Best work/life balance

They're whining about the end of their 35 hour workweeks or cutting down their 7 weeks of vacation a year.

All Finance jobs entail high levels of sacrifice in return for large financial reward. With that being said, why would any quality firm hire someone focused on work/life balance when they can hire someone willing to work 24/7? The supply and demand of the industry weed out people hoping to maintain work/life balance.

Your best bet would be to focus on finance careers that are market driven S&T, HF, etc so that you are working market hours + and few if any weekends.

You might get away with 12 hour days at a tiny, no-name boutique.

Not really. I consider my lifestyle to be very good, especially relative to the money. I'm only expected to stay as long as it takes to get the work done, and alot of that work can be done from home. Hours during deals are bad, but even then it's only until around 11 or 12 and some weekends. When I'm not doing deals I can get out of the office as early as 5:30 and as late as 9, but it usually falls somewhere in between. And yes, mega fund hours can be much worse, but you'd be surprised. I know a few kids at Bain Cap that are getting killed but I also know guys at Sankaty, Brookside, and Bain Ventures that have very good lifestyles.

I second GameTheory's post. It's one of the reasons to move to the buy side - better lifestyle. As a general rule of thumb, the smaller the fund, the better the lifestyle. Of course there's generally a comp trade off as well.

Yeah everyone in ibanking eventually wants to move to PE shops. How do Ibanks propose to compete with that ? Oh yeah, more money ;)