I'm an associate at a mid market PE fund. We hired a new analyst last week who turns out is the son of one of the MDs best friends.
The kid asked us the other day "is gross profit supposed to be larger or smaller than revenue?" so another associate on the team laughed and said "are you a F***cking imbecile?"
Kid studied computer science and had internships in software firms. Even for a pure nepo hire, he has literally no finance knowledge. Wtf.
| +147 | I should have been a marketing girly (a rant) | 50 | 37m | |
| +55 | Starting own PE fund as a student | 18 | 2s | |
| +33 | Prep On Cycle or Travel | 36 | 8h | |
| +31 | Sourced company -- now what? | 20 | 2h | |
| +30 | Late sending case study | 7 | 2d | |
| +26 | Would my background make me a good fit for Infra PE? | 9 | 5d | |
| +25 | Me bitching... A Rant. | 3 | 4d | |
| +25 | Leaving PE Firm | 8 | 1d | |
| +24 | Burnt Out 2nd Year Analyst Dreading Move to PE | 1 | 5h | |
| +23 | The Morality of PE | 6 | 5h |
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I never understand these posts - yeah, finance has some nepotism and it's just part of it. Same with any other job.
Not sure what the ASO has to gain by insulting the kid. Even talented, ultra qualified analysts can ask really stupid questions... I had a non-finance major very confused about Ctrl + C on their first day and he was a top analyst within a few months. it's called having a first job. If he studied CS he's probably pretty smart and will pick it up quickly, not everyone studies finance as a hobby.
Literally zero reason to be rude to these kids who are learning - regardless of connections
Agreed but within reason. You don't have to have studied finance to realize that revenue should be a larger number than gross profit...it's common sense. Secondly, if you don't know, you should google, and only then if you still don't understand you should ask.
+1 SB. Agree here. Yes, there is nepotism but it's really next level nepotism if you are giving a leg up to someone who doesn't know a f#$ing thing about finance.
Look if Google hired me as a junior programmer because of my dad but I don't know the first thing about programming and can barely turn on the computer, I wouldn't blame anyone for being rude to me regardless of how smart I am.
Here's a reason - they took the spot of someone who has an interest in the field and they took the spot of someone who has been working hard to get it.
Maybe the price of nepotism is taking some shit from people until you can prove yourself. Don't feel sorry for the kid at all - his colleague's rudeness is a small price to pay for being handed a highly sought after job without having a clue about even the most basic business concepts.
Don't want people to give you shit for being handed a job through your dad's connection? Well, it's simple. Go get a job through hard work like the rest of us.
Yes agreed, doesn’t do anyone any good to be rude to the new guy in the group.
Plenty of guys from my class from ib came from a lac; never took a class in finance and started knowing very little. After 9 months, most became great at the job despite starting off knowing much less than their peers who studied business in ug. People in the group initially had same frustration and sentiment but eventually everyone became strong analysts and went to great places afterwards. Give it some time and see how the new guy does at that point.
Finance isn’t like coding or engineering where you actually need to spend years learning it and specializing in it to do the job.
Disagree totally here. Might do him a lot of good actually to know that he has to earn his stay at the company as well as earn the respect of his peers. Might be quite an incentive to get better at the job a lot quicker.
Whether you are talking sports teams or work teams, there's a certain level of giving people shit that can be productive. You don't want it to go overboard and you don't want it to be unnecessary hazing, but a certain level of giving people shit, can be helpful to all involved.
Yeah that's a good point, most decently intelligent people can learn a lot of the basics over the course of several months of consistent studying.
A lot of the job gets repetitive as well, it just takes time. People these days should also be expected to learn how to use google/chatgpt/ internet as a resource before asking simple stuff as well, otherwise may end up getting roasted over questions like the above.
how does this have 35 SBs..
your dad got you a job in private equity, least you can do is look over some materials? like, what do they do? what do they use accounting for? what is accounting? what's a P&L? why does it matter? come on, nowadays most nepotism hires are still pretty adequate
1. there is just really no reason for ASO to call anyone a fucking imbecile
2. it's the kid's first week of their first-ever job, even if they did some prep work god forbid they ask a confirmatory question
Well there’s one reason - for humor! That reaction would’ve made me laugh
“Learning” isn’t asking something the average high schooler knows. If he’s such a smart CS guy he should have a tech job, not finance.
That’s fair, and people should be patient with analysts in the first 6 to 12 months as they ramp up on their first job out of college. It’s only annoying if it’s year 2 or 3, and that same analyst still seemingly does not understand or did not make the effort to learn basic stuff on the job.
Well said ^
The real story here may not be "new analyst is dumb", but rather "associate calls son of MD's best friend 'imbecile'".
I used to think this way too. Unfortunately the cold hard truth is that this kid likely has more value to the firm than you do. Life isn’t fair. I’ve been there before.
Until you start bringing in more revenue than the relationship w/ the kid’s dad is worth, this isn’t worth fretting about
Lots of other nepo hires in this thread I see...
So some compsci kid enters your firm as a 21-22 year old first year analyst through a connection and doesn’t know much - why not point the guy in the right direction?
Send over some courses, guides, models etc. He might not even know where to look, or about the existence of some of this stuff if he’s from a different field. Send him peakframeworks or something. Otherwise he’ll still be spinning wheels all day and learning slowly, and you’ll still be annoyed about no progress.
This is how I learned how to do the job when I was a first year analyst in IB - one day some associate showed me a course on modeling + general ppt and excel stuff. I didn't even know how to build graphs in excel until 7 or 8 months in, used to just copy and paste charts over from other excel docs and input data lol (and I wasn't a nepo hire)
Your associate is a dildo.
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