11 ms·

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 hou

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.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  I would be somewhat more charitable and claim that they do some "fit the client problem to an existing in-house problem solving models" exercises as well.
- thefinalboss 11y ago
  I disagree. Having spent 6 years working in one, my tasks ranged from spreadsheets and decks to coding java, dev ops, all forms of testing and plenty of technical design work. It's hard to lump entire big consulting companies into one category as once you get to 100K+ employees the company is like an entire world within itself. I agree that in general, the consulting arms of said companies do not do complex technical work. When you are integrating and upgrading a SAP implementation with 70+ existing systems, across 6 continents, with hundreds of stakeholders, things get complex.
- rrss1122 11y ago
  This makes me wonder why they're asking one guy to do the work of two or three people. If it's really that simple, and doesn't require specialized skills, there are plenty of archaeology and anthropolgy grads out there, realizing they made a mistake in choosing a major, who would love a job crunching numbers on Wall St. Why not hire more?
jseip 11y ago
Part of it is about gauging people on their ability to perform under extreme stress. Part of it is about extracting as much work as possible from a human before he / she burns out. Yet another goal is to take dozens of analyst and weed out, over the course of years, all those who are not hungry / greedy enough to make partner. It sure as shit isn't about doing anything that is sustainable long-term.
Omniusaspirer 11y ago
As others have said it likely just depends on the ratio of busy work to complex mental work they're doing. I had a stint of several months so far this year where I was putting in 100+ hours/week of manual labor at a day job and then coming home to do a couple hours of programming before sleep. Hell, I even started learning Thai during my half hour breaks. I didn't find myself having any serious difficulty maintaining that lifestyle after having adapted to it. I honestly felt great but couldn't shake the thought that I was probably abusing my body to the point where I'd pay for it later. Oh and yes, some coworkers liked to toss out the "superhuman" quip but I don't think I was doing anything others my age couldn't do. Youth and determination make for a powerful combination.
- nine_k 11y ago
  This basically means that the amount of time that requires intense intellectual strain is way below 100 h/week on Wall Street, but the amount of work that requires much lower intelligence ("busy work") is significant. This would explain a lot. It looks like a prime target for [more] automation, too.
rhino369 11y ago
While clearly there are diminishing returns on the number of hours worked in a day, the limit of productivity is way higher than 8. I'd guesstimate that the average person can do 10 solid hours, working on 75% for another 2, and 50% after that. That doesn't mean your work is only 50% as good, you just start slowing down. And I'm including small off task sessions in that time. When these guys say 100 hours, they aren't stopping the clock when they are reading an article on ESPN. I know several engineers and programmers who are doing over 10 a day. People vary on how much they need to sleep, but I really doubt they are only getting 3-4 nights for months at a time. 100 hours a week gets you almost 10 hours a day off. They live close to work, eat takeout at work, get people to do their housemaking duties. That leaves enough for 5-7 a night. I'm sure less on weekdays and more on weekends. As to why programmers are more sensitive to work/life balance, it's probably because the programming industry has been hot for a long time. Plus, programmers are extremely productive because of how software scales. But industries just develop different cultures. Many tech companies compete for talent based on perks, but finance is mostly based on money. There is also a bit of hazing element to the finance industry hierarchy. You work less as you guy up. The time is sort of "paying your dues." The ones doing 100 hours are 21-23 years old and can still handle it. In consulting and law, the billable hour creates perverse incentives. I can be twice the lawyer than someone who bills 15% more hours, but they are 15% more profitable. Finally, a lot of people can't hack it. The burn out rate in big banks is absurd. The average person lasts less than two years I believe.
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  > Plus, programmers are extremely productive because of how software scales. Not sure what you meant by this. Software engineering gets harder as a system scales, not easier.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    But one programmer can write a piece of code that runs on a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million servers. Most other workers can't multiply their output that way.
crdb 11y ago
Anecdotal evidence of course: It's mindless work, mostly. There's little creative work. And you're pumped up on adrenalin. I spent 2 months in consulting. Here's a sample. We slept on average 2-4 hours a night. We traded off eating in the morning vs an extra half hour's sleep - after about two weeks, I yielded and did like everybody else (no breakfast, even though the buffet was sumptuous including home pickled herrings I still dream about). The partners/EMs would meet with the client and then tell us the 400 slides that needed to be produced for next week's board meeting, and sometimes fleshed them out. We then put together the slides, and did whatever BS research needed to be done to justify the numbers (quick Google, hit a database, or - before my time - systematic interviewing of 300 people to create the data necessary, yes, the consultants did the interviewing!). An EM put it to me like this: "Are we 20x as expensive as their in-house talent, certainly; but we'll get it done 10x faster, and without any visual mistakes, and that's all they care about." I took a weekend (yes, "took" a weekend, because we were supposed to work every day, although we could come in at 10am on Sunday to catch up on sleep) to see an opera in Italy. The train did not have mobile reception. I discovered upon arriving in Verona that I had to produce 50 slides - each with 4 graphs I had to calculate - in 6 hours. I did them, emailed them, went to the opera, had an excellent roast beef with Amarone, got drunk on negronis, came to the hotel to find more work. I passed out on the bed from exhaustion and set about doing it on the train back to Zurich (unrelated factoid: on the train to Italy, Italian customs walked through the train and interrogated the only black guy in the wagon). One of the team members cracked and overslept by one hour one day instead of turning up for the morning cab to the client. She was mocked about it for a month. We ate sandwiches from a vending machine in the client's corridor. Our EM threw a fit once because McKinsey had booked out one of the 5* hotels in town, BCG the other (both working for the same client as us, funnily enough) and we were stuck with the Ibis Hotel. I didn't understand the swearing in German but I still remember the sound of "Ibis Hotel" fired in anger. I thought it was funny, personally I didn't care, Ibis hotel or luxury palace, it's still a bed and a warm powershower, and I can't have breakfast anyway. Everybody got extremely depressed once when one of the partners went home at 7pm right after posting a Facebook status update along the lines of "Damn, still at work :( :(". Our return taxi (S-class of course) was booked for something like 2-3am... I made around 2k/month from my food allowance alone because I ate sandwiches and it was no questions asked cash. We had steak delivery to change us from the vending machine sandwiches, but couldn't enjoy it. Ate the steak in front of the laptop. The hotels and limos were awesome, but what is the point of a balcony the size of a small swimming pool if you never see the sun, and what is the point of a 2m long jacuzzi if you don't have time to take a bath? Some people stopped ironing their shirts to get more sleep, I tried to use room service or my own iron and starch because I foolishly thought I had a career to manage (the EMs didn't care, it's not like us junior folks were client facing). The lack of sleep was physically painful. By the third night all your body would ache, your eyes would ache from behind, headaches were constant, you were in zombie mode. It sucked but you just saddled up and kept going because everybody else did. Visual perfectionism was constant - I was told off for being 5 minutes late to a cab pickup, and for misaligning an object on a slide by a millimetre. After this, you just stress yourself into double checking your work, all the time, sometimes triple checking, even though it's just as painful. You also eat more from stress, so put on weight. One EM put on enough weight in a month to crack his suit trousers, and went to the supermarket during lunch to buy a couple new pairs. So yeah, productivity takes a hit, but the sheer amount of hours and generally, the type of people who get into these firms (overachieving, slightly hyperactive, energetic, driven) are more productive per hour on this type of work. At the end of the case, about half the team quit. Aforementioned lady went to the Kennedy School in Harvard and works for the Brasilian government or something. I joined a trading company. The EM moved to Australia to work on miners' strategy, the other EM to Saudi doing more consulting, but with different working conditions (apparently they get weekend business class flights to anywhere in the world no questions asked in that office). A few months later, I read in the paper that the client had been acquired by a large foreign group. I thought back about what we were actually doing, and I realized there had been three groups: the management, the board and the shareholders. We worked for the management since they had the power to hire us for more cases. We justified their bad decisions to the board, who themselves had to cover their own behinds enough to be able to pretend they did their work to the shareholders. The company's loss in value over two years was a direct result of a bad strategic decision by management which handed over the market to the one direct competitor. The board was also at fault for not thinking about the stupidity of the one decision in question. In my mind at least. I'm told it's not always like this, that sometimes you're sent to Sydney with a $40k/month expense account and 9-5 "strategy level" work, that after the financial crisis belts were tightened etc. Hell I had drinks in the Sydney Sheraton spa with a McKinsey buddy recently who was doing just that. Nevertheless I'm not going back to this industry any time soon, it's just not worth it when it's not your equity. Trading was a different type of intensity. After a particularly active day, even though I had worked only from 9am til around 4.30pm (no lunch, no time), I passed out on the train home. Here, a mistake didn't cost you just a bollocking, it cost the company thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions were usually gains, after the other side made a mistake, we were careful). I was a lot more conscientious than my predecessor and only made three mistake in thousands of trades, saving the company a lot of money just by doing my job properly on the execution side; I think my biggest execution mistake lost us $30,000 on $10m so not too bad. Initially, I took the habit from consulting over and had dinner at the office, reheating supermarket dishes in the microwave; but the office was empty after 6pm which was a big realization, that these people made a lot more money and were a lot happier than "us consultants" whilst working less. I guess that's when what you say above about quality vs quantity hit me. What was motivation? Well, consulting firms sell you the idea that you'll be at the top of the world if only you stick it out long enough, part of the elite that you presumably aren't yet (even if born there). I think banks are similar. (I later read Richistan, linked it with observations, and realized this "elite" was really just the lowest rung, the "employee" layer in the multi layered world of wealth; that these employees, if unable to ignore it, generally get pretty depressed about being in contact with the upper layers all the time; that wealth is really a relative, not absolute thing, above having enough to eat and sleep and send your kids to school.) Ego is a big thing. A lot of consultants/bankers think themselves more hardcore, smarter, better somehow than the plebs (a lot of them are mercenaries, understand the game and go through the motion for the paycheck). You'd hear people introducing others as "it's so and so, he's from GS IBD" and a wave of relief would go over your body as you would think "ok, that's one of us, I can trust he understands, I can really talk to him". Even today, when I tell finance people I was in finance and talk about markets, they relax and get a lot more open. It's funny because that's rarely the case with developers. Money is another, not the money right now but the promise of big bucks if only (again) you stick it out for a few more years. The high drop out rate is a function of realizing that either you won't make it, or that no money is worth it, or - in fewer cases - that someone with the level of talent/intelligence/drive these companies select for can actually make a lot more money/achievement/impact somewhere where you're not working for someone else. Or you realize that you're living someone else's dream (perhaps one fabricated by careful PR from the firms in question, and peer pressure) and you go on to live your own life. The funny thing is that entrepreneurs are very respected amongst consultants and bankers despite making - on average - a lot less money and having a lower net worth. Stick it out til private equity or hedge funds and you'll have a shot at billions which is much rarer in startup land. Yes, but those billions have someone else's name on them, and that ultimately makes all the difference in the status pissing contest. YMMV. I have a feeling this comment is going to come bite me back some time in the future :P
zeeshanm 11y ago
A lot of work an analyst would do is very repetive and dull. Sometimes they may be just changing font size, color, etc. for hours.
hiou 11y ago
I didn't see anyone here mention it so I'm going to bring up the elephant in the room. Performance enhancing drugs. I think most of us around here are aware of our contemporaries who use quite a bit of prescription assistance to operate at a high level. You get the right mix of Adderall, cocaine, theanine, modafinal or whatever and you can pull off some amazing stretches of work. And sadly, anyone who has gone really hard down that path can probably tell you kind of things that it can do to your mental health. Not at all in anyway whatsoever relating that to this article or particular case and I'm sure there are people who pull this off without those things, but I have a hunch it's becoming the exception at this point, not the rule.
schlumpf 11y ago
The answer to your question probably lies in the old joke, "Why are bureaucrats so vicious? Because the stakes are so love." At investment banks the stakes are high -- particularly at junior levels. So people endure. Or at least they try to. The workhorse experience you're asking about doesn't exist at senior levels, which makes surviving long enough to move up the food chain an objective in and of itself. But what typically motivates people to accept such persistent sleep deprivation is expected future income. E($$$), for you operator fans, increases pretty much monotonically for each day you don't quit or get fired or succumb to a more tragic outcome. If you're curious as to how this behavior became so deeply ingrained in "Wall Street" culture, start with real-time news. M&A work is often done overnight because priorities change as stock prices move, and because regulatory disclosures during quiet hours are often preferred to the middle of the trading day. Bankers and clients want to act while they have breathing room before news "hits the tape". And during the day, propaganda -- sorry, pitch books -- has to be updated to reflect the market moves and latest news. This circularity hits the trading side of the business, too. Research analysts are paid to have a fresh view on the markets every day. In my experience this is institutionalized nonsense but it also pays the bills for said analysts. So you spend as much time as humanly possible trying to find quantitative fig leaves to dress up those new things you are obliged to say. Consider also that a building full of smart people has a skewed and thin-tailed distribution of brain power. Unless you are Mensa material, it can seem easier to establish your claim on a (you hope) fat bonus through back-breaking work than by sleeping well and acting creatively. Naturally this idea has occurred to some of your colleagues as well and pretty soon it's a race to insomniac oblivion. The guys (and it is almost exclusively guys) who make it to senior levels and get back their sleep while still getting paid have usually figured out how to take credit for others' efforts. That's not meant as a cynical comment but as an observation of what is sometimes euphemistically called "getting lift" from one's team. For a much more entertaining description of this pattern, I highly recommend Stanley Bing's "Sun Tzu Was a Sissy"[1]. [1]http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Tzu-Sissy-Stanley-Bing-ebook/dp/B000FC2J0W http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Tzu-Sissy-Stanley-Bing-ebook/dp/B0...

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.

hkmurakami 11y ago
I would be somewhat more charitable and claim that they do some "fit the client problem to an existing in-house problem solving models" exercises as well.
thefinalboss 11y ago
I disagree. Having spent 6 years working in one, my tasks ranged from spreadsheets and decks to coding java, dev ops, all forms of testing and plenty of technical design work. It's hard to lump entire big consulting companies into one category as once you get to 100K+ employees the company is like an entire world within itself. I agree that in general, the consulting arms of said companies do not do complex technical work. When you are integrating and upgrading a SAP implementation with 70+ existing systems, across 6 continents, with hundreds of stakeholders, things get complex.
rrss1122 11y ago
This makes me wonder why they're asking one guy to do the work of two or three people. If it's really that simple, and doesn't require specialized skills, there are plenty of archaeology and anthropolgy grads out there, realizing they made a mistake in choosing a major, who would love a job crunching numbers on Wall St. Why not hire more?

jseip 11y ago

Part of it is about gauging people on their ability to perform under extreme stress. Part of it is about extracting as much work as possible from a human before he / she burns out. Yet another goal is to take dozens of analyst and weed out, over the course of years, all those who are not hungry / greedy enough to make partner. It sure as shit isn't about doing anything that is sustainable long-term.

Omniusaspirer 11y ago

As others have said it likely just depends on the ratio of busy work to complex mental work they're doing. I had a stint of several months so far this year where I was putting in 100+ hours/week of manual labor at a day job and then coming home to do a couple hours of programming before sleep. Hell, I even started learning Thai during my half hour breaks. I didn't find myself having any serious difficulty maintaining that lifestyle after having adapted to it. I honestly felt great but couldn't shake the thought that I was probably abusing my body to the point where I'd pay for it later. Oh and yes, some coworkers liked to toss out the "superhuman" quip but I don't think I was doing anything others my age couldn't do. Youth and determination make for a powerful combination.

nine_k 11y ago
This basically means that the amount of time that requires intense intellectual strain is way below 100 h/week on Wall Street, but the amount of work that requires much lower intelligence ("busy work") is significant. This would explain a lot. It looks like a prime target for [more] automation, too.

rhino369 11y ago

While clearly there are diminishing returns on the number of hours worked in a day, the limit of productivity is way higher than 8. I'd guesstimate that the average person can do 10 solid hours, working on 75% for another 2, and 50% after that. That doesn't mean your work is only 50% as good, you just start slowing down. And I'm including small off task sessions in that time. When these guys say 100 hours, they aren't stopping the clock when they are reading an article on ESPN. I know several engineers and programmers who are doing over 10 a day. People vary on how much they need to sleep, but I really doubt they are only getting 3-4 nights for months at a time. 100 hours a week gets you almost 10 hours a day off. They live close to work, eat takeout at work, get people to do their housemaking duties. That leaves enough for 5-7 a night. I'm sure less on weekdays and more on weekends. As to why programmers are more sensitive to work/life balance, it's probably because the programming industry has been hot for a long time. Plus, programmers are extremely productive because of how software scales. But industries just develop different cultures. Many tech companies compete for talent based on perks, but finance is mostly based on money. There is also a bit of hazing element to the finance industry hierarchy. You work less as you guy up. The time is sort of "paying your dues." The ones doing 100 hours are 21-23 years old and can still handle it. In consulting and law, the billable hour creates perverse incentives. I can be twice the lawyer than someone who bills 15% more hours, but they are 15% more profitable. Finally, a lot of people can't hack it. The burn out rate in big banks is absurd. The average person lasts less than two years I believe.

bottled_poe 11y ago
> Plus, programmers are extremely productive because of how software scales. Not sure what you meant by this. Software engineering gets harder as a system scales, not easier.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  But one programmer can write a piece of code that runs on a thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million servers. Most other workers can't multiply their output that way.

crdb 11y ago

Anecdotal evidence of course: It's mindless work, mostly. There's little creative work. And you're pumped up on adrenalin. I spent 2 months in consulting. Here's a sample. We slept on average 2-4 hours a night. We traded off eating in the morning vs an extra half hour's sleep - after about two weeks, I yielded and did like everybody else (no breakfast, even though the buffet was sumptuous including home pickled herrings I still dream about). The partners/EMs would meet with the client and then tell us the 400 slides that needed to be produced for next week's board meeting, and sometimes fleshed them out. We then put together the slides, and did whatever BS research needed to be done to justify the numbers (quick Google, hit a database, or - before my time - systematic interviewing of 300 people to create the data necessary, yes, the consultants did the interviewing!). An EM put it to me like this: "Are we 20x as expensive as their in-house talent, certainly; but we'll get it done 10x faster, and without any visual mistakes, and that's all they care about." I took a weekend (yes, "took" a weekend, because we were supposed to work every day, although we could come in at 10am on Sunday to catch up on sleep) to see an opera in Italy. The train did not have mobile reception. I discovered upon arriving in Verona that I had to produce 50 slides - each with 4 graphs I had to calculate - in 6 hours. I did them, emailed them, went to the opera, had an excellent roast beef with Amarone, got drunk on negronis, came to the hotel to find more work. I passed out on the bed from exhaustion and set about doing it on the train back to Zurich (unrelated factoid: on the train to Italy, Italian customs walked through the train and interrogated the only black guy in the wagon). One of the team members cracked and overslept by one hour one day instead of turning up for the morning cab to the client. She was mocked about it for a month. We ate sandwiches from a vending machine in the client's corridor. Our EM threw a fit once because McKinsey had booked out one of the 5* hotels in town, BCG the other (both working for the same client as us, funnily enough) and we were stuck with the Ibis Hotel. I didn't understand the swearing in German but I still remember the sound of "Ibis Hotel" fired in anger. I thought it was funny, personally I didn't care, Ibis hotel or luxury palace, it's still a bed and a warm powershower, and I can't have breakfast anyway. Everybody got extremely depressed once when one of the partners went home at 7pm right after posting a Facebook status update along the lines of "Damn, still at work :( :(". Our return taxi (S-class of course) was booked for something like 2-3am... I made around 2k/month from my food allowance alone because I ate sandwiches and it was no questions asked cash. We had steak delivery to change us from the vending machine sandwiches, but couldn't enjoy it. Ate the steak in front of the laptop. The hotels and limos were awesome, but what is the point of a balcony the size of a small swimming pool if you never see the sun, and what is the point of a 2m long jacuzzi if you don't have time to take a bath? Some people stopped ironing their shirts to get more sleep, I tried to use room service or my own iron and starch because I foolishly thought I had a career to manage (the EMs didn't care, it's not like us junior folks were client facing). The lack of sleep was physically painful. By the third night all your body would ache, your eyes would ache from behind, headaches were constant, you were in zombie mode. It sucked but you just saddled up and kept going because everybody else did. Visual perfectionism was constant - I was told off for being 5 minutes late to a cab pickup, and for misaligning an object on a slide by a millimetre. After this, you just stress yourself into double checking your work, all the time, sometimes triple checking, even though it's just as painful. You also eat more from stress, so put on weight. One EM put on enough weight in a month to crack his suit trousers, and went to the supermarket during lunch to buy a couple new pairs. So yeah, productivity takes a hit, but the sheer amount of hours and generally, the type of people who get into these firms (overachieving, slightly hyperactive, energetic, driven) are more productive per hour on this type of work. At the end of the case, about half the team quit. Aforementioned lady went to the Kennedy School in Harvard and works for the Brasilian government or something. I joined a trading company. The EM moved to Australia to work on miners' strategy, the other EM to Saudi doing more consulting, but with different working conditions (apparently they get weekend business class flights to anywhere in the world no questions asked in that office). A few months later, I read in the paper that the client had been acquired by a large foreign group. I thought back about what we were actually doing, and I realized there had been three groups: the management, the board and the shareholders. We worked for the management since they had the power to hire us for more cases. We justified their bad decisions to the board, who themselves had to cover their own behinds enough to be able to pretend they did their work to the shareholders. The company's loss in value over two years was a direct result of a bad strategic decision by management which handed over the market to the one direct competitor. The board was also at fault for not thinking about the stupidity of the one decision in question. In my mind at least. I'm told it's not always like this, that sometimes you're sent to Sydney with a $40k/month expense account and 9-5 "strategy level" work, that after the financial crisis belts were tightened etc. Hell I had drinks in the Sydney Sheraton spa with a McKinsey buddy recently who was doing just that. Nevertheless I'm not going back to this industry any time soon, it's just not worth it when it's not your equity. Trading was a different type of intensity. After a particularly active day, even though I had worked only from 9am til around 4.30pm (no lunch, no time), I passed out on the train home. Here, a mistake didn't cost you just a bollocking, it cost the company thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions were usually gains, after the other side made a mistake, we were careful). I was a lot more conscientious than my predecessor and only made three mistake in thousands of trades, saving the company a lot of money just by doing my job properly on the execution side; I think my biggest execution mistake lost us $30,000 on $10m so not too bad. Initially, I took the habit from consulting over and had dinner at the office, reheating supermarket dishes in the microwave; but the office was empty after 6pm which was a big realization, that these people made a lot more money and were a lot happier than "us consultants" whilst working less. I guess that's when what you say above about quality vs quantity hit me. What was motivation? Well, consulting firms sell you the idea that you'll be at the top of the world if only you stick it out long enough, part of the elite that you presumably aren't yet (even if born there). I think banks are similar. (I later read Richistan, linked it with observations, and realized this "elite" was really just the lowest rung, the "employee" layer in the multi layered world of wealth; that these employees, if unable to ignore it, generally get pretty depressed about being in contact with the upper layers all the time; that wealth is really a relative, not absolute thing, above having enough to eat and sleep and send your kids to school.) Ego is a big thing. A lot of consultants/bankers think themselves more hardcore, smarter, better somehow than the plebs (a lot of them are mercenaries, understand the game and go through the motion for the paycheck). You'd hear people introducing others as "it's so and so, he's from GS IBD" and a wave of relief would go over your body as you would think "ok, that's one of us, I can trust he understands, I can really talk to him". Even today, when I tell finance people I was in finance and talk about markets, they relax and get a lot more open. It's funny because that's rarely the case with developers. Money is another, not the money right now but the promise of big bucks if only (again) you stick it out for a few more years. The high drop out rate is a function of realizing that either you won't make it, or that no money is worth it, or - in fewer cases - that someone with the level of talent/intelligence/drive these companies select for can actually make a lot more money/achievement/impact somewhere where you're not working for someone else. Or you realize that you're living someone else's dream (perhaps one fabricated by careful PR from the firms in question, and peer pressure) and you go on to live your own life. The funny thing is that entrepreneurs are very respected amongst consultants and bankers despite making - on average - a lot less money and having a lower net worth. Stick it out til private equity or hedge funds and you'll have a shot at billions which is much rarer in startup land. Yes, but those billions have someone else's name on them, and that ultimately makes all the difference in the status pissing contest. YMMV. I have a feeling this comment is going to come bite me back some time in the future :P

zeeshanm 11y ago

A lot of work an analyst would do is very repetive and dull. Sometimes they may be just changing font size, color, etc. for hours.

hiou 11y ago

I didn't see anyone here mention it so I'm going to bring up the elephant in the room. Performance enhancing drugs. I think most of us around here are aware of our contemporaries who use quite a bit of prescription assistance to operate at a high level. You get the right mix of Adderall, cocaine, theanine, modafinal or whatever and you can pull off some amazing stretches of work. And sadly, anyone who has gone really hard down that path can probably tell you kind of things that it can do to your mental health. Not at all in anyway whatsoever relating that to this article or particular case and I'm sure there are people who pull this off without those things, but I have a hunch it's becoming the exception at this point, not the rule.

schlumpf 11y ago

The answer to your question probably lies in the old joke, "Why are bureaucrats so vicious? Because the stakes are so love." At investment banks the stakes are high -- particularly at junior levels. So people endure. Or at least they try to. The workhorse experience you're asking about doesn't exist at senior levels, which makes surviving long enough to move up the food chain an objective in and of itself. But what typically motivates people to accept such persistent sleep deprivation is expected future income. E($$$), for you operator fans, increases pretty much monotonically for each day you don't quit or get fired or succumb to a more tragic outcome. If you're curious as to how this behavior became so deeply ingrained in "Wall Street" culture, start with real-time news. M&A work is often done overnight because priorities change as stock prices move, and because regulatory disclosures during quiet hours are often preferred to the middle of the trading day. Bankers and clients want to act while they have breathing room before news "hits the tape". And during the day, propaganda -- sorry, pitch books -- has to be updated to reflect the market moves and latest news. This circularity hits the trading side of the business, too. Research analysts are paid to have a fresh view on the markets every day. In my experience this is institutionalized nonsense but it also pays the bills for said analysts. So you spend as much time as humanly possible trying to find quantitative fig leaves to dress up those new things you are obliged to say. Consider also that a building full of smart people has a skewed and thin-tailed distribution of brain power. Unless you are Mensa material, it can seem easier to establish your claim on a (you hope) fat bonus through back-breaking work than by sleeping well and acting creatively. Naturally this idea has occurred to some of your colleagues as well and pretty soon it's a race to insomniac oblivion. The guys (and it is almost exclusively guys) who make it to senior levels and get back their sleep while still getting paid have usually figured out how to take credit for others' efforts. That's not meant as a cynical comment but as an observation of what is sometimes euphemistically called "getting lift" from one's team. For a much more entertaining description of this pattern, I highly recommend Stanley Bing's "Sun Tzu Was a Sissy"[1]. [1]http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Tzu-Sissy-Stanley-Bing-ebook/dp/B000FC2J0W http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Tzu-Sissy-Stanley-Bing-ebook/dp/B0...