Maybe I am crazy, but I tend to cringe at what a lot of people on this site think of as "good" or "desirable" work/life balance.
To me, good WLB is a normal 9-5 job, but I see people on here who ask questions like "where can I find a lifestyle job (ie 60 hr weeks)?" - when did working 60 hrs become lifestyle? I think of lifestyle as my college days when I would shudder at the thought of finals week, where I'd have to study a whopping 30 hrs instead of my normal 10 hrs
Just for my own amusement I've put together the following WLB classifications - curious if others think I'm way off base here
Less than 35: Great
35-45: Good
45-55: Ok, adequate
55-65: Poor
65-75: Severely inadequate
More than 75: soul-crushing
This would put most PE shops in the "poor" to "severely inadequate" range, which sounds about right to me. Then of course the Apollo's of the world get the "soul-crushing" badge
Sure for the average 'joe' 60 hours is not good WLB but please list me jobs where I can work 9-5 at the age of 24-26 and make $300k+.
No one is forcing you to work at these firms, most people do it for the money and know what they're sacrificing in order to attain it.
I agree with you. I’m not saying the hours are unreasonable relative to comp, just that the wlb in a vacuum is “not good”
Although to be fair, there are roles in SWE or at certain SM’s where you can clear $400k at that age working ~50 hrs
Software engineering.
Lmao they're all getting fired and their vested shares are worthless
Sure, "all" of them are getting fired.
Kind of weird how often this sentiment is shared on WSO. SWE is a killer gig, cash comp is still excellent, and the industry isn't going anywhere. If anything, people on this forum should be more thoughtful about potential backup plans, as it'll be a tough few years (unless you're in RX/distressed) if the financial markets blow up again like '08. And it'll happen someday...
All of my friends in the tech space are crushing it, and they actually have time for family, friends, meaningful relationships, ski trips, trips to Europe, and other things that they'll actually be able to look back on when they're old.
I won't opine on what is more important when looking at comp vs WLB. There isn't really a "right" answer. But it is dumb to talk down on other industries.
Tell me you have no clue about tech without telling me you have no clue about tech.
Also, how can vested shares be worthless? Do you mean that they're down from the historical highs?
Software engineering. 300k at 24 would be the norm if not somewhat below market.
9 to 5 job.
Not trolling have tons of friends working as swe.
What finance jobs are paying $300k+ mid-20s?
I’m confused - virtually all jobs within “high finance” pay that much or more
IB associates/VP, PE, HF?
I know you’re trying to make this ignoring comp but there’s an inevitable overlap. At the EOD of you are working 60 hours a week at a large cap fund making market comp you should thank your lucky stars. Can you imagine 9-9 Monday to Thursday. 9-6 Friday and 2-3 hours of catch up on Sunday? You can grab late dinners in a city like NYC, comfortably hit the gym regularly, go off the grid on weekends without a problem all while clipping PE comp. Sign me up
Yes of course comp and hours are inextricably linked. But I think it can be helpful to look past simple hourly wages and try to account for stuff like increasing marginal cost of time, negative externalities (eg health problems), etc.
Yeah the notion of WLB is heavily screwed up here (inevitably). Maybe it's a lifestyle thing but personally, I find there's a massive diminishing return on making more $$ after you start IB/PE, like in that $300K+ range. Making that much working 70-80 hrs is totally worth it at age 25, but after that you're supposed to improve either pay or WLB. When you continue down finance, the money scales enormously but your hours get scaled back less (even if not 80 hrs/week, you're expected to be very productive + source). But for me, I'd rather keep the pay relatively constant and just reduce hours as I get older, because I don't even know what I would do with that extra money. but there's a shitton I would do with extra time.
So to your question, yeah I think 40-45 hours is the ideal, and I'm focused on working down to get there.
Goal: $250k+ in a 40-hour-a-week gig doing something semi-interesting back in my LCOL hometown where my peoples is at. Corp banking? RM on the commercial banking side? What are you thinking? I've confirmed I prefer working around and with smaller businesses vs. giant corporates but not sure what's out there for $250k+ and 40 hours in a tier 9 (to use WSO terms) city.
$250k is a ton of money. Like 5X the median household (and not everyone in a house works 40 hours). What makes you think you deserve it? Honestly If I can find a gig that’s even $100k at max 40 hours a week in a LCOL city I’d be more than happy and I know that it in itself is a stretch. Before people say “corp strat” based on limited networking those guys are still working 50-60 hours or even more a week. It’s not a true 9-5 gig (at least at noteworthy firms) as the director winds up being some ex-IBer who thinks a “lifestyle gig” is making it home before his kids go to bed.
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50-55 hours is ideal later in my career. Now I'm okay with pulling 70-80. My father had a similar trajectory and still works more than 40 hours a week (could easily retire but chooses not to).
I feel that. Currently working 30ish hours a week (went back to banking as an asso given pay hikes + the old fund was an underpaying grindhouse) at a large corporate bank and I am bored out of my mind. Rather be devoting 50-60 hours of true energy into a role I actually care about.
Do you think it’s less about WLB and more about work life satisfaction?
Delete
What city / geography?
DC
What type of deal size are you guys doing? Mostly sell-side founder owned?
Delete
I grew up in the DC area and wanted to stay there. Is most of the work just government? I've always thought DC was a strong area for gov tech and law but never seen it having an IB scene.
There's actually a pretty solid IB scene if you're open to boutiques. The big MM firms that have branches in DC are typically limited to GovCon. I'll jot down all of them I can think of at the moment because I'm bored af right now...
MMs:
Stephens - ADG Group
Baird - ADG Group, Real Estate Group
Raymond James - ADG Group
Houlihan Lokey - ADG Group
Stifel - Private Markets Group
DC Advisory (Daiwa Securities) - Generalist M&A
Rothschild - Natural Resources
JPM - Middle-Market banking group
KippsDesanto (Capital One) - ADG Focused; M&A
Boutiques:
District Capital Partners - Buyside M&A focused
McLean Group - Sell-Side M&A focused (Mostly GovCon)
Hovde Group - Financial services focused; Bank M&A and Spec Finance Capital Raising + M&A
Clearsight Partners: Now a subsidiary of Regions; M&A and Capital Raising predominantly for Tech & GovCon
Compass Point - Financial services focused; capital raising
Outcome Capital - Sell-Side M&A focused (Tech & GovCon)
Chertoff Group - Sell-side & buy-side M&A focus with private placement practice; also do PE investments
Height Capital Markets - Diversified industry; M&A and capital raising
Olsen Palmer - Sell-side Bank M&A
FOCUS Investment Banking - Diversified industries; M&A focus
Progress Partners - Tech M&A & Capital raising; also contains a Merchant banking arm
FON Advisors - ADG focused; M&A; also contains consulting/policy advisory practice
Seal & Associates - Industrials focused; M&A
Ziegler - HC focused; M&A and capital raising
I would tend to agree with your assessment that our perspective of WLB is messed up, but there are a few of considerations for PE specifically:
WLB is not working for a dickhead VP or a psycho "analyze everything" partner
This!
A lot of these are young peoples take on work life balance. Allow me to give an older view:
The bad part about IB or demanding jobs in general isn’t the hours, it’s not controlling your time. People tend to think what makes IB or PE bad is the hours—it actually isn’t the worst part or even on the top 3 for most people when they leave the role. What makes the role bad is feeling that it is impossible to be away from your desk for two hours for your mom’s birthday. Or knowing it isn’t feasible to grab drinks with a friend who surprise visits from out of town.
Imagine you wake up at 9 and work until 5 then workout from 5-7, eat dinner for an hour and work from 8-12 Monday-Thursday. That’s 48 hours and 9 hours of sleep a night. Plus a 9-5 Friday, it’s 56 hours a week. Add in a little Sunday evening or Saturday am work of 4 hours and 60 hours a week can be very comfortable and even desirable if you enjoy the work that you are doing and can manage your own timelines.
Post 60 hours is where you start having significant weekend work, or are unable to do tasks during the week. That said, if a role allows for waves of work and you like what you are doing, even putting in a 75 hour week once in awhile isn’t that bad.
I think work life balance really goes to what you are trying to achieve. From my experience, many of the most miserable people I know/knew were those with not engaging roles that are 20 hour a week jobs. Then your life very quickly becomes lonely as you run out of activities and begin to get anxiety that others around you are building superior skill sets (and likely getting paid more).
Every old person knows Flexibility> hours. Also, while a 9-5 sounds amazing, in practice I find more often than not, those individuals end up consuming significant amounts of social media or TV/ video games, which harms their mental health. It’s unhealthy to drink and go out every single night and even if you join rec leagues or work out you can only really exercise like 2 hours a day. Is watching TV, playing video games, or surfing Tik Tok in the evenings really that much better than listening to music and creating slides as you get paid? I’d say no, but to each their own.
No it is not
Yes, by a mile
I think you are being dishonest if you think you will do productive hobbies more than 3 hours a day though is my point. To my point on a 60 hour week, I will lift and run, read for an hour a day, and have a relaxing dinner and still work a 9-5 8-12 day. Also, rec sports most people do leagues on weekends or like once a week. Hard to even find that many different activities to do every single day.
Agreed. +SB
I think this response is coming from the exact point of view the original post was calling out
If you really can't conceive of how one could enjoy the extra time in their day other than TV/social media, then yes, 60 hrs/week seems like great WLB because you have no life
But what if you wanted to:
Go skiing
Play some golf
Have sex
Go birdwatching
Or literally anything else you can imagine
Is every option 'constructive' or productive' - not necessarily. But if you are keeping yourself engaged and enjoying yourself, what else matters in life?
If sitting at a desk fulfills every one of your desires, then congratulations. But don't ever use your vacation time to go to Costa Rica and do some shrooms or you'll regret everything
I generally agree with your post, but I do want to make it clear that there is a big world out there for people who aren't truly fulfilled by work
I still think this is disingenuous and drawing a false equivalency. Many of you keep listing hobbies and acting as though 60 hours a week doesn’t allow for hobbies and that’s just not true. If you work more than 60 and don’t have flexibility I would agree with you people are wasting their life and there is more to life than just work, BUT the point I am making is 60 hours isn’t that bad. I think many people on this forum are either undergrads who haven’t worked, or kids in their banking stint who can’t understand the massive difference between 50/60 hours a week and 70/80. There is a big world out there and I highly advise people to not only work otherwise they are wasting their life, but the difference is that I think many of you aren’t understanding that 60 hours a week with flexibility allows for all the things you listed above. Realistically, most people don’t ski alone and people need to take vacation in order to travel to a mountain. As for bird watching, that usually needs to be done during daylight or around sunrise and sunset, so it’s likely a weekend activity or it’s something that you would be able to do working 60 hours a week.
There is a happy middle ground for work life balance that is indeed individual for everyone, from my experience I know almost no one who has financial stability and enjoys their job while working 40 hours a week. I stand by the happiest people I know work closer to 60 than 40 hours and the most miserable are those working north of 75 and less than 30.
As mentioned, it isn’t that I can’t conceive doing anything with my free time it’s that 60 hours a week gives you basically 4 hours a day during the week and a more or less completely free weekend for hobbies and recreational work. That’s a lot of time to fill with activities and most people can’t fill the extra time with anything aside from Netflix, movies, and video games from my experience. I trained for a marathon, lifted weights, joined a band, dated, and drank heavily twice a week while working 60 hours. I eventually learned that 60 hours was the right amount for me even though when I left banking I thought I needed a 30 hour a week job and I was very wrong.
You could expand deeper into many layers of “soul crushing”
75-90: soul-crushing
90+: you work at Apollo, and you have no soul to crush in the first place
My WLB is terrific but for people who want to do great things, it is impossible to turn off that little motor. If you told your boss that you want to work hard now so you can not work that much later, they would be disappointed and wonder who they just hired. Successful people in finance treat their work and their lives like they're running a business. How your business appears, the work it produces and who the customers are is all very important. Nothing is in a vacuum and it doesn't matter what HR says, you are judged exactly how you fear your are being judged.
The amount you work is second to your attitude to get something done you and others are proud of.
The reason I'm commenting here is I never sought out a good WLB. It just happened. I recently read Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and he speaks of the Jews in the concentration camps who would shun work and those who would work to give their terrible lives a purpose. The work shunners all died because they had a view that life didn't have anything left for them instead of seeing the responsibility of life and feeling tasked to do something, even if the chance of being liberated was so small. Oddly enough, your desire to obtain a better WLB might preclude you from ever getting there. There's no shame in wanting to do great things, working hard and telling your boss you are trying to build a full life (which is better than I'd like the same salary and fewer hours).
My WLB is as follows: WFH 9 hours a day with 6 of those being real plugged in hard work and the rest on the phone or emails or whatever. I don't look at weekends as being any different than weekdays to be honest and I probably put in a total of 40-50 hours a week at max. I'm in my mid-30s and make about $380 with a $600 max.
What do you do and what’s your background?
Lol college is more like think about showing up to one lecture a week and then spend 12 hours a day finishing assignments and studying. Nothing like getting home when the is up
Every single IB is 80+ lol
Not the one I worked at…
Tbh I think even 40 hours a week is shit WLB. Perfect WLB IMO is doing work whenever I want. If one week I feel like 10, then 10, 20, 50, 100 if I feel like it. The goal is to control when and where I work, and I might have to work some soul-selling hours to get there.
I agree with you OP. I miss the days in HS or before starting internships when I had a ton of free time. I played sports and chased passions that did not have to do with making money. Now I am always thinking about the next steps in my career/business and more money (like many other driven people on wso). I am currently doing around 50ish hours a week and it made me sad to realize how much this sucks. It is almost impossible to fit in any fun activities, or healthy habits (like working out and cooking) on top of the work and commutes every day. What's sad is I want to work and gain experience at firms where I know people consistently put in 70-80 hours, maybe 100. I am applying to these places knowing the WLB is atrocious, but I guess that is the sacrifice you have to make sometimes... I would be lying if I said I never thought about doing the absolute bare minimum like living off my parents for the rest of my life lmao but I feel like I have something to prove/a chip on my shoulder... the majority of people working these gruesome hours do too.
Hate to sound like a Gen z boomer but people complaining about even a 40 hour a week white collar desk job is so laughable to me. There is no free lunch. You cannot have both the outsized compensation and twiddle your thumbs for twelve hours a week thinking whatever code you've written, presentation you've made, or model you've executed is man's greatest production of logic and knowledge.
You either directly work for your pay or you make enough good investments that the money end ups doing the work for you (which ultimately boils down to other people lower on the totem pole physically putting in those hours of work in the name of innovation and margin expansion). I think having a hard, but true 40 hours expected of you each week is perfectly reasonable, in fact I'd consider that perfect work balance if i could receive the same pay. I can already think about all that I could do being completely unplugged from 7-9AM,5-11:30PPM, and full weekends to myself with no work product consequence. Remember the 40 hour work week was a model originated for factory workers doing hard manual labor. We sit in a desk in collared shirts and type. Maybe have to socialize a bit. It's cushy AF.
In a perfect perfect world, I think 32 hours a week would be perfect. Could have perpetual 4 day weekends to essentially have a fully developed hobby or perhaps have a 9-3PM; 11-5PM, something completely flexible. Would die happy at that
So you’d rather work 32 hrs a week than 0?
Why would I waste time pretending I’ll be in a situation to work 0 hours a week and will earn my current rate or more? I wasn’t born exceedingly rich nor do I gamble by day trading. Being realistic you’re going to have to trade time for pay for at least 10 years of your life like just get over it lol…
poll on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6953470181276868608
I don’t really care about my total hours worked. For me “good” means I’m able to make it to the events and hobbies I car about
So you don't care about your hourly wages?
I do, and would want to make sure my compensation is in line with the time I'm putting in. That doesnt really relate to work life balance though? I'm saying I feel like I have balance as long as I'm not missing events that are important to me, even if that means I'm missing a night of netflix to put together a model.
WLB completely depends on the industry and what is needed to succeed.
You also have to define what success is for you and your field.
Typically, "high finance" roles require more than 40hrs/week of work in nature.
I agree that working 90hrs a week is not exactly healthy for the mind or body. But it is often the cost of performing in the field.
There are few "perfect jobs" and they are very hard to find even if you figure out what a "perfect job" is specifically for you
It’s all about what you want to achieve in life and where you want to get to. Plenty of jobs that grant you what you seek, but will they make you happy?
Unfortunately having responsibilities and making money are congruent to the work intensity. :)
I would bump those up a bit. 55-65 should be adequate with 45-55 being good. Above 65 id say poor is appropriate. I get the whole "in college we could just chill" but allot for those people have jobs of their own and in most cases if you're not working it's not a guarantee that they're available as well. So allot of time would just be spent watching TV and being bored imo
americans are conditioned to work till they die. its what this country is built on, it's how corporations run and reap benefits. it's engrained in every aspect of their lives - education, entertainment, real estate, infrastructure, everything. vacation? you get 10 days a year! workday boundaries? you're expected to be responsive at all times or you're not a good worker! flexible environment? fuck no you have to add at least 2 hours a day for commuting, making yourself look presentable, etc. while also being forced to give up 30%+ of your salary for rent in an expensive city. lunch break? eat at your desk and be grateful for your $20 salad you little corporate bitch!
Agreed
I don’t think you can broadly define a subjective ranking skill and suggest it applies to everyone. This would be your personal ranking, but everyone is going to obviously want different things out of life.
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This is kind of a ridiculous question. Some people don't want WLB. Some people want WLB.
Your life and time is yours and you get to decide what to do with it. If you want to win and value career success and want to work 110hrs a week... do it. If you want to make less money and work 40hrs a week... do it.
Where did you go to uni where you could get away with studying 10-30 hours a week? In Europe, we all studied 60-80 hours every week and all weekends. Normal weekday was usually lectures and reading hall from 08:00 - 20:00.
I never studied or went to lectures more than 10 hours a week in college, now at a BB.
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