'Good FAANG job with better work life balance"

Ha.

Ha ha ha.

The grind to get in to those jobs is similar to a banking entry job, the grind for the first few years to make a small mark and advance up the ladder is very similar, and you are still not making the same payout at the end of the road in tech. If you want the tech equivalent it would be those FAANG companies just a few years before IPO, when the payout was assured and almost certainly going to be large and when the company was still small enough to be extremely picky about hires and still expected people to have no work-life balance at all.

Concerns about work-life balance did not show up in tech (or at least was not talked about) until all of the FAANGs had already IPO'd and there was no chance for a multi-million dollar payout for enduring the grind.

>, the grind for the first few years to make a small mark and advance up the ladder is very similar,

Citation needed. At which FAANG do people work 90 hours a week? I see junior engineers working consistently 40-50 hours (FAANG ML lab), and some managers perhaps putting in 55-60. I have never even heard of people at Amazon (arguably the worst grind) putting in these hours.

When the companies were smaller, there was far too much work and it was all high value. Therefore, they hired lots of driven people, gave them some autonomy and watched them work themselves into the grave for you.

These days, by the time you are grinding to make the next level and avoid the 2 year cut you are already past the point we are talking about. The post-hire grind at a FAANG is now closer to what a middle manager at GS would do; it is good money but you are not going to make more than $1M/year working at a FAANG unless you are a rock star or director level. OTOH let me tell you stories about pre-IPO Facebook or Google....

Among many people I know who worked at FAANGs (primarily Google and Apple) from the early 00s to the present, none of this is true.

Yes, many of them worked long hours, but none of those I knew described it as a "grind", they honestly just liked their work. Certainly none of them did it to the level of sleep deprivation or damage to their physical health.

What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort?

> What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort?

There is a sharp divide between those who bring in revenue and everyone else.

Analysts and associates do not bring revenue. Their work is to idle until a deal is imminent. At that moment, being the team that can immediately whip together materials for a client, that can immediately generate closing documents, that can be the difference between winning and losing the deal. Between tens or hundreds millions of dollars in fees for the firm or zero. Between those intense bursts it's mostly farting around.

At the higher level, more work means more selling. Unless you're in a real bum corner of the market, there is always another deal you could pick up. If you start reaching diminishing returns, empire build--branch out.

One of the biggest breaks I had in my career was moving from a finance culture to an engineering-led one. The finance culture works. But it optimises for short-term results and it optimises for the partners, those at the top.

Of course, Big Law works on a similar model. associates get billed out for far more than they make so it's in the interests of partners to generate lots of billable hours. And then it's basically up or out. Make partner (at which point, as you say, your job basically becomes sales to a non-trivial extent) or leave.

Management consulting as well.

> Big Law works on a similar model

Law and consulting are different because more hours literally means more revenue. Banking is success fee driven. It's thus theoretically possible for hours to be reduced without impacting--or possibly, positively impacting--revenue.

Fair enough even if the end result is pretty much the same.

My understanding is that investment banking, which I made a very deliberate decision not to go into, throws associates at a whole lot of deal book production and proofreading that is only read by some other overworked associate.

Yea that's one of the worst things that really convinced me that the investment banking track was not for me: How utterly pointless the work was. You're spending 100 hours a week updating slide decks to use 14 point font instead of 12 point, and making the titles a different shade of blue. And it will all be read by....likely nobody, maybe someone who doesn't care what the font is. I'd rather grind as a software developer on a feature that never ships--at least there's creative output, and you're learning something.

I think the chief complaint of the analysts is less about the total hours worked than the fact that much of the grinding is not productive.

From what I recall, the issue was that management knew analyst time was not valuable at all, and so it was common practice for them to leave the office at 7pm with an "i need this by tomorrow" order for client materials that were meant for speculative pitching rather than supporting a live deal.

Thus the analyst ends up getting holidays and weekends crushed repeatedly by projects that aren't really that meaningful and could have been spread out in a much more manageable way if the higher ups had given any consideration at all to what they were asking.

> the chief complaint of the analysts is less about the total hours worked than the fact that much of the grinding is not productive

It's a fair complaint. This anecdote stood out:

"VPs create shells for decks that do not align with what senior team members want to show, which results in junior teams creating the wrong materials. Ultimately, senior team members see these materials and junior team members often have to start from scratch on incredibly short timelines (less than 24 hours) – resulting in unnecessary stress, subpar work, and lack of sleep" [1]

This is a problem! Also, when I was an intern, it wasn't uncommon for an MD to have a meeting at 11AM, be back to back until 5PM, to only drop a request on the associate's desk at 6 from that morning meeting.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INo...

More hours at work means more deals then the other guy who went home at 5pm.

Money, presumably.

In this context, I do not understand the grind. The grind should be an up-front cost that allows me to leave concerns about work at work. For example, things such as professional development do not spill into your personal life. That is possible while working strenuously for a 40 or 60 hour week. There is not much left of a personal life if you are working an 80+ hour week.

The grind is that if you are coming from impoverished circumstances, it the salary you can send e.g. to your family can lift your whole family out of poverty.

It's a great personal sacrifice that most HN readers do not need to make, but keep in mind there are people for whom this presents an opportunity to change their entire family's life.

> not much left of a personal life if you are working an 80+ hour week

To be fair, it is made abundantly clear to anyone going into investment banking that they should not expect a personal life in their first few years. Similar to law or medicine.