continuous stream of good nights of sleep if you're doing any kind of work that requires creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles etc. Sure, you can miss sleep once or twice here and there, and you can still get away with doing menial repetitive tasks, but even those are going to be a bit of a struggle. In software, we clearly understand that people who continuously work 14 hour days are not actually producing 14 hours worth of clear-headed work. In fact, once you factor in the damage generated by the low quality of deliverables, they might be producing far less than even 8 hours of work. As an industry we've done decades of deathmarches, and we mostly know that those things don't really work. Has this realization not hit the rest of the work world, or are we as developers simply wimpier than other professions? How does this work in the Wall Street world? Is the idea that it doesn't matter how good your work is, as long as you show martyr-level dedication to the company? Or, are these people superhuman, and are they able to do 14 hours worth of quality work every day for ever? In which case, can I have whatever they're having? I'd really love to understand this.

dwolfson 11y ago
I can't answer this first hand, but my impression is that not necessarily the entirety of those 14 hours on Wall Street is usually spent doing work that requires "creative thought, ability to associate concepts from different domains, thinking about problems from different angles." One reason for the long hours is that most of the difficult work piles on later in the day due to bottlenecks, or waiting for feedback/turnaround. Another is the unspoken rule on "face time."
dmagee 11y ago
You're assuming that big name consulting companies etc are actually doing complex work. They're not. As an analyst/associate you're spending most of your time crunching out excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations. Something the average highschooler could do.

curiousDog 11y ago

And the pressure is more intense on middle class Indians (most of whom come here for a Bachelors or Masters) and are on a H1-B. The H1-B is basically corporate enslavement and add to that the sadistic societal structure of Indian culture, you have a perfect recipe where young professionals are caught in-between the devil and the deep blue sea: Either work your ass off (I used to work 80+ hrs) to please your manager (most of the time without any recognition) or say FU and head back to India to face the shameful wrath of both your parents and relatives (you're a failure now. You couldn't make it unlike Mr. Rahul's son who is now a manager).

bch 11y ago
What's the "corporate enslavement" aspect of an H1-B ? What would be a preferred "work-a-like" ?
- curiousDog 11y ago
  I actually agree with Prof. Norman Matloff's proposal: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf Section 10.3. The rest of the document is a great primer on the whole H1-B system as well. Currently, there is an incredible amount of fraud in this area.
  - GFischer 11y ago
    That article is awful, and made wholly unaccurate predictions (that's not to say that H1B is bad): "the American software developer will become extinct within the next few years" "the Impact Innovations Group even estimates a precise date at which the “extinction” of the American programmer will occur—2006" I understand that American developers can feel that H1B's depresses their salaries (it probably does, if I went to the U.S. I'd probably accept a lower rate than I would have were I a native born American). I also see that H1B is not a good place to be as an inmigrant (and that's why I chose not to accept it and I'm not going to the U.S.)
    - bch 11y ago

hristov 11y ago

I think a lot of these suicides are not actual suicides, but accidents resulting from exhaustion. I used to have a job where I pulled all nighters and worked 48 hours straight some times, and let me tell ya the exhaustion sometimes makes you act like you are drunk. You do not have very good motor control, all of your muscles hurt and you tend to forget obvious things. I think it is quite possible that the subject of this article simply collapsed and fell over a parapet rather than jump intentionally.

hkmurakami 11y ago

>Mr. Gupta, who was universally liked by his colleagues and whom several said was so good at his job that he had become one of the “go-to” analysts. A friend who is an associate at a big law firm in SV has a similar problem where she is so good at her job that the partners give her the toughest tasks they have on their plates. It's pretty crappy that your life suffers because you are excellent at your work.

gadders 11y ago
If you want something done, give it to a busy person. Or in a slightly longer form, the classic "Letter to Garcia": http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Unfortunately, today, he'd probably be laid off in favor of more predictable employees. Perhaps Agile employees doing Pair Programming.