What's it like to actually work 80-100 hours?

notthehospitalER:

I enjoyed the hours more than I thought I would during my SA stint - I really liked the team I was in, and in my experience I got in by 9, no real work was done till around 10 (coffee, news etc before then), I'd work till lunch (on bad days through it), have lunch with some coworkers, work for a few more hours, get another snack/coffee, work for a few more hours till dinner, then have a nice dinner with my coworkers, then do some more work for another few hours and leave around midnight. After dinner, work was a mix of actual work and chatting.

Essentially periods of work broken up by coffee/food breaks and some downtime. I really liked my team so didn't mind the hours, but can see how people who don't like their teams would find it miserable.

A 100 hour work week isn't leaving at midnight. It's leaving at 3AM during the week with good chunks of work on Saturday and Sunday

If you are working on a live deal the stress fucking sucks and there is much less downtime.

It is fucking miserable. It destroys your body, your health, and your social life.

80-90 is actually sustainable for quite awhile. Keep in mind:

1) you're working 6-7 days a week, so on a daily average you're working ~14. Your social life sucks, but you sleep enough to get by.

2) You are NOT working all the time. There are long stretches (sometimes 2+ hours) of sitting around, reading the news, etc because you're waiting on somebody else, usually the client. So while you're still at work, it's not too intense during these times.

You WILL work a few 100+ hour weeks, but these are infrequent for the most part. The most intense time is when deals are closing. Even for the best groups, this is once every few weeks. You're usually given some time to recover after closing.

thanks

Not always :)

If you don't mind not having a social life and pretty much just sleeping and being in an office. I think I only started getting tired of the routine around the end of my first year. But since then I've been getting more and more tired of it, though I've also been working less in general.

2 things keep you going:

1) Downtime where you surf the internet and post on message boards. 2) Your friends. Without other analyst friends, this job would be almost unbearable, which is why I feel sorry for anyone at a boutique or office with only 1-2 analysts.

presumably all the above relate to IB hours in NYC

i've heard that in asian offices, e.g. HK/SG, 100+ hrs/wk is standard. bankers, including summer analysts typically work from 9am to 3am everyday including weekends. is this true? i guess it wouldn't be too surprising given the low taxes in hk/sg and work-till-you-drop culture there

i'd just like to know as i will be SAing in an asian IBD office this summer and would like to know what kind of hours and workflow pattern is like during a typical day/week

re: wsosurfer

i'm going on to do BB FIG and last summer the guys on the floor were generally out by 1am at the latest (of course when it gets bad it gets really bad, just like anywhere else) and weekends were lighter - i was in for about 5 or 6 hours each day on the weekend. the FTs do a bit more during the week if there are lots of stuff flying around.

there was just one korean 3rd year analyst who seemed to be there ALL the time, but that's more an exception than the rule.

in general i'd say it's very doable still. the only reason any of us got really tired was because we'd go for drinks after we got off at 1am...

I doubt workers work "everyday" from 9am - 3am. How long do you think somebody can get by with 4-5 hours of sleep (assuming transit time etc). Maybe 1-2 weeks? Stories like these are grossly exaggerated.

On average, I'd say I do a 70 - 90 hour work week. Don't always work weekends, though I'd say I go into the office for at least 5-6 hours around 3 weekends per month.

Let me put this into perspective for people who aren't in banking yet and think that "70 hours is nothing" and feel they are ready for 100+ hour weeks. Trust me, going from college where you have a TON of free time to working til 10pm or later every night is no joke. Yes, you are paid well, yes, there is a fair amount of down time while at the office, but it's still rough. Simple things like finding time to go to the gym become much more difficult as keeping a routine is no easy task.

While you stop functioning outside of work, are completely miserable, and your health suffers, you can function working 18 hour days for a very long time. On one deal, I did it for a month solid, 9am- somewhere between 2 and 4am every week day and 12 hours minimum on the weekends. 4-5 hours sleep for a long time isn't the issue, its how many 2-3 hour nights in a row before you pass out at your desk.

The hours, in general, as we always say aren't really that bad and its really just the uncertainty that kills you. If you knew you were gonna be out every night by midnight, you could go out and make plans. Hell, first year thats what we did for a few months, any night you're out by midnight go out for two or three hours. The problem is, when will you be out tonight, early or late, can you make plans this weekend, is there really any reason for that 6am Sunday morning conference call.

Yes, people inflate their hours by the fact that they aren't always working, look at me I'm writing on WSO, but its quite easy to put in 80, 90, or a 100 hours in a week. An all nighter and a few twelve hour days gets those hours up quickly.

How do you guys find time to run errands and things like that? With those hours, it seems like even just getting a haircut would be difficult.

How fast do your weeks go by? I would imagine that they would fly by..

wsosurfer - my friend in a BB HK office says that hours are worse than NYC (he transferred out of my former group so has a direct comparison), but much more "face time."

In regards to general hours, your body tends to adjust to long hours. 4 to 5 hours of sleep is enough for many people. So even if you're getting home at 2AM, in bed by 3AM, you can still get 5 hours of sleep before you work up at 8AM.

I also feel like people tend to exaggerate how early they get in. I was in a pretty late-morning group. Alot of people rolled in between 9:30 and 9:50, with stragglers coming in even later if it had been a late night or a rough week. If you're staying until 3 or 4AM, people usually don't sweat a half hour in the morning unless you have meetings or things to do (but presumably, you've done much of it the night before).

Getting errands and other things to provide some normality in your life aren't terribly difficult to get done, it's just a matter of how lazy or exhausted you get after a rough week (or five). I feel like despite my work schedule, I was still able to get into the gym about 5 times a week, buy (minimal) groceries, and get haircuts. Weekends are important - most people don't get into the office until noon or 1PM on weekends, so any errands you want to run before then are your prerogative and all you sacrifice is sleeping-in time.

I will say the worst part about the hours is going from a very busy period (e.g. winter and spring) to a slow period (summer) and then back to a busy period. You get used to having a little bit more free time (slower dealflow, summer interns helping out), then having to go back to being slammed again is hard to adjust to.

Thanks for the all the contributions re asian office hours.

blueofspirit - the FIG you're referring to is the Financial Institutions Group of IBD, and not the Fixed Income Group? The hours you had seem quite manageable and leaves an afternoon/evening off for the weekends to make personal plans. It is a relief to know that I will have time to see family. I was actually starting to worry I will be won't be seeing any of my family/friends at all over the summer.

GameTheory - did your friend at BB HK office specify how many hrs/wk he works on average? I will in fact be working at a BB HK office this summer.

I was just wondering how much the downturn in the IPO/buyout/PE market will influence the working hours at BB IBD. IPO dealflow has practically come to a halt over the past few months, and with markets in the state they are it probably won't get much better in the next few months or so. And given that the Olympics will be going on at the same time across the border from HK, I'm quite interested to see how the SA stint will turn out for me this summer.

This blog would be a good place to start:

http://maximizingalpha.blogspot.com/

Thanks GameTheory, your perspective helps a lot.

Ok this is based on London but to be honest I think this whole 100+ average hours a week thing is total bs. It's like some of my analyst friends who claim to be working till 3am every night but around twice a month I might see them in the lobby getting a car at 1130pm - which if you do the odds means most likely they are going home around that time more often than they claim, they just tend to recount that week where they worked till 4am two or three days. Yes in a real intense period of a deal you may clock 100 for a week or two but not longer usually.

On average I'd say I do about 80hrs per week and my group is quite active. There is barely anybody around after 1230-1am (though we get in earlier than other groups for no real reason, just the internal culture) and certainly not the same people consistently. It's not often that you have to work two full days on the weekend and usually for me it wouldn't be more than two 5 hr slots or 1 ten hour which isn't really that bad as after all if you are single most of the action is taking place at night on the wkend anyways.

Supposedly there were a few teams that used to have really bad work life balances at my bank but literally all their analysts and associates were walking so they had to change.

As for errands etc, you tend to do that in some downtime on a quiet day. You usually have a pretty good gauge of when it will be quiet enough to pop out for an hr to get a haircut. Given the hours ppl work there is certainly nobody there clocking ppl in and out once you are abusing it.