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.
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.