"Karōshi": Death from Overwork on Wall Street
It's 2015, and people in America are literally working themselves to death.
Let the insanity of this situation sink in for a second.
In a country with more wealth and opportunity than any before it in history, young people like Thomas Hughes and Sarvshreshth Gupta are sitting at a desk and staring at a computer until something kills them or they kill themselves.
I've been thinking about the tragic stories of Thomas and Sav a lot recently, rolling the same few questions through my head: Why are people with dream jobs committing suicide? What's causing their situations become so bad? And why are thousands of ambitious students fighting tooth and nail to follow in their footsteps?!
Maybe the reason that I can't stop thinking about it is because these stories hit a little too close to home. I worked as a management consultant for 4 years, and most of my close friends work in finance. I've worked a few 100+ hour weeks, and had times when I've been burnt out and hating life. While I never once contemplated suicide and I hope my friends haven't either, we often talk about the struggle to balance work with life and whether the sacrifice is worth it.
The following is a quote from Sav, but it just as easily could have been said by me or or one of my friends, "It is too much. I have not slept for two days, have a client meeting tomorrow morning, have to complete a presentation, my VP is annoyed and I am working alone in my office." Sav died on the same day he said this.
I don't have answers for why Thomas, Sav, and many others made the choice they did. Suicide and mental health are the domain of trained professionals, and if it's affecting you or someone you know then please talk to someone (click here for a list of international suicide hotlines).
But a good place to start looking for answers is Japan, where they've spent 40 years battling against the social issue of 'Karōshi', a.k.a. 'death from overwork'.
Lessons from the Japanese salaryman
Work-related death and suicide is a significant social issue in Japan, and the unfortunate plight of the Japanese 'salaryman' taught me an important lesson about how we can tackle the problem in the Western world.
Death from overwork is so common in Japan that in the 70s they created two words to describe it — karōshi if the cause is 'natural' like a stroke or heart attack, and karōjisatsu if it is self-inflicted.
But despite nearly 40 years of awareness of the problem, not a lot has changed. Today, the country faces plummeting national birth rates and low economic productivity because of their systemic work-life balance issues. In March 2015, the government announced another half-measure solution by promising to make it the legal responsibility of workers to take at least five days’ paid holiday a year.
I understand that you have to start somewhere, but this will do nothing in the near term to reverse the "work-hard, play-never" culture in most of Japan.
'Karōshi' on Wall Street
There are concerning parallels between Japan and what's been happening here in recent years.
The high-profile 2013 death of Moritz Erhardt in London caused governments and corporations to acknowledge that there is a serious problem with the work culture on Wall Street and beyond. And like in Japan, the talk has produced little in terms of meaningful change.
You've probably read or experienced first-hand the half-hearted attempts by big banks to solve the issue of employee burnout. Let me be the first to say, 'thank you, Goldman Sachs, for telling your interns that they don't have to work more than 17 hours a day'... problem solved!
I have a hard time believing that executive leadership at these banks is naive enough to think these policies will actually make a difference. Maybe I'm just cynical, but it looks more like an attempt to solve their PR crisis and given them something to talk about during intern recruiting.
This problem won't fix itself
The simple takeaway from these examples is this: we can't wait for governments or corporations to fix the problem of overwork and employee burnout. Maybe eventually they'll produce some effective solutions, but I'm not willing to wait around while people are suffering everyday.
As I see it, you have three options when faced with the challenge of a high-stress, high-demand job:
Option #1: Suffer, sacrifice, and eventually burnout.
Option #2: Quit your job.
Option #3: Accept the challenge and take action.
Knowingly or not, you have probably already selected option #1. It's the default option. It's the option we select when we accept the status quo and do nothing. I did this for 2 years until I hit a low point before I decided to take action.
Some of you should select option #2 — quit. These jobs aren't for everyone, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that. In the end, I decided that management consulting wasn't for me, so I quit. I wish that people like Thomas and Sav had quit instead of making the choices that they did. But for some people, quitting is not the right option. Working insanely hard, long hours can suck sometimes, but life has little purpose or meaning if you aren't pursuing excellence at something. Maybe in the end you'll decide to quit anyways, but at least do it for the right reasons and not because you were too burnt out to give the job a chance.
Finally, there is option #3 — take action. If you're sick of accepting the status quo and are ready to do something about it, then this is the path for you. It's going to be hard and uncomfortable, but that's what separates the successful people from everyone else. It took me months of trial-and-error to find things that fixed my burnout, but it's possible and that's all that matters.
And I guess that's the takeaway from this meandering article: burnout is not an inevitable aspect of working a job like banking or consulting. You don't have to feel perpetually exhausted, disengaged, and unhappy. You don't have to sacrifice your youth to succeed.
There's obviously a lot of steps required to fix burnout, but from my experience the most important step is the first step: the mental shift of truly believing that you are in control and that it's possible to succeed without getting burned out.
# # #
I wrote this post because I'm sick of reading news stories like the ones about Sav, Thomas, and Moritz. I'm not naive enough to think that writing will be enough to solve this problem, but it's a start. Hopefully we can start supporting each other and having more conversations on WSO about what we're actually going through rather than continuously over-exaggerating our hours and acting like working until you get sick is something to be proud of.
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My name is Alistair Clark, and I'm a former management consultant and I now run worklifefitness.co. I consult top-performing business professionals (consultants, bankers, lawyers, etc.) on how to prevent burnout so that they stay healthy, kill it at work, and enjoy life again. I put together a free email course for WSO readers: The 5-Day Burnout Fix.
Advertising?
I was waiting for the "BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!"
Definitely advertising, but who cares. Gotta get your name out somehow; at least the post is relevant in the field.
I think this post overlooks that there is more to life than work. If you're dead set on working in IB and the work is too time demanding, go to a damn boutique. Not every IB requires 80+ hours a week. I know the whole depressed state makes one feel helpless and probably lose a sense of reality a bit, but you need to know when to throw in the towel - and there's absolutely no shame in that (you're a douche if you think there is)...
"Working insanely hard, long hours can suck sometimes, but life has little purpose or meaning if you aren't pursuing excellence at something." Step outside of the damn box and do what makes you content. There are probably 10 other careers I would pursue right now, and I am sure after being in IB, any analyst can afford to go back to school for a bit and pursue a change, big or small.
Just my two cents, I don't know why everyone gets a boner for IB. It's probably more for the ego than for the thrill - there's not much thrill there.
Many people getting a boner over IB barely understand what it entails. And as for Japan's karoshi, their work culture has always been a joke and more of a face time than actually working efficiently. And they wonder why their economy is in shithole despite probably clocking the longest working hours than any other countries.
"Many" would be an understatement. It is more like 99%.
You forgot option 4: man up
Yeah banking sucks in terms of work-life balance, but you don't succeed without hard work and sacrifice. My friends who did banking out of college were miserable during their stints, but not a single one regrets it. Why? Aside from the money, it allowed them to do more lucrative and interesting work later on, gave them tons of exit opportunities, and a strong network and brand. Their lives have consistently gotten better over the years because of the sacrifice they made early on. That's the nature of life. Suck it up, stop being a whiny bitch, and grind it out.
Good god, you Americans love your cliches.
A lot of people succeed without hard work or sacrifice, particularly people who are good at sales.
The people who are fixated on the false equation of "hard work + sacrifice = eventual success" in banking are typically the naive analysts and associates stuck on their hamster wheels.
Banking is a meritocracy, but often the definition of "merit" is not what your American myths of boot-strapping, hard work and sacrifice etc schooled you to think.
EDIT:
A major cause of burn out is when naive analysts and associates despair to themselves, "I'm working so hard, why is success not coming to me for my hard work and sacrifice, like the legends promised? DOES NOT COMPUTE!"
It's because your education system and surrounding myths of success convince you to think that if you work hard and sacrifice, you will certainly get to the top. "You go girl!" and all that Oprah Winfrey shit, or its male equivalent (eg "you don't succeed without hard work and sacrifice").
I see plenty of smart kids who aren't smart enough to think around their programming, smashing their heads into the wall of a stalling career, stumbling back, then smashing their heads against the wall again because they adamantly believe HARD WORK + SACRIFICE is the only key to success.
Hard work and sacrifice will get you only so far.
And often, there are faster alternatives to get to the same level of success (although that often means having a lot of natural talent and/or connections).
Dumb-arse persistent belief in high school mythology is not the only cause of career burn out, but it's certainly a big one.
Couldn't say it better (even as an American). Warren Buffett never (or hardly) busted his ass, and I am sure he'd even say that. Can't recall the quote exactly, but there was a statement in the book "Snowball" about how he never wanted to WORK, and I definitely think investing has been a hobby for him.
amen, this should go straight on the front page
Great insight. This exact thing happened to me while consulting, but you vocalized it so much better than I could have.
I worked my ass off in my first two years and got mediocre results and didn't understand why. It was a big factor in my burnout, because I basically felt like "what's the point in trying so hard if no one is noticing?"
Along with the internally driven cause you mentioned (mindset of "hard work + sacrifice = eventual success"), I found that there were also important external causes in the form of senior staff / bosses.
Let me explain further...
When I was an analyst I would get assigned endless amounts of low-visibility grunt work that was disguised as a "great opportunity" coming from people that I didn't even report to. I didn't know it at the time, but I was spending hours and hours each week doing work that was immaterial to my success (e.g. organizing analyst events or helping write research papers). I thought that all of this work would fast-track me for promotion, but in reality the real decision makers (i.e. partners / execs) didn't care about anything not related to making money. My associates/managers/seniors managers were just delegating work that they didn't want to do, regardless of whether or not it was good for my career.
It took me 4 years to figure out this game, but in my last year I worked half as hard and got my best performance ranking because I focused on a few important pieces of work that were "force multipliers" for my career success and politely said no to all the b.s. "great opportunities".
I think a more important question is, if they lowered their work week to 50 hours a week, doubled staff and halved compensation, what effect would it have on the people who pursue wall street careers? In other words, would it change their candidate pool greatly?
Just throwing an idea out there.
I feel as though that would dilute the resume value of doing investment banking, turning it from juggling multiple deals/responsibilities to have an explicitly carved out set of tasks that do not encompass the entire process of deal making/trading/advising etc.
Could be wrong though. It could turn this into finance bro daycare.
The goal should be to get peak performance from your employees, not exhausted burn outs. It's a fact that those kind of working environments lead to a shittier product.
Money, Death, and Wall Street: Is there really a change on the horizon? (Originally Posted: 09/06/2015)
As an outsider it can be easy to shake your head at the death of a Wall Street analyst, to say: “just quit” or to label any and all demises “categorically senseless” or espouse the media’s buzzy “it’s a suicide contagion!”
All are valid, and yet, none tap into the very essence of what makes Wall Street the sort of environment where the workload would become too much, the pressure unbearable and the hours so long that one might lean towards killing themselves over just walking away from the job.
The only certain element in all of this is working on Wall Street can be an extremely tough gig.
“I think the working conditions of Wall Street banks are a constant — they've always been bad, they'll probably always be bad,” says Kevin Roose, author of New York Times bestseller Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits.
But Roose, who spent three years post-recession shadowing eight young workers at financial firms like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan for his book, says the interesting thing is this: despite all the chatter surrounding working conditions and the shuddering economy, the Wall Street post-crash and the Wall Street of today still look similar.
“In 2008, young bankers were working hard because the world was falling apart,” he says. “In 2015, they're working hard despite the fact that the banks have eased up on them slightly, in part because Silicon Valley has presented them with a recruiting challenge.”
The culprit seems to be a deeply ingrained idea that the 100-hour work week and shop vice-like pressure is par for the course.
Consider this: Wall Street, like the American Dream itself, needs a mythos to thrive, a pursuit of neglect-the-means-and-focus-on-the-end, because it’s that pursuit that validates the filthy, filthy riches at the end of the ride. It’s an allure that Hollywood is all too to perpetuate, spoon-feeding the mythos, the culture of overwork, and the drug-fueled benders punctuating multi-million dollar deals.
“I think the Hollywoodized Wall Street is very attractive to a certain type of young – usually male – person,” says Roose. “So if those people show up to recruiting because they saw Wolf of Wall Street, and want to replicate the culture they saw, then their workplaces become closer to the stereotype.”
But it’s the same mythos the fathers of both Thomas Hughes – the 29-year-old investment banker who jumped to his death in May after slitting his wrists – and Sarvshreshth Gupta – a 22-year-old first-year analyst who called his dad saying he was overwhelmed with work and was found dead, having fallen from his building in April – credit as causing their sons’ deaths.
Hughes’ father said that his son Thomas had been under a “lot of pressure” and feared he might have turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with the stress of work.
With heartbreak on his shoulders, Gupta’s distraught father, Sunil, penned an essay for the New York Times lamenting his continual pushes and encouragement towards his son, despite Gupta’s trepidations around his workload.
“From mid-January, he started complaining. ‘This job is not for me. Too much work and too little time. I want to come back home.' As probably, any parent would react, we counseled him to keep going, as such difficult phases were inevitable in a high pressure new job,” writes Sunil. “Now, I, who had nurtured him, carved him, possessed him, took the fatal decision for him. Why did I ask him to continue? Why didn't I ask him to come back? What if I had not forced him to continue?”
Of course, Hughes and Gupta’s passing weren’t the first. They were single souls in the company of dozens of other young analysts who have died, overworked, terrified of the weight of the world they’d surrounded themselves with.
It is absurd. It is unnecessary. And yet, it still keeps happening.
“I really don’t know what to make of these incidents – there is definitely a ton of stress on these kids,” says Matan Feldman, founder and managing partner of Wall Street Prep, a consultancy firm that trains budding investment bankers and analysts on financial modeling and accounting techniques as well as connecting these skills to the reality of grueling hours and attention of detail required to make it on Wall Street.
“In some groups, that stress really is unjustifiable and is just a form hazing,” he says of the pressure. “In other groups, it’s similar to the stress that kids pursuing competitive careers face everywhere – be it medical residents, consultants, or lawyers.”
He points out that the culture also varies across banks and groups within banks.
“At some regional banks and boutiques, there is a real work life balance, hours per week are manageable – 60 to 70 – and there’s less of a cutthroat culture,” he says. “At larger banks and particularly within certain high profile groups within the large banks, the culture is exactly what you have heard – cutthroat, grueling hours, and an expectation that literally everything comes second to the job.”
Not that the financial sector on Wall Street hasn’t made some moves to clean up the culture.
“The last two years though, the brass has called for making things a little better and it is having a positive impact compared to when I was a banker 15 years ago,” adds Feldman, who worked his way from analyst in Chase Manhattan Bank's Mergers & Acquisitions Group in New York to the role of associate within JP Morgan's Equity Research Group, covering Food & Drug Retail Equities.
The catalyst for change seems to be death.
In 2013, the death of 21-year-old Bank of America intern Moritz Erhardt three back-to-back all-nighters spurred the company to review the tragedy.
Around the same time, ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0a994e7a-408c-11e3-ae19-00144feabdc0.html">Goldman Sachs preached its recommendations made by a “junior banker task force” of global executives including hiring more entry-level employees, allowing more one-on-one time with their managers and clients and creating more predictable “out of office hours.”
In June of this year, after the latest deaths, Goldman Sachs, which has 2,900 summer interns, told them to leave the office by midnight and not return before 7 a.m. and also make sure they’re taking Saturdays off.
It all feels a bit like good public relations moves, but even if it is the real deal and Wall Street is in fact easing up, the systemic culture finds a way to reset the cyclical memory and keep the culture from ever really changing too much.
“Part of the nature of banking is that it's a client service business,” he says. “So no matter how many rules you give your vice presidents and managing directors about how many hours a week a junior banker is allowed to work, if a big client needs a pitch book on a Sunday, it's still going to have to get done.”
It’s the same point Roy Smith and Charles Murphy, former investment bankers and professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business, ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/17f44d8e-101c-11e5-ad5a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3hh3W6s5v">argued in an editorial for the Financial Times.
“Part of the reason for this intensity is the unpredictability of activity in capital markets, which includes prospecting for and executing new issues of securities, IPOs and mergers and acquisitions,” they write, pointing to this year’s record M&A activity. “When activity levels surge it is all hands on deck, something everyone knows.”
The other part of the high pressure, 100-hour workweek environment is using it as an incubation process.
“The firms believe that having a relatively small staff of high-grade junior employees to handle the business provides a more intense form of training that produces a cadre of professional mid-level employees with long-term career potential,” they say. “It is a tough, sink-or-swim process that separates out those that have the aptitude, personality and preference for this type of work. It can be nerve-wracking and physically demanding.”
They go on to liken it to elite military training for the Navy Seals and other Special Forces units.
According to Roy Smith, the steady stream of analysts willing to hammer it out on Wall Street to get ahead of their peers has made it a buyer’s market.
“The phenomenon of the so-called ‘best and brightest’ leaving Ivy League and similar elite schools to become Wall Street analysts reached its peak sometime in the late 1990s,” he explains. “After that, growth on Wall Street slowed and, though there was some increase in the utilization of analysts, the demand for analysts slowed but the supply of young people wanting to be analysts increased as the word got out about how much money they made and how many of them went on to ‘real’ careers on Wall Street.”
Bluntly put, Smith doesn’t see it switch gears anytime soon.
“I don't foresee a change in this in the near term,” says Smith. “But students inevitably will gravitate elsewhere, especially as other industries like the health care and tech start ups create employment opportunities with similar appeal or if Wall Street reduces the pay premium it has set for the elite graduates.”
But as long as interns and junior analysts are working impossible hours, are breaking under the weight and seeking shelter in drugs or alcohol or, worse, death, the conversation has to be had. And besides, it’s not a secret, Wall Street’s working conditions are well documented. They’re part of that mythos, that allure we’re talking about.
They’re selling points in some cases and they work, fascinating outsiders and bringing them in. Which is why it’s so hard to change.
“A lot of the people who work on Wall Street are drawn to it because of its aggressiveness and long hours,” says Roose. “They're competitive, college-athlete types, and they're battling each other for promotions and bonuses – so even if you tell them not to work as hard, a lot of them won't get the message.”
This piece was written by Andrew Seale, a freelance business writer who contributes frequently to Yahoo Finance, The Globe and Mail's Report on Business, The Toronto Star, and The DealRoom.
Dozens have died? Is that actually fact?
I like the Navy Seals analogy. I think one of the big problems is that people think if they can't make it on Wall St they've failed in life, and the suicides are the extremity of such a thought process. Go fishing, buddy.
NY Times Article - "Deaths Draw Attention to Wall Street’s Grueling Pace" (Originally Posted: 10/11/2015)
Interesting article in the NY Times today about the workload in Investment Banking and recent suicides (link inside the post).
Thoughts?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/business/dealbook/tragedies-draw-atte…
Cocaine and alcohol don't go together, no matter your chosen profession.
Agreed. Most people are sane enough to quit if something is too taxing on them. The only career I can think of that is heavily tied to suicides is a military-related career. I feel for those people.
just googled the suicide rate by profession (the riches . com - so maybe not a reliable source) but financial workers are 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide (they are on the 3d spot after doctors and dentists). So i guess stress is till a big factor here. But if u have a different view, i will be glad to hear it
The media will always bite on a story that can feed off people's inner demons - jealousy, disdain, etc. Every time anybody in a high-paying job who's life is supposed to be "all that" does something that doesn't conform to that idea, some journalist will jump at the opportunity to "expose" the "truth" about what everybody else doesn't have. While this guy's death is certainly tragic, we can't toss aside simple traits like logic and common sense just to find a scapegoat. Guy was on drugs and took a combination he couldn't control. Sure, work stress was a factor. But it's more likely that without the drugs he wouldn't have jumped. But without the work stress? We can't know for sure - maybe a bad breakup + drugs would have had the same outcome.
I don't know a single person in IB that isn't completely miserable but a choice is a choice. That individual was not forced into IB.
500k all-in as an associate? Interesting..eye roll..
Chicken or egg situation
Does high finance make people crazy or did those people choose high finance because they were already crazy
Interesting how NYTimes is citing WSO and the article I posted. Both stories are sad but I totally agree that work can't be solely blamed. Drugs and alcohol are a terrible combo along with lack of sleep can easily lead to lack of judgement. Condolences to both families.
"In 2014, Thomas moved to Moelis, which he figured would be more prestigious and less bureaucratic than Citigroup. He was hired in May and promoted to associate, a rare feat for someone without an M.B.A. His father says he was well reviewed in December and received a bonus in the $400,000 range, on top of his $100,000 salary."
$400K bonuses for associates at Moelis.......?
Moelis is not prestigious that's for sure . Doubt the 500k figure as well
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