[rdl]

What do investment banking interns (and bankers) do which benefits from such long hours? Lots of manual data processing? Reading? I absolutely benefit from uninterrupted stretches of 12-24h working on problems sometimes, but only infrequently -- usually hit diminishing returns between 4-12h. The only times where I've been useful >24h was when the task was more "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other people or long-running processes", or in some cases where external factors (transportation costs, outage window) meant a single 48-72h sprint was worth more than maximum productivity during that period -- and even then, some level of rest during some stage made a huge difference.

An entire summer of 17h days is difficult to imagine as a productive way to work.

"It's just hazing" is a reasonable answer, but surely that would create a market opportunity for some alternative entity, or at least would mean the hazing has to be limited in duration.

[whatok]

These people are essentially on-call, on-site. There's a lot of money involved with the deals companies are trying to close and bankers are there to handhold clients throughout the entire process. They're not working the whole day but if a client or senior person wants a change to a Powerpoint deck, they're paid to turn that around quickly.

[cpncrunch]

Why not just do that from home?

[bayesianhorse]

I think it's more than hazing. It may be some kind of costly advertizing, to show off their ability and willingness to function under that kind of stress level.

On the other hand this behavior also selects for candidates who are driven more by (the hope of) success and money, than by health, social/family life etc.

[leroy_masochist]

Former GS IBD associate here.

You basically have two workdays: the client-facing workday, and the preparation-for-the-next-day workday. Client-facing workday goes roughly 9am-6pm. Preparation workday goes from 6pm to anything from midnight (on a good day) to 5am (on a bad day).

During the client-facing workday you're spending about 1-2 total hours having meetings with clients, usually on conference calls, occasionally in person; the more senior you are, the more personal interaction you have with clients. The remainder of the time is spent reviewing the materials you generated the previous night, talking about what needs to be done, etc -- basically a constant planning / execution workflow around multiple concurrent streams of deliverables.

In the evening, managing directors go home around 6pm and vice presidents go home around 8pm. That's when you become really "free" to hunker down and start jamming out work. It's a lot harder to be productive when your time is hacked into 30-minute chunks the way it is during the client-facing day.

It is quite common to have nothing to do for hours at a time, both during the day and evening, while you wait for people to get back to you with further instructions on what to prepare and/or instructions for changing what you've already made. So, a 16-hour workday isn't usually a full 16 hours straight. You usually have time to go to the very nice on-site gym, for example.

The deliverables you're making are usually PowerPoint presentations with a lot of model-driven Excel outputs in them. Occasionally the underlying models are intellectually interesting, but they usually are pretty monotonous to put together....you're building something to a clear spec, and the challenge is being 100.000% certain you did it without errors, not figuring out how to do it.

To answer the question about whether you're productive working such long hours: the time commitment and the stress certainly don't foster creativity, happiness, or high productivity, but they really don't need you to be doing inspired work. At a junior level they're looking for people who can follow defined processes at a high level of throughput with a low error rate, while contributing occasional flashes of original thought -- for example, when you have to build a new model based on a unique client situation. Those situations are actually really exciting (especially when you're working on a big problem for a big client) but the flipside of the excitement is the stress around the consequences of fucking it up -- e.g., if the client just got a "bear hug" letter from a competitor expressing interest in a merger and you have to model out whether it makes financial sense.

The downside is that it's a miserable and unhealthy way to spend a couple of years. The upside is that you ride an incredibly steep learning curve and gain a ton of knowledge on valuation models, the inner workings of various industries, corporate governance, and how to run merger / fundraising / hostile-defense processes.

Hope this was helpful.

[rdl]

Wow, great description.

Parts of that actually seem really fun, but mainly the learning about industries and the model-building. I suspect I'd be a bad IBD intern.

(I've been talking with some people about a technology-focused turnaround firm; capital is cheap, but being able to do PE/etc. turnarounds by buying existing failing companies and replacing tech, rather than building a startup to disrupt the industry, might be interesting in certain sectors where distribution, IP, etc. really matter.)

[jnbiche]

Very interesting, thanks for the write-up. I'm currently intensely miserable in the midst of a long string of 12-hour days, so I can't imagine what 16-hour days would do to me. But very interesting to hear what's happening in these situations.

[enraged_camel]

>>Hope this was helpful.

I found it very interesting. Thank you for the write-up!

[jorblume]

It's a gut check for motivation. How badly do you want to be there? Are you willing to give almost everything for the firm?

Hazing might be a part of it but I see it more like boot camp than anything else. Weed out those who don't have the fortitude and drive. They don't want employees who value family time over the company, for example. Forcing people to work insane hours will self select for the "right stuff".

It's not about productivity, it's about cultivating a specific culture.

[Floegipoky]

They're weeding out anyone who prioritizes literally anything in their lives above money and their job, and at the same time showing those that are left that treating others as less than human is all in a day's work.

And we wonder why the financial industry keeps finding new ways to profit at the expense of others.

[trequartista]

I've seen how this works at somewhat close quarters. They are expected to shadow a manager (or their mentor or somebody senior), go to meetings, take notes, prepare presentations, revise presentations, rework presentations because their boss' boss' boss didn't like it, prepare reports for that meeting at 9am tomorrow morning.

It's essentially grind work (which also includes bringing coffee/lunch or if you really are up to it, walking the boss' dog). It makes me wonder if they ever get to learn anything at all, but I guess making presentations and creating good first impressions matter a lot in the long run. But what do I know.

[whatok]

Depending on the role, the financial modeling skills learned as a junior banker are pretty much unparalleled vs any other opportunity straight out of undergrad.

[ddispaltro]

I have no experience but I always figured it was similar to training in the armed forces. Put people through stressful situations to see how they perform under pressure, lack of sleep, etc.

[basseq]

> "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other people or long-running processes"

It's exactly this in I-banking, from what I understand. A lot of the day is spent tweaking/waiting. Towards the end of the day, you get feedback from clients/managers, and that's when the "real work" starts.

From an external perspective, it's always struck me as horribly inefficient.

[whatok]

A lot of it is ego-driven. Senior people think that because they went through it, all junior people have to go through it too. Companies feel that if they're shelling out huge money in fees that banks should be on-call 24/7. If you're responsible for a deal either from the company or adviser side, , you'd rather have it fixed before anyone notices or at least as quickly as possible. Thus the benefit of junior staff working crazy hours.

[jsprogrammer]

What it really sounds like is that a lot of shit work is being done all over the place. If everyone needs to be on-call 24/7 and most of their time is spent applying fixes to problems that are continually happening, something is probably broken in your organization.

[Keyframe]

Sounds like ad agencies do their work.

[jsprogrammer]

>"It's just hazing" is a reasonable answer

How is hazing reasonable? Most seem to find it to be an abhorrent tradition.

[bra-ket]

the amount of work that can be generated by a bad manager is infinite

[blfr]

Never worked in a bank but I believe it's a matter of being available to senior employees.

[jonknee]

It's bootcamp for finance.