Frank
Los Angeles, CA
Male, 35
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
As a liberal arts grad with mountains of debt and molehills of direction, I took an analyst job at a top NYC investment bank. Neck-deep in spreadsheets and working around the clock, I fought to keep my head above water in a sea of brilliant, khaki-clad sociopaths. While the money and education were great, I quickly learned how the finance world really works... and I wanted no part of it. After 9/11, I left for good.
An unplannable, wildly inconsistent one. The difficulty in maintaining a social life while holding a banking job isn’t necessarily due to the sheer number of working hours, but rather, the unpredictability of schedule. For example, I may only work 60 hours per week on average, but I have almost no idea how those 60 hours will be distributed. This leads to quite a few cancelled dates and get-togethers, so you really have to make sure your friends and loved ones are fully aware of the nature of the job if you want them to tough it out with you.
Cliched as it sounds, bankers definitely subscribe to a “work hard, play hard” mentality. Even after a 16-hour day, if a 1-2 hour window presents itself, the bankers will forgo sleep for much-needed tequila shots. They’re pent up from the office lockdown and they’ve got money to blow.
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This varies widely. But on average, the oldest full-time execs I saw were in their early to mid-50s.
A banker's retirement age (much like that of any profession) really depends on what his motivations are. Some get into the field thinking they'll work their tails off for 20-25 years, accumulate a ton of money, and retire relatively young. But the problem is, many of those same people continually upgrade their lifestyles, and those lifestyles require that they keep working.
In other cases, some simply get addicted to the money and stay on as long as the banks will have them. Once you reach the most senior ranks, the day-to-day "work" is pretty low-impact. Most senior bankers are really more figureheads than anything else -- they attend some meetings, and occasionally they'll be brought in as a respected voice in deal conversation. But they can generally come and go as they please, remaining well-tanned and well-rested throughout the year. Some also become consultant/advisory types who make millions to come in and opine a few times a month on new deal opportunities. Nice work if you can get it.
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Every time my desk phone rang, my heart felt like it was going to jump out of my chest. Any one of those calls could mean I would be chained to my desk all night. New projects frequently surfaced late in the day. If your phone rang at 6pm, it was often a staffer calling about an "emergency" project that needed to get done that night, come hell or high water. And you had zero say in the matter. So, at the risk of beating a dead horse, the real "fear" all goes back to the unpredictability of schedule. Don't get me wrong, everyone in every job at every company has bad days at work, but typically they can at least gauge when their day is likely to end. But imagine having NO idea when your day would actually end, with the very real possibility that it wouldn't. Terrifying to say the least.
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It's funny – one can major in underwater basket-weaving in college and get an investment banking job after graduation, but if someone's a few years removed from college and has no finance background, it's significantly tougher. The advice I typically give to those with no finance background looking to make a career-switch into finance is to consider business school. It can be an expensive proposition, but it does legitimately qualify you for an entirely new line of work (in this case, banking/finance). Furthermore, you can intern during your time in school and get a better sense of whether the transition is for you.
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3D Games Developer/Programmer
Is the new Oculus Rift thing as cool as everyone says?
Air Traffic Controller
Have you ever ordered a pilot to abort mid-takeoff?
Track and Field Coach
Do you let your athletes play another sport in the off-season?
I’ve been out of the game for awhile, but to the best of my knowledge, there haven’t been any real movements toward taming the schedules of junior bankers. I always thought one seemingly obvious solution (or partial solution) would be to allow junior bankers to arrive at the office later than the typical 9am start-time. Perhaps 12 noon. The reason being – the majority of meetings among senior bankers (where most of the work originates) happen over the course of the day. So it’s typical that new marching orders aren’t handed down to the junior bankers until mid- to late-afternoon, and often that work can take until the wee hours to complete. If you’re in the office until 3am, and need to be back by an arbitrary 9am “just because,” that’s a colossal waste of sleep and/or personal time. I cannot even begin to explain how much of the morning/early afternoon office time is spent twiddling thumbs.
EDIT: I recently read that in the wake of several banker deaths/suicides, certain banks are attempting to curb the hours of junior bankers. This includes mandatory Saturdays off and logging/monitoring hours to alert senior bankers which employees are in the "red zone." That said, my understanding from further reading (and friends still in the industry) is that while these policies sound great on paper, they're difficult to enforce. If the work needs to get done, it needs to get done, and early 20-somethings don't have enough leverage to point to the fine print.
More on recent investment banker suicides and deaths: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-24/banker-suicides-leave-industry-concerned-as-coroners-investigate.html
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They start by putting on their underwear, then pants, followed by socks...
I kid I kid. Assuming you're asking how they bankers dress for work, the quick answer is the higher end of "business casual." Slacks, button-down shirts, nice shoes. An important client meeting might require a suit and/or tie.
That said, up until about 2000-2001, ALL bankers had to wear suits and ties every day. But that requirement was loosened during the dot-com boom. When the boom hit, investment banks were looking for ways to attract and retain top talent, many of whom were defecting to the shorts-and-sandals world of Silicon Valley. That need to compete, coupled with the increasingly vocalized absurdity of wearing a suit for a 12-20 hour workday, finally gave way to more comfortable everyday attire.
(That said, not a week went by when we wouldn't overhear some silver-haired old-school banker grumbling about how they needed to, "Get ties back on those damn kids.")
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After 2-3 years as a junior banker, you've got the skill set to get into innumerable lines of business outside of banking. The following are the most common "exit paths" I've seen over the years:
– Move to the operating side. For example, if you were in the Technology arm of your investment bank, you could easily transition into Corporate Development, M&A, Finance, or Strategy at a tech company. The same goes for any other area of focus (e.g. Media, Manufacturing, Financial Institutions).
– Other areas of finance. If you still like finance but don't like banking, you could transition to a hedge fund, asset management, and the like.
– Consulting. Bankers and business consultants are cut from similar cloth, so many bankers who enjoy analyzing businesses but crave a more manageable lifestyle switch to consulting.
– Business school. One of the most common exits is to get an MBA. This gives the ex-banker a two-year stint to sharpen his or her skills and test the waters of other possible career paths.
– Get out of finance/business entirely. I've seen this one more than one might think. Sometimes a couple of years in banking fresh out of college is exactly what an early 20-something needs to figure out what he *doesn't* want to do. In that case, he can either start from the bottom rung of a completely unrelated industry, or find a non-finance focused job where his skill set is still of value.
Keep in mind, most people faced with this decision are still very young – 24 or 25. So even if they want to make a move to a completely different industry or function, the fact that they've done their banking tour-of-duty sends the following signals to a would-be employer:
– This kid is probably very smart.
– This kid will work his ass off.
– Even if he doesn't have direct experience for the job in question, he's probably capable of figuring it out.
Point being, if you've got a track record of being smart and diligent by age 25, you're a viable candidate almost anywhere else.
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