The salaries sound high - but bearing in mind that you will need to live within very close proximity to the financial centre of the city (London City, Canary Wharf, Wall Street etc) you do not end up with much spending money at the end of the month.

You may well have a comparable salary as a relatively junior FAANG developer with a lot less effort.

M&A has always been notorious for the insane hours it pushes on interns and junior employees and most of them use it signalling to land much more balanced job in management consulting or other parts of finance (unless they really want the money because there definitely is money to be made there). The royal track of an internship in audit/large finance department followed by one in M&A then a job at Mckinsey was very much still in the head of some when I was business school student.

Also finance is known to have a peculiar culture and use gruelling first years has a filter. Some consulting companies do it too. I personally find it stupid and therefore elected to work for a more sensible place but it is real however. Still contrary to what another commenter implied this is not a grind. Things become more normal after the first hurdle and these companies reward in a way which is not particularly dissimilar to any other big companies (a mix of making yourself visible and intelligently playing the political game).

Nothing worth it. I've talked to people who have been through the investment bank meat grinder and who got out. One guy went to Silicon Valley. He said tech firms have their own issues but treat him far better.

The gist is: there's a culture of abusive working practices that appears to have becomes self-perpetuating in the way that hazing rituals at US colleges or the army sometimes do. Much of the work is horrendously inefficient, for example, writing long reports for managers that are then never read, or which are read and then ignored, or in which only a single figure is actually needed. Other problems involve managers who have no idea what they want so constantly change their requirements, causing work to be scrapped and redone, but with arbitrary and ludicrous deadlines attached.

Additionally managers think nothing of setting someone a new task to write a large report at 9pm on Friday night, then demanding it be delivered to their private home at 6am on Saturday morning.

Because the workers are young and ambitious, they tolerate this even though they can see that a lot of it is work for work's own sake. And presumably the only ones who make it are the ones who have become inured to the notion that arbitrary work is some measure of self-worth, and thus try to select "the best" by pushing people to the limits and seeing who breaks.

This culture is entirely absent in tech, where if someone is asked to do a task there's a general expectation that the task actually matters and has been thought about - at least a little bit.

Or, to put in other terms: games industry squeezes people who joined the industry for a chance of self-expression whereas finance industry squeezes people who generally joined for the money and the grind.

Squeezing is not nice but at least in finance you know what you got into.

I'm not particularly trying to defend the games industry here, I'm just curious why the popular culture lately is so keen to cover the hard work being put into games but not into other industries which work even worse hours.

The fear is when you’re in a company where your project might lose funding if you don’t complete eight months’ worth of work in two months time. That’s when the games industry goes from abusive to masochistic.

Also, my impression is that after the EA "wivesgate" thing or whatever it was called, practices at the bigger studios got better. But maybe that's just rumour and speculation. I'd expect long hours at small firms no matter what industry they're in, by the nature of being smaller.

Did he mention what those issue are?

The salary is high, but not more than two professional jobs for top grads high. They are eligible for bonuses though, and that carrot of six figure salaries is dangled.

To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from one tomorrow. Doing all this with reasonable working hours isn't impossible--it just requires a global, co-ordinated team.

"Why not hire more analysts?", you may ask. Well, who will pay for them? If you take it out of the senior bankers' pay, they'll quit. Start their own firm. People will work those hours, and they'll find them, and they'll take a bunch of their clients with them. If the house pays for it, shareholders protest. Why is ROE falling? Why are fixed costs so high when you had a dry year?

It's a collective-action problem likely only addressable by regulation. That or litigation.

I get that, even though though the closest I've come is having a banker struggle to keep it civil as I passed on the message that no we couldn't just fudge the asset valuation after the client admitted at the last minute they'd supplied us with an incorrect detail, and no our analysts were going to do it tomorrow, not this evening. But as they stood to earn four orders of magnitude more than we did from them and actually had more competition they weren't in the same position to tell the client that we weren't going to drop everything to rectify their error.

I thought the division of labour problem was more of an issue than a salary at the entry level though, not so much because a pitchbook can't be handed to a suitably qualified employee on a different continent to finish but because they don't trust that setup. Dividing the pie between more senior bankers is obviously going to cause consternation, but surely a few extra graduate analysts isn't going to dramatically affect Goldman's bottom line, especially if they can cut those entry level salaries a bit and still retain more?

(not saying this in favor/against unions in general, but from a worker's perspective, why not pursue that option?)

Preparing reports, power point presentations and playing with Excel spreadsheets that will be looked for 5min then set aside as the negotiation politics come to play

Pitch book that details financial implications of acquiring a publicly traded company where all the details are available - what the balance sheet looks like post merger, earnings, revenue, synergies.

Private equity backed company is for sale, we need to show them every deal we have worked on in the past 10 years that is similar to the company for sale so we can prove we can sell it. Who is going to buy it, how much can they pay, who do we know at the buyer firm to get a quick decision.

Formatting pitch books is bouncing back and forth between excel and PowerPoint to make sure all info is correct and sokmetimes you are waiting on others to do there part before you can move forward. Group head tells VP who tells associate who tells analyst and it flows back and forth before getting back to group head who screams “what the duck is this?”

- Being in high demand, especially after your first job in the industry. Nope, every job search is as difficult as the first one and there are no companies competing to have me on.

- Being able to get a FAANG job as long as you're great at algorithm problems. Nope, those companies have limited presence in the UK, their salaries aren't nearly as good as in the US, it's tough to get an interview and there are no UK equivalents to them. So even if I'm the best at whiteboard problems, that makes no difference to my career.

- High salaries, both right out of university and later in one's career. Or tech salaries being much higher than other industries. In the UK tech is just another group of okay-ish white-collar jobs.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

You should check Spain. I'm paying more to the hires in latin america than I got offered while trying to work in Spain

US troops are given a cost of living allowance (COLA) while stationed in Germany. It is (or was while I was there) tied to the USD/Euro exchange rate. Even so, we always tried to avoid shopping "on the local economy" and stick to base facilities for groceries and such as much as possible.

- Social security is far better. You of course need to save for bad times, but getting sick will cost you practically nothing (you're always insured and the insurance will pay you 2/3rds of your wage) and when loosing your job (which is already far harder than in the US) you'll be covered quite good for 18 months and fall back to basic social support after that

- Generally a bit lower standard of living. It's not bad, of course, but 100k$+ cars, for example, are usually only leased via work, and 2k$+ laptops are a rather large expense to many people.

I consistently see JavaScript SEng roles at startups and large companies going for 40-60k.

The big cities are quite expensive, and you're not going to buy a mansion with that kind of money but it's still pretty good, especially compared to the national median.

A £3k/month flat is certainly lavish. Or at least sized for two incomes.

(And even then, probably a nice a place in zone 1. Did that figure come from actually looking for places, or just exaggeration to make a point? I mean, of course you can spend that much and far more, but it's by no means the entry point is all I'm saying.)

I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much opposite Facebook's office, paid £2800/month for a 1-bed studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the City, he pays dead on £3000/month for a flat but he's 2 minutes away from the office and pays for that convenience. And yes, I know someone who lives in Ealing, but a 2-bed flat(not a house) is still £1900/month, and the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.

But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location for around £2000/month (I live in one). Suggestions that an analyst at GS or an E3 at FB earning 70-100k isn't actually that well off because rents are high are silly, if they're struggling how is someone on a more normal grad salary of 35k supposed to be coping?

Our standard of housing is extremely low here. And small.

What department? I couldn't stomach working at a particular 'international trade' department, because they managed to hire the most awful team of over-engineers to build a CMS.

I couldn't understand what the fuck they did there, other than force me to do superfluous shite for months after I delivered what they wanted. That superfluous shite being the bifurcation of a PDF generator Django application to a 'server' and 'client' micro-service that communicated over an HTTP API; which they also demanded that I write a pip installable client for (a client for an API that had one endpoint!)

This was years ago, and I still have no qualms about deriding these jackanapes who work in the insular world of government Python development in London. I felt like a proper whore working for the government, extremely easy work, good pay; but a terrible inability to see how mediocre what they were doing was.

British and American companies are structured quite differently. As a contractor in the UK, you effectively have the same rights as an American employee.

If you look on the job boards for contract work, hardly any of it (prior to corona) was under £500pd.

Median household income is £29.9K (and some households have two or more earners).

Full time minimum wage is ~£15K a year.

I look over the pond and see what people with my level of experience are earning and think "damn, I'm under paid" then I look at at the median household income and think damn I'm way over paid.

£90k was something that you'd take 10 or 20 years to get to.

Though this was nearly 15 years ago so I could be misremembering

1. Pay in general is lower in the UK than the US. The bank will pay what they can get away with and there isn’t enough competition between banks/consultancies/tech/law to drive pay up. I wouldn’t be surprised if more competitive candidates got higher offers.

2. A lot of compensation can be made up in bonuses, though I don’t know what kind of bonus a junior analyst might get.

Minimum wage is £8.72 / hour.

So at a bare minimum (before perks / generous pension / very generous bonus) they are getting three times the minimum wage.

That's still not great, but they are suffering far less than millions of cleaners and other essential workers, not to mention the millions of people on zero hour contracts who are unable to get minimum wage and the thousands of people in forced labour conditions aka slavery (ie migrant Labour).

Which is mostly to say that the condition of most people is a lot lot worse than most of us stop to think about most of the time.