Make 30K or more as a SA
I made just under 35K this summer working as a SA. Here's the reason why, and why most SA's get paid less than they should.
1. Internship compensation laws vary by state
2. In New York interns can get dicked around, thus BB firms (and possibly smaller as well) make interns sign an agreement accepting "Premium Pay" often on their first day during training (before you learn you have to read all the small print)
3. What this really means is you give up the overtime you would be legally entitled to if you were a full time employee (this usually translates to 1/2 hourly wage for all hours over 40 hours a week, as opposed to the usual 1.5x hourly wage normal employees are entitled to
4. In California interns are far more protected (the once in a lifetime experience where bankers like big government)
5. Thus, in California interns are ruled by the following hourly compensation laws
A. Up to 40 hours in a week at 1x hourly wage
B. 40 - 80 hours in a week at 1.5x hourly wage
C. All hours over 80 hours in a week at 2x hourly wage
D. All hours after 12 consecutive hours working at 2x hourly wage
When hourly wage is calculated at 70K annual broken down by 50 weeks at 40 hours a week, hourly wage comes out to a round $35.00
I worked at a sweatshop, and thus was averaging over 110 hours a week for 9 weeks (with a few 130+ hour weeks), but walking out the door knowing you had made $1,000 since you last slept sure made it a lot easier on your mind.
So my advice to all of you prospective SA monkey's is to do your homework. If you are in New York, tough luck, you still have a great summer internship to stick on the resume and the money still aint bad. If you have an internship in any other state, look up the laws that govern intern salaries. I was able to have the pay system shifted for an entire regional office of a BB firm just by emailing HR with a courteous email and a link to the California compensation laws.
First thing I bought with the cash? Affordable but reliable car.
I actually heard this about Cali. Thought it was BS. Good shit OP.
This was talked about in another topic, but nice to get some perspective.
Also, most IB SAs I've talked to didn't put down their overtime hours ("just because," according to them).
"I was able to have the pay system shifted for an entire regional office of a BB firm just by emailing HR with a courteous email and a link to the California compensation laws."
This part is bull shit, but the OT pay in CA is true.
this
Thanks for actually spelling it out for once so when people ask this question again someone can link to this.
Point of clarification here: $35k on an hourly wage at a BB in California means you weren't at a sweatshop. I've heard of multiple (3 to be exact) cases of $45k+ ($49k being the highest). Either that or your hours were not properly being tracked.
35k after tax? Was this in CA? Thanks crazy
Pretty old news. Also happens in quite a few places outside the US as well.
The SAs at CS Canada are taking a paycut by accepting a FT analyst position after being paid OT based on a salary of 92K. Basically covers most of your undergrad tuition if you got a few scholarships along the way.
i know it's the law, but i could definitely see california banks not looking too favorably on this. not that that's disincentive for a SA
what is the hourly rate and hours weekly that translates to 30k?
West coast = best coast
So this goes for any IBD SA's at BB or MM banks in SF?
@Whiskey5: Thanks for the input, but that is true. Not only did we start getting paid according to California law after I alerted them to the fact that they were not in compliance with state regulations for intern pay, but about a week later we were mailed another check to compensate for the difference in what we should have earned during our first week on the job AND for our week of training in NYC
@Nouveau Richie: Sorry, I should have clarified, it was 35K take home after tax. Pre-tax was close to 50K.
@snakeplissken: Yeah, I can imagine that the higher ups were not too happy about it. Thankfully BBs are such massive institutions that the guys we worked with on a daily basis had no idea how much we were making. There really was no way they could find out unless they specifically called someone in HR (and even then I'm not sure they would have told some random Director or Associate). Certainly no memo went around the office or anything like that. All the SAs kept it to themselves for most of the summer. When we ran the numbers we were making basically as much as a senior director for the time we were there, and we were definitely blowing the FT analysts out of the water...
@MinneBanker: We worked on an hourly pay that was based on a 70K annual salary. That worked out to $35 an hour for 1x pay. So since we were averaging roughly 115 hours a week: 40 hours a week at 1x = 1,400 40-80 hours a week at 1.5x = 2,100 80+ hours (average 35 hours a week) = 2,450 Weekly salary = 5,950 (before tax) This is all approximate, obviously. And on top of this break down, any time we worked more than 12 hours straight, all of those hours were 2x pay. Since there were several times I didn't leave the office all night, my entire next day was at 2x pay.
Unfortunately California taxes like crazy, so your actual take home isn't that great relatively. But still, walking out with that much cash is a pretty good feeling.
Okay, sounds about right. Shit's ballin' dude, congrats. Hope you got the offer.
@AsianMonkey: The beauty of this is that it should go for any hourly wage job in California. At smaller banks it may be a little more awkward to basically ask to have your pay doubled (or more depending on your hours), but at large institutions the people running pay-roll are so far removed from the people you work with on your daily teams that things like this easily slip under the radar.
white lion thanks a lot for the clarification!
GS TMT here I come...
Does the overtime pay rule apply to London SA's too??
Seems particularly generous.
not too shabby
This is ridiculous, I made €3000 per month in Europe.
Precisely, you live in EUROPE. Not to worry though -- 4 more years of Obama and SA's here will be making European wages as well.
Made a decent amount as a BO intern last summer, much more than Europe at least.
"This is ridiculous, I made €3000 per month in Europe."
above_and_beyond, I know the feeling. In Tokyo a few years ago, 14-hour days, no social life, suicide-inducing sleep deprivation... ¥275,000 per month, or (at the time) about $2400. And the commute was over an hour because you can't afford to live closer at that salary!
what was the 130 hour week like?
That's $3.8k? I made $4,000 one week. (Sadly, my bank knew about OT and paid us $17/hr base.)
@HowardRoark: 130+ hour week sucks. I had one this summer (134 hours of 168 in a week). Basically 2 all nighters. I didn't leave the office at all on tuesday night and friday night since we had part of our team in HK and thus on a very different time zone. We had to be up to do last second changes to a management presentation on friday, and on tuesday we had calls from 3 continents at 2:30 am, 3:30, 4:30, and 5:30. At that point going home for 1 hour of sleep really doesn't make sense anyway.
I just got my W2 from my Cali IBD internship from last summer. Wages, tips, other earnings = 50k (Pre-tax) Best of luck to all of you!
hahahah, good luck ever getting paid properly in IBD on a per hour basis. Then again, this is the dues you pay early on in your career, ain't nothing is easy.
Don't look at your hourly worth, you are a person earning a wage based on intellectual work and not fucking manual labor. Look at your total comp and future potential otherwise this kind of thinking will only put a very low mental glass ceiling.
Hey man what did your email look like when you hit up HR? I'm in the exact same situation for this upcoming summer. California BB that pays pro-rated analyst salary (70k => ~14k for the summer). Were you worried about how asking them would affect you in terms of pissing them off? I'd be slightly worried about them reneging on me or putting a target on my back when I walk in day 1.
you're getting paid 14k to work over 10 weeks and you want to ask for more? smh
Holy crap... I should have worked a bit harder to get the left coast this summer.
Glad I live in Cali. Numbers like that makes being a SA look a lot less horrific
Ok, i've done a summer internship in London.
At the start, i recieved a form where i signed that i accepted to not be protected by some law about overtime.
I always wondered what could happen if you don't accept to sign it ?
And what about overtime laws for Full-Time employees ?
When bonuses were massive, i could stand the hours without problems, but now with the massive cut in pay, I don't see why bankers shouldn't be as nitty about their hours as other professions.
Boutique, full time banker here. This thread has me ahhhh, well let's just say a bit depressed. Fucking college kids. Get off my damn lawn!
Did you get the full-time offer? IE did they view this as reasonable or as you being difficult.
Also was this an undergrade internship or MBA?
This was an undergrad SA position. At the end of the summer they did make me a full time offer (though being 2012 only 50% of our class got FT offers). I think this had as much to do with the fact that they didn't know it was me who emailed HR as anything else. At the end of the summer some of the older people realized how much we were making, and there was some grumbling. They even reprimanded one SA for "milking hours" and told us that after 2am if we were finished work we should go home (out of context it's a hilarious thing to have to be told...).
As for the email I wrote to HR, it was actually a bit of a process. I originally brought the issue up on the first day of training because I had done some research about California compensation laws and saw that I should be entitled to overtime pay. I spoke to my recruiting contact (also part of the HR division in a BB) and she referred me to someone else. Nothing happened for about a week and when we got our first pay check we were disappointed to see we were getting NYC wages. At that point none of us really wanted to write another email to HR, but I guess I went out on a limb and took a risk. My email was a courteous as possible, with lots of things like "I'm not sure if you are aware..." and "perhaps XYZ's policies are different..." but in the end I provided a link to the intern laws for California and let them make the call themselves. I didn't want to push too hard. Ultimately a huge multinational BB bank does not want to open itself up to the liability of breaking the law by not being in compliance with something as stupid as intern pay laws. Can you imagine the headlines and pay-out from a lawsuit from a SA who didn't get a full time offer but worked 130+ hours a week and wasn't even paid correctly? They could probably even sue on grounds of sleep deprivation torture or hazing haha.
Again, the beauty of this is that HR in NYC is so far removed from the people making calls about whether or not you get a full time offer, that they probably never even talk. Plus, at the end of the day in California you are entitled to that money if you are working that much.
As for OT for FT people, unfortunately in California these over time laws only apply to people working for an hourly wage (aka interns). Working as a FT analyst you go from an annualized wage of 250K+ (50K for 9 weeks * 50 weeks roughly), to making 72K plus bonus (which is certainly no guarantee of anything any more).
Does this pay discrepancy also exist on the analyst level?
Why are interns paid on an hourly, as opposed to a salaried, basis?
I got an offer from a west coast BB and it was a pro-rated salary instead of hourly :(((
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