I HATE MBB. Need advice for emotions management!!
Let me preface this post by saying that I know I’m privileged to be shitting on a role/company that many people would fight to have. Logically, I know very well that I’m not in a bad place at all, but it’s the emotional aspect that I can’t deal with. Telling myself a story is one thing, believing it is another and is the part I struggle with. The point of this post is to get your perspective on my situation and advice for what I can do, both professionally and emotionally.
Feel free to jump to the end for the specific questions I have. But here goes my rant for some background context -
My background:
I work at an MBB but on a knowledge team, not on the consulting team. I joined recently and lateraled from industry, and I already have 2 years of experience post college (which is partially why I don’t have enough patience for bullshit computer desk work anymore.) I never intended to lateral to a consulting firm and would not have actively sought out a role on the consulting team when I was doing my job search/trying to get out of my last job. I stumbled upon my current role purely by chance, and the job description for my current role seemed to not involve the aspects of consulting that I didn’t like, and seemed to involve a lot of finance, which I thought I’d be interested in, so I took the job.
What I do in my current role:
I was under the impression that this would be a specialized finance-focused consulting, more like investment research type of role. However, now it has turned out that I’m just on the knowledge team, literally doing support tickets for consulting project teams. I’m literally just pulling EV EBITDA figures for them, retrieving data items or list of companies from CapIQ and Bloomberg. I’ve never done anything more customer-service-like. I don’t get to see any context around the case or any big picture. This is just like, if not worse than, my old job, where what I was doing was really just pulling data from SQL despite the glorified strategy analyst title. And this is not going to change as I get more tenure, because of the way that my team/function is structured to fit in the firm/support the consulting staff. I gain zero transferrable skills.
why I hate this job:
Logically, I know I can’t just quit/the brand name helps a lot for my future role(s) and potentially B-school/I could browse past casework to gain business knowledge/I could leverage the brand name to build my network, etc… Emotionally though, I HATE every minute that I have to do a stupid data pull, knowing that in the best scenario the data points would just end up on a PowerPoint page in the appendix of a 50-page deck that nobody will actually look at, because that’s precisely what happened when I was on the client side and my company engaged an MBB. Nobody gives a damn about their bullshit format, dense slides, obvious conclusions that took me 20min to figure out with a simple pivot table analysis but took them 50 slides to explain by using language that made things look really vague, deep, unfathomable and therefore sophisticated. The more ridiculous thing is I now have to work in the back office as support staff to people who produce work that I disdain.
Every time I have to work on a freaking request I literally become livid, thinking about how I’m 3 years out of college and doing a support ticket for a consulting team member one year out of college, and how I’m barely clearing 100k/paying half my paycheck to expensive city rent/saving literally nothing. I’m accumulating zero social, financial, or intellectual capital. And this is 3 years out of college. I know to a lot of you who are far more ahead in your career, 3 years is nothing, but my problem is that I look at my peers from college and high school who are way more ahead than me (even if just financially through high-earning jobs and savings) and I just get really pissed off that I’m still doing this shit work/not earning or saving anything when I’m closer to 30yo than to 20.
My emotions tell me to find another job asap so I could quit, because all the menial work is killing me, despite all the seemingly logical talk about “a year is nothing”.
I know a lot of you went through much harder stuff in IB, but I’m just not the type of person who could have stomached/would have chosen IB anyway. Say that I’m a spoiled brat all you want, I just can’t deal with bullshit work or people the way that some people can. Don’t have the patience or character or personality for that. I don’t have attention to detail and am not process-oriented, because I’m naturally not good at this and I’m not at all motivated by it. I’m motivated by seeing the big picture and putting together the moving pieces of a project to achieve a concrete objective. My next move will be to a startup and will not be in finance or traditional corporate.
My plan for next steps:
I don’t plan to stay here more than one year, but lasting even just a few more months is killing me. logically, I know my next steps should be
1) try to lateral to the consulting team for now and stay a whole year. They work 60-70 hours while I work 30 hours in a good week and 50hrs in a bad one, but burnout is not just from the volume of work but more from the nature of the work, at least for me. I’ve never had a 40hr or 50hr week yet, but it will come fast enough, and I can’t even imaging doing these stupid requests for 8 hrs straight every day. At least in consulting I’d learn something 30-50% of the hours I work whereas on the knowledge team it’s 0%. If I could work 10 hours a week (which is what I did in my last job, but still HATEd that job) I would use the spare time to learn stuff on my own that’s more relevant to my long-term career goals, but if this becomes a full 40hr job (and it will become that very fast) then it’s not worth it. I can’t imagine doing a whole year on this knowledge team.
2) find out how much quitting at 6months (rather than doing 1 whole year) is going to impact my B-school application this or next year.
3) network like hell to have new opportunities lined up so I can say bye whenever rather than having to stay when mindless work starts rolling in and things get REALLY unpleasant.
My questions for you:
1) what do you think of my next steps/to-dos?
2) Do you have any suggestions for dealing with the emotional aspect of it so I don’t waste energy being frustrated all the time?
3) is there a material difference to quitting at the 6-month mark, 9-month mark, or the full-year mark (provided I find a satisfactory role by the 6-month mark or 9-month mark and have the luxury to quit)? A main reason for taking and staying in this job is the brand name that supposedly opens door down the road. What do you think is the impact on my future exit options (not just the immediate next one, but perhaps years ahead, just having MBB on my resume). On LinkedIn I’ve seen people quit within 4-8 months of starting a new job at some random or brand name company, but I’ve never seen anyone do that at an MBB.
4) What is the impact on B-school application if I quit in less than one year, especially considering that I’ve already had 2 jobs before this and my last job lasting only 9 months. MBB really works magic for b-school applications, and my role could probably be twisted to be specialized consulting rather than request fulfiller. I don’t think the admissions officer would be able to tell exactly what I did, and I could always read up on casework and list those as examples if asked about cases I’ve worked on. But the recommendation letter - seriously, I don’t even know what my manager would write about, given that all I do is standard request fulfillment and there’s zero material for a strong recommendation letter. Or does it not matter as long as the MBB name is there?
Thanks for reading this long ass post and listening to me bitch about life.
Sorry to hear about this. It sounds soul crushing.
I am unqualified to answer (1), (3), (4), but here are a few thoughts for (2).
What did you expect before taking this role?
Sounds to me like you didn’t do your research on what the role actually was and instead focused on the pReStIgE of MBB. People don’t understand that brand name in this situation means very little. This is like choosing AML/KYC compliance at GS because you want the name Goldman Sachs on your resume thinking it’ll open up the world of finance to you (it won’t). B-schools are not going to see MBB and all of a sudden let you in - they’re going to know what this role does.
My advice is to focus on your next role and really try to understand what the job is/where it sits within the organization.
Your reply sounds harsh but is very true. I definitely am the one to (at least partially) blame for this situation. I’d say the reasons for accepting this job were
1) I really hated my last job and just wanted to get out as quickly as possible. After having taken and failed so many interviews at other companies in a job search process that dragged on for 6 months, I was too exhausted to continue searching and just accepted the first offer I got, which was this one.
2) looking back of course it now becomes very obvious to me as well how extremely stupid I was. I always knew there’s consulting team and knowledge team, but somehow it just never dawned on me that this role, by not being part of the consulting team, could only be on the knowledge team. Both the job description and the interviews (both the questions I was asked and the interviewers’ explanation of the job) made it seem like it was more research focused. I thought I would be learning more about finance and building financial models, and nothing was ever mentioned about fulfilling service tickets. They did not call themselves a knowledge team. They just said they are not the typical consulting team and only focus on finance and investment topics.
Can’t cry over spilled milk, I know. But it definitely seems like something is very wrong with my due diligence process, because I get disappointed/surprised by every job I take. It just seems like I suck at understanding what reality is like, before it hits me in the face. At least now I’ve made it a rule to never apply to job listings posted online and never join a company where I don’t know someone at.
I have no crystal ball or clear-cut solution to a nuanced topic about your career. I do have an aggregation of advice passed onto me from my mentors, colleagues and peers, so me being me, I will pass them on best I can and try to hit on the questions you've laid out.
What is my next to-do/steps?
How can I deal with the emotional aspect?
Does the Duration Matter?
On a final note, from your inquiry, I think a position within Asset Management may be of interest to you.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I think clearing my headspace and thinking about my vision would be very helpful. Lastly, care to elaborate why you think a role in AM may be a good fit for me? I’d thought about this path and taken some actions (passed CFA 2 levels) but eventually decided I’m probably not interested enough in investing. I don’t find myself researching companies or reading financials news in my spare time.
You passed CFA Level 2? Might as well finish and become a CFA Charterholder. I understand where you’re coming from about your current job and why you stopped the CFA. I have taken many courses on investing and did the elite modeling package twice and don’t find myself looking into 10-ks and tickers. Ever.
My question to you is: Do you really want to join a startup? If so, why? Is it because that’s the thing to do right now? Make sure that “why” is honest and purposeful because you can leave that MBB and land in a startup just to end up feeling the same way that you are now.
It’s okay to not know exactly what you want, plenty of people don’t. Maybe start looking into different roles that help you build the skillset you’re looking for and start asking for informational interviews to confirm your research and determine if it’s a potential career path for you. Best of luck, brother.
This is sadly not a role people would fight to have.
Knowledge/Research in a consultancy is similar to BO/MO support functions in banking at a BB -> Decent WLB, salary and company prestige but only mediocre work content, career prospects and exits etc.As a poster mentioned above, you could've asked any FO consultant and they would've told you that they view their research/knowledge departments on the same level as HR.
Would recommend to leave after you've done some sort of minimum tenure (1-2 years) as your career upside within the firm is low (and chances to lateral within such a short time frame to the FO are slim to none).
I think you should just quit and look for new roles now. This knowledge role is clearly not what you're looking for professionally and is hurting your mental well being.
Generally I would recommend staying in this role for a year, but the brand name is not going to be as strong as you think it is for b school applications (at least for T10) so there's not much upside for you to stay.
You need to really do your diligence and think carefully about your next role. Talk to people in the role before joining to better understand what your day to day is like.
Yep, never should have applied online or believed a word the interviewers said. All just bullshit. Hate this game.
I really relate with this post. I remember applying to this company on handshake saying that the work exclusively with hedge funds and other industry professionals that do research, only to find that the job consisted of LinkedIn searches for "industry experts" who they would try to negotiate a rate for. The business description was nothing like the actual job, but luckily one of my smarter coworkers told me about this kind of position and I didn't continue the interviews. Honestly doing something that you don't like really sucks, and I think MBB pulled a fast one on you.
There are some benefits to your current position though, and I suggest you leverage it. Firstly, $100K for 30 hours of work is still pretty good atm, so go get some nice hobbies and start recruiting. Consider listening to some tunes you like during your monotonous work.
You said sell-side banking is not for you and I can really relate with that, so if you're in a finance hub or something like that you could try and network to find a buyside job, especially at a small AM or HF. You can also try lateralling to consulting but it's glorified powerpoint building so not sure how much you would like that. You can consider a MBA as a way to network into a buyside role, though those things are expensive. Consider doing a weekend/evening MBA program so you can only work 30H, probably get the MBB to pay for it, and network for a better job. One problem with this is that most MBA students at places like Haas average 30 years old, so you might not have enough experience. Hopefully you find something who's willing to refer you to a HF or AM role, it only takes one person to extend that branch to break in.
Thanks for the kind words and for thinking about next steps for me. Yes objectively the situation is not too bad. At least I got money to pay for a pretty nice apartment/cover all my expenses/allow me to live a comfortable life and even have a little bit left to put into savings. And to the many undiscerning eyes in industry/corporate/startup world, I still got a brand name. Hard to remember this perspective when the customer service tickets hit me in waves, but at least I learned the importance of having someone on the inside who can tell me true information regarding the role instead of doing online applications…
I lowkey still resent the team managers for selling this role as something that couldn’t be further from the truth, but fortunately I’lol at most stay in this role for another 3-6 months if I put in the work to network internally or externally.
once you move to front office, you'll be reminiscing about your old job. it's extremely stressful to try to solve poorly-defined issues that the client with decades of experience can't solve. and yeah, you're getting paid more per hour than they do, while all you need to do is perform simple straightforward tasks.
Hey, yep I talked to a couple friends in consulting roles and seems like the first 8-10 months they are just doing a different type of going-through-the-motions/logistical tasks like writing interview questions/taking interview calls/taking notes/distilling “insights” from notes and putting into ppt, before they finally got to more interesting projects where the critical thinking/pushing for second-level insight kicked in. Given that, I’m not sure if it’s worth my energy to network and try transfer to the consulting side especially if I just plan to stay another 9 months to a year in the firm/under the same firm name to get that minimum tenure/make me seem less like a flight risk on my resume.
You seem like a knowledgeable person about the reality of consulting work, can I PM you to talk more?
I was in a similar situation to you when I jumped out of ER into anyplace that would hire me because the ER role had gotten soul crushing, only to move into consulting role that was incredibly slow paced and soul crushing for a different reasons. What worked for me was using the extreme amounts of downtime at my consulting job to figure out what industry/role to target longer term and to practice the technical skills needed for that role in between turns of some godawful ppt. I'm not sure if the latter applies to you, but you mentioned wanting to work at a startup so I'd make sure you understand the day to day bs that comes with a job like that (you're delusional if you think no job has some sort of bs to deal with) and fully understand what you're getting into so you can stay for a while longer. imo it would be close to worst case scenario to jump from consulting after ~6 months to another job you immediately hate and jump soon after.
I left my consulting job around 6 months and no one cared, however I was switching industries entirely so I don't know if the same would apply if you're planning on staying in the same industry. Lastly if you do have to suck it up for a while, try to commiserate/bitch about the job with your coworkers - blowing off some steam with people that are in the same boat can be pretty cathartic.
hey thanks for your post. Yes I have to turn some completely useless and brainless ppt slides, but they are the same slides over and over again so at least one perk is that I will get faster at it and hopefully have more down time. And yes I’m using the down time to be involved in some startup work to see what I like and dislike. I stayed in my last job for 9 months and was really planning on lasting 2 years here in consulting, but that’s definitely not happening, even if I manage to transfer to the consulting side. I’m ok with jumping at the 6month mark if I can find a next role where I can stay 2 years, and the resume impact will be minimal.
How did you go about the due diligence/research process for your next role after consulting, to ensure that you wouldn’t end up in a similar situation again? Also, do you think the 6-month stint in consulting added any brand name value to your resume?
im sorry bro but it just sounds to me that you
1) didnt really research what you were getting into yourself in
2) are a bit of a tosser, i mean 100k for 30 hours of work a week - what the actual fuck lol
3) honestly you just sound bored and a bit spoiled
well your comment is exactly why I put a “disclaimer”/“preface” at the beginning of the post. Not gonna fight/argue with you here, only thing I agree with you is on your point #1 though. To each their own, I’m not saying I’m leaving 100k on the table by quitting right now, but also I’m not gonna pretend like I got a great deal and force/trick myself to feel grateful for sth I honest can’t stand/think is stupid.
not sure where you're at, but I'm at BCG and i know a couple of instances of where KT members transitioned to CT. im not clear on the details of exactly how they managed that, but i do know there are opportunities for KT members to become "embedded" on case teams where they're actively supporting and driving forward a client engagement as opposed to just answering support tickets. flag this to your line manager and see if they have any thoughts. if there's one thing i do know about MBB, it's that theyre above average when it comes to caring about and investing in their staff's L&D, including non-CT staff. I can't guarantee this will be the case for you, but it's a worth a try
Lol yea that’s what they sold me on when they tried to sell me the job - being embedded in case teams, faster cadence than regular case teams, being able to finish a case in 2-3weeks vs the typical several months. Well, now it’s just all clear that only the managers are doing any case work, even they have to answer support tickets sometimes. We’re not getting any training on anything useful/to be able to be embedded in cases in the future. Zero transferrable skills. And it looks like interna transfer is harder than if I just applied with an internal referral as an external candidate. I hate this.
have you discussed any of this with your manager? i dont think you should/need to be as candid as you are here, but MBBers tend to be reasonable people. if you explain your frustrations with the role in a diplomatic way, im sure you and your manager can work together to figure out where you can assume more interesting responsibilities, with the potential to transfer to the CT if youre interested in that
and this is a lesson for your future career too - sometimes, youre going to be dissatisfied with your job. the first answer shouldnt be to just find a new one, it should be to raise your concern with your management and talk through solutions. if this doesnt work, then definitely find another job (and i think in this case, quitting <1 year in is fine and most hiring managers will understand if you give an explanation without being too negative)
I think the way you navigate this is absolutely staying at least 1 year. Even if you hate the role, you need to maximize the brand potential of this position you are at. The second thing is also that other consulting firms don't have to know the specific nature of your position. If you are vague about your experience and actual day to day responsibilities, why shouldn't they just think you are doing consulting? Use the brand to leverage your way into another firm and you'll be fine. Leaving before your first year would be very unwise, however.
Oh yeah and also, suck it up. There's people that work in literal salt mines for a dollar a day. Get a fucking hobby. Listen to some podcasts. Your ancestors fought wars and toiled away for years just to pass down their bloodline so someone can be sad online about working for one of the most prestigious firms in the world. You'll be fine lol I'm sure you can suffer through to the 1 year mark.
But I mean, if I CAN find another job (let’s say at a startup or tech company in strategy, which is what I was recruiting for before accepting this knowledge role) before the 1-year mark, I don’t think I should be held back by some idea that I must stay in a job for one year. If the whole point of staying one year is the brand name, then doesn’t being able to exit nicely already show that the new employers/labor market bought the brand value (even before I hit one year)?
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