This kind of ''hockey team leadership'' works well when all players have the same hard skills and backgrounds, but quickly crumble if the team size gets higher and more diverse. Its easy to fake group cohesion if all members are the same douchebag.
I have participated in same behavior but in the tech industry. I joined my managers at strip clubs for lunches, I introduced fresh grads and H1Bs to endless buffets at strip clubs. Happy hour were pretty much required work activity everyday.
But I never thought it was bad, I mean strip clubs are sleazy, but I always considered happy hours to be part of team bonding. The best teams, I have worked in, also drank heavily.
Not sure if it is age or if it is because I don't go to happy hours that much anymore but I also don't have a strong bond for my team.
But I sort of feel bad for all those reluctant H1Bs who I introduced to strip clubs. I wonder if they really enjoyed hanging out with us or if they were pretending.
In my view there are two ways to understand this problem.
1) As a feminist issue. And it is, since no women will feel good in this kind of workplace where strip clubs are the norm. On the long run its counterproductive for society to allow these behaviours at the workplace.
2) As a creativity issue. Even in a hypothetical where women/minorities don't exist, these behaviours would still be an issue from a business point of view. The ''sport team mentality'' kills intellectual creativity. Try to sell these guys an idea which is alien to their monkey-culture... impossible. While working in these environments, I think I've read up to 10 books about ''how to pitch your idea'', not understanding what was wrong. True creativity is impossible in these circles, and their business usually fails at some point. It happened two times in my life, and I'm not 35 yet.
Getting in touch with your subconscious is like loosing your virginity ; it wont happen if you alway group with similar peers.
Unfortunatly, addiciton and other mental health problems are almost impossible for the firm to adress until its too late for everybody (disgrunted employees, missed business opportunities, etc). I hope this COVID crisis will make us more preventive regarding these issues.
If the model were really this simple, relapse would be non-existent. I can't believe any former addicts would make a rational choice to relapse.
This implies something way harder.
BTW: I've always thought that Margin Call is a very very movie showing internals of the financial institutions.
BTW: I've always thought that Margin Call is a very good movie showing internals of the financial institutions.
It was late, I was tired, mistakes were made. :)
Unless you’re drinking a pint of a 14% Belgian tripel, they won’t be equivalent.
This is literally abuse. It's also not normal. Not from my short time in banking and longer time in trading (around lots of bankers). Not from anyone I know in the field. I'm sorry you had to go through that--you may want to talk to a lawyer.
I agree it's abuse, but it's more normal than people realize when there is a lot of money on the line in high stress situations. The solution is to remove some of the stress, but I'm not sure how easily that can be done when so much money is on the line since they naturally go together.
I remember working in a 'startup' in the 90s with people routinely yelling at each other. I remember hearing the owner stomping around, slamming doors and yelling at my boss (who was awesome). Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours so he could present it and hopefully get the next check. Let's just say I may have then yelled at the computer while coding. Fun times :)
Heck, one of the owners decked the other one in a meeting, walked out, and we never saw him again.
This is fine. It's a hostile work environment. But if everyone's on the same page, it can, I don't want to say work, but not totally suck. Especially if there's good money.
Threatening to punch people, smashing things near someone to show them who's boss and "getting physical" is different. It's abuse. It's illegal. It was somewhat commonplace in and before the 80s [1], but it has not been common for decades now nor should it be.
[1] I have a theory for this, and it involves leaded gasoline.
May just be coincidence but this is the second time in the past few weeks I've heard about this, and I'm curious. Would you mind going into more detail?
There's a LOT to chew on in there.
Note that I don't disagree with your notion that abuse is abundant in all human societies.
If you assume that abuse can be caused or influenced by more than one thing -- which I believe makes sense but you might disagree -- then it doesn't matter what communism was doing if we're talking about capitalism.
The thing with banks is that they aren't productive in the first place. They're scalping off whatever they can get, with fierce competition. If you're fresh out of college and get hired into these places, you can't just walk away without risking your whole career. It's a monopsony. That's what enables abuse, human nature takes care of the rest.
It really really hammers home the power of training.
I remember two instances pretty clearly: in one, the CEO and head of architecture were having a 1:1. The CEO got a bit shouty, and the head of architecture very calmly said, "Don't talk to me like that. If you do it again, I'm walking out the door and never coming back".
Unfortunately in another incident, with a different coworker and his boss, my coworker did get pissed enough at his boss' tone that he walked out of the conference room, slammed the door, left the building, and never came back.
This is all just toxic garbage. The people in power require that their employees "act professionally", but then feel free to heap verbal abuse on their people. Not ok in any situation. If you're unhappy enough with an employee's performance that you feel the need to yell at them, you either just have anger management issues and should see a therapist, or they're a bad employee, and you should step back, calm down, and after you're calm, fire them.
> Then my boss came in and asked me if I could build a client demo. After I responded sure, he said we needed it in 3 hours
This is why I never agree to anything until they tell me the deadline :-P
My own experience was getting into a fist fight with someone after I told them to fuck off and open a ticket because I wasn’t going to drop everything and fix his shit right there right then.
Fist fights never go how you expect them to which was fortunate for me in the end.
We’re still friends 20 years later :)
Edit: I’d like to clarify that this is in no way acceptable but it is normal to some degree.
https://www.businessinsider.com/no-such-thing-alpha-male-201...
That's what I don't get in these abusive industries: Just because someone is higher up in a hierarchy he is not strong, he is not untouchable, the police is not on his side. Those pencil pusher bullies get in the face of the wrong young new intern and they get trashed. Should happen all the time. Should end such behaviour very fast. But doesn't. Seems like it's baked into recruiting, only hiring people that wouldn't even think about defending themselves.
It's unfortunately common in many places. Maybe "normal" denotes the default state, and perhaps abuse of this sort isn't the default, but it seems to occur in lots of high-competition, high-stress workplace hierarchies. I experienced it working in a sales branch for enterprise business equipment (pre- and post-sales support) where there were junior sales, sales, team managers, branch manager, regional manager, regional VP, and this sort of verbal & even physical intimidation was an every day thing. I was "fortunate" that I reported to the branch manager and couldn't be pushed around too much by the rest: "Take it up with my boss" became a mantra, and no one ever wanted to do that because they'd get shat on in some form or another, but that just meant I had lots of shouting matches with people who wanted me to do things but couldn't actually force me to do it-- and most of the time their issue was that someone else had already reserved my time and I wasn't available for them. I still had to endure a verbal tirade from the branch manager, complete with common macho comparisons to a little girl, when I decided to take a better position with corporate headquarters.
(My whole experience at the branch level left a bad taste in my mouth though, so I didn't stay much longer... it didn't help that I became part of a team with an incredibly competent manager that had already automated away most work, leaving mostly boring tasks. Interesting work was on the horizon with a new system implementation coming up, which is why they kept a full team, but as I said-- bad taste. That second manager did however leave an impression, and I've tried to be strategically lazy in automating my own work ever since)
Tech isn’t quite a paradise, but compared to finance, or a bunch of other industries, it’s pretty close. The tech media would still have you believe it’s on the same plane though.
I consider myself lucky to have had what I consider excellent bosses and work environment in a couple of my first jobs. So at least when I finally landed into abusive and hostile job, I could with some confidence say that this is not normal, no one should be tolerating this, and hey boss, watch me go!
Whether this ‘theory’ actually holds true, I don’t know. But having had it in my head has certainly allowed me to curtail my bad behaviors over the years. And hopefully has allowed me to be one of the better examples for the next generations.
All this of course assumes that leadership wants to optimize for humane treatment of people.
Many end up damaging their personal relationships and suffering mental health issues.
Work is passed down to the lowest person in the org chart. Most junior employees burn out in a couple years and are replaced with a fresh college grad. Rinse, repeat.
This post has an insider’s perspective explaining how the daily flow of the business in corporate finance and M&A requires a lot of the work done by junior bankers to be completed at night or on weekends: http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-fine-disreg...
Smart people will always gravitate to something like this to justify all the abuse. It was inevitable, reading this, I figured it was coming up in the first sentence.
Bankers are perpetually late on shit. The industry can barely manage to transfer money expediently. Listen to yourself. The abuse - which by the way is totally orthogonal to whether or not you work through the evening - is absolutely not about the workflow or timing or whatever, because I can’t think of a white collar professional more dogshit at doing things on schedule than an investment banker.
I’m confident 40 years ago the abuse was worse. And the money was worse too! They’re just not correlated. That’s the misconception, there’s no brilliant insight into how the abuse translates into more dollars. The real transformation in the industry is that the computers are better at making the real money than the human beings are, and like in many white collar professions, there are givers and takers of all that computer-generated surplus. Fortunately, when you work for a money printer, like at a giant tech company, some of whom have trading desks with AUM bigger than many hedge funds, you can relax a little.
It doesn't make much sense to criticize investment banks for the behavior of commercial banks. Probably the main thing that connects the two is pursuit of profit. And transferring your money slowly is profitable for commercial banks.
No. The justifications come in around making employees also work a 9-5 shift. If they just hired night-quants it would be fine.
It's simply a fact that some work needs to be done by the next morning like stocking shelves. Or 24/7 like tech support.
Yes, actually investment banking is kinda critical because every day that paper languishes a bunch of capital is going underutilized and people are idle and unpaid. In order to not waste the life work of so many, yeah the paper pushers should get in gear.
But also, it's rude and silly to ask this. Because I could just as cleverly ask if what you enjoy is critical and we both know that it, when viewed reductively, is not.
I don't think anyone has a problem with working at night or weekends. The issue is working at night or weekends when you also worked during the day and week. Again, just hire more staff. This isn't a hard problem.
Suggesting that this problem can only be solved by working junior staff 100-120 hours a week is ludicrous. Are these junior bankers so rare and talented that you can only hire one to change a title font size from 12 to 14 at 4am on Saturday? Smh.
IB works by doing absolutely unreasonable amounts of work for CEOs for free, to impress them, so they'll pay even more unreasonable fees when they do want you to do something big like a merger. In the meantime the senior bankers just take off-hand comments by the CEOs, turn them into questions, make the junior staff write 100 page slide decks answering them, and send them back to the CEO, who doesn't read them but feels impressed.
this seems to be the main issue. Most other industries which require night work, 24 hour shifts etc have solved these issues DECADES ago already. Either by some kind of rotation/scheduling system, or by having multiple shifts.
Maybe it's the difference between the people that are seen as bringing in money and the areas that are seen as just costs?
Normalizing abuse is also a problem. In graduate school I was in a lab where the professor was abusive from day one. In retrospect I should've quit that same day!
That being said we just spent 4 years being abused by the President.
However I'll warn people about the more bearable, long-term stress of this kind of job, which is abusive in a slightly different way.
When I finished uni, I shared a flat with a friend with one of these jobs. Apart from at night, I had the whole flat to myself every weekday night for years. He'd rarely be home for dinner, often our only contact was him standing at my doorway at eleven or midnight, with me basically in bed already chatting with him about how his day went.
I remember locking myself out of the flat once, and I just walked to his work to get his key. My main problem was staying up to wait for him at the end of the day.
During all this time, I never got the impression that IB work was important or interesting. He'd clamour to get his hands on spreadsheet ("model") work, but it never struck me as actually sensible. There were simply too many moving parts on these giant Excel sheets to actually be a real, predictive model. There was no evidence that such a model was a good representation of a supermarket or whatever.
But most of all, the bit that seemed abusive was the way work seemed to happen. Having barely slept, he'd drag himself into the office in the morning. Amazingly, there'd be very little to do. He'd sit around all day until the afternoon, when the MD would come in and demand a 100-page deck done by the next morning.
We never did anything like a movie or a dinner without it being at the very least interrupted by work. Really important stuff like "you have to change the font on p57-89".
This was massively stressful on his relationship as well, and it eventually ended. Work was not the only factor, but it was surely a major contributor.
The trouble is young bankers see the older guys who've made it and think they can make it too. They don't see the survivorship bias, because when you've gone through a top school and uni, you ARE the survivor. The bank makes you think you're the cream of the cream. (One thing that seemed to not cause concern was that a lot of the young bankers were the children of important people, eg CEOs. You'd think that makes your own odd a lot worse.)
My housemate duly looked up to his boss, a guy with a similar background to himself. Perhaps he could work himself up on that team, and build a similar life for himself.
One day, the boss didn't come to work. The bank put out a statement that he'd suffered a heart attack at home, in his 40s. My friend knew that he hadn't. Not long after he left the bank, and shook off the idea of working himself to death.
personally, this would suck out any kind of enjoyment out of a job for me, no matter the money.
I also work in a high stress industry (datacenter/connectivity) and while the work can be crazy at times, it is all worth it because the work i do actually matters to people, companies and organisations which depend on the systems we run. I am building something which directly benefits other people.
> We never did anything like a movie or a dinner without it being at the very least interrupted by work. Really important stuff like "you have to change the font on p57-89".
If this is seen as "important", what value do these investment banks actually produce except gaming the market and taking profits? are they actually producing anything that helps their peers?
I've been in situations that had me interrupted (major outages for instance), which suck ofcourse, but atleast the motivation and pride in the work makes it worth it.
This is IB, not trading. Basically it's about one company buying another. The way you do it is a senior banker talks to the CEO and says "hey, you should buy one of these companies, here's a slide deck and I'll help you do it".
That relationship with the CEO is way more important than what the deck looks like. It's not as if business strategy is so complicated it needs a 100 page deck to explain. AFAICT it boils down to a few motivations: buy this company to get their capital/customers/staff, or buy it because it because if you don't you'll fall behind. Or because you need to act like a CEO, and CEOs buy companies.
The decks that all the juniors are working on are just a way to say "there's a lot of smart people doing due diligence on this, so even if this deal fails like 2/3 deals (fails meaning the merger happens but it's a mess), you can say you did your homework". Which of course you won't have, because who ever reads a 100 page slide deck?
What value is produced? It's hard to tell, at least it didn't seem to me like it was worth terribly much. Either a merger is a stupid idea, but the salesmanship gets it pushed through, and the bank gets paid. Or the deal is obvious to everyone and it's a matter of the bank wanting to get their name on the deal ahead of other banks. The key is still to have that senior schmoozer guy arranging it. Someone's gotta make a slide deck, but it beats me why some of our brightest are put to work fixing fonts and choosing background images.
> Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept it.
And that's why it continues: because everyone accepts it and allows it. I'm lucky to be in a position where it's not difficult for me to find a job (so I can understand that this sort of principled stand is not available to everyone), so if a boss ever behaved like that to me, I would quit on the spot, and tell them, very loudly, in front of the whole floor, why I was quitting. Zero question about it.
If you endure the period of 1-3 years with abuse and horrible working conditions, you have that golden star in your resume, and can move on to something better.
But that's how the system is designed. Work young analysts to the bone, send them off to business school/hedge funds/private equity firms/corporate dev. jobs/whatever, and take in the next batch.
The people that rock the boat can easily get punished. And then their financial careers go up in smoke. Not an ideal situation for high-achievers that have sacrificed their youth on getting good grades, extracurriculars, and in general maximizing their chances of getting into some investment bank.
It's literally something a crazy Will Ferrell character like Ashley Schaeffer would do.
It's so hard to believe it even happens but for some reason I feel like in Finance these types of insane people are common.
Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept it. I saw my boss's boss get publicly humiliated by his boss's boss a couple times. Difference is, the junior guys don't have anyone to whom they can pass off work that rolls down to them, so they just end up doing the work of several others on their team. They're the backstop.
There's no profit-oriented reason for the culture, just like there's no good reason for prison abuse. It simply manifests due to the nature of bullying in a hierarchical culture that rewards imbalanced personalities.