[hx2a]

Around 2003 I worked at Merrill Lynch, on the IT side supporting investment banking. Our users were creating Pitchbooks, which are these 100 page PowerPoint presentations that contain a lot of financial data taken from various financial statements. The junior employees toil for hours putting these things together for senior managers.

We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial statements and generate complete decks. What previously took dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the junior employees an enormous amount of time.

The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the sake of work.

[sceew]

FactSet and CapIQ have the capability to do this. A lot of this job is 'automated' to a certain extent, so it's not like the hours are being driven by antique software. There's just so much bespoke / custom work that goes in the PPT decks that makes full automation hard (and I'm talking about non-sexy stuff like rearranging logos or data entry...it just takes time). There's already a good amount of automation in banking between software vendors and the use of template presentations / excel spreadsheets. Any incremental bit of automation will not reduce hours for junior bankers, it will just create more work product, more meetings, etc. Blackberries, software vendors, etc. have all made bankers more efficient, but it just increases the work output, not the amount of input.

Every time IB work hours comes up in a forum of 'outsiders,' people always point towards 'more automation' or 'hire more people' as panaceas for the terrible work-life balance. But when you are in high-profile, white-collar client service, there's just no pushback between senior bankers and clients. If you are giving a presentation to a F500 CEO, you're always going to solve for the quickest deadline, and that means 100 hour weeks for the junior people. Only solution is a huge top-down cultural shift amongst senior bankers and executives.

I think there's two things that could change this: (1) the job gets such bad press that junior talent gets worse or (2) clients start pushing back on bad work conditions. But on (1), the job is so mindless and repetitive that a degradation is talent is not that big of a deal (especially compared to engineering). On (2), clients would never do this. Clients pay large fees for this work, being a banker is still perceived as a prestigious job for juniors, it's flattering to think that someone is working 100 hours a week for your company, clients don't see the pain amongst junior employees, etc. - there's so many reasons why clients wouldn't push back.

The saddest part of all of this is not that some people are highly compensated yet miserable. The saddest part is there's still hundreds of college graduates who are chasing this dream because they think it will pay dividends in the future, but most of these kids get burned out and exit to 'generalist' jobs that they really have no passion for. They could have been building a product, adding something new to society, etc.

[sonthonax]

Have any enterprising juniors written pitch book generators themselves?

[easterncalculus]

I'm sure there are practical issues for not doing this, but at that point if it's not too much trouble I would just make and release this project to the junior employees without telling the managers. What, they weren't that fast when they started?

In all seriousness I'm convinced this comes from people putting too much value on the institution. It's Merrill Lynch, not the army. What's so bad about people doing their work better? Why do they feel it invalidates some specific, all-important experience?

[hx2a]

We wouldn't have been able to build it without some kind of approval and agreement of who we would bill our time to. Although I should point out that "vigilante projects" (as I call them) do have a place in investment banks, and people who can write code on their own can do a lot to improve their situation. I remember a different job where myself and one other person each created vigilante projects that later turned out to be absolutely critical for properly monitoring internal systems. Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management.

[heavenlyblue]

> Vigilante projects are created in defiance of the incompetence of upper management.

This is where you should anticipate the upper management saying no and then just never ask, using an excuse that “you thought that wouldn’t be such a big issue”

[heavenlyblue]

Nothing stops them using the software to build the prototype of the presentation to start their work from and then add some human language on top. 90% hours off that, and nobody will ever tell too.