Is MBB work-life balance better or worse than BB IB?
I've heard mixed reviews from friends. Currently considering recruiting for both (rising junior), interested to hear from people who actually know
Jul 30, 2021
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Why recruit for both? What do you actually want to do?
Think ~60 hours a week crammed into 4.5 days, with lots of travel at McK, a bit less at BCG, and the least at Bain.
be a narp like my friends but I wasn't born into that
we have free weekends and a decent proportion of managers who care about maintaining wlb (not all of them, but enough). in banking, you might have lulls between live deals but even the best managers arent going to be afraid to hit you with a pls fix at 11pm due by 2am
I did BB IB before consulting (post-MBA).
My worst weeks in consulting have been comparable to slightly worse than average weeks in banking. The crappy end of banking is immeasurably worse than consulting.
There are structural factors in consulting that just generally prevent it from getting that bad except in very rare cases - the biggest one being that at a junior level, you are only ever on a single project at a given time. Your manager has full visibility into what you're doing, which means you can work with them to manage your capacity. Some of my worst weeks in banking were caused by multiple deals spiking all at once, resulting in me getting totally crushed. This just doesn't really happen in consulting.
Consulting isn't all rainbows and sunshine and has other downsides relative to banking (the biggest one being pay). But if the dimension you care about is WLB, consulting absolutely wins 99 times out of 100.
Yea I will add on to this that YMMV, I went from consulting to large cap PE and the differences are mostly psychological.
Not being able to step away from my computer on weekends because I might get hit with work at any time in PE is draining, whereas in consulting, my work day stopped at 5/6pm on Friday and started again 9pm Sunday. I could drop off the face of the earth during that time which is very refreshing.
Same with during weekdays; a lot of times my actual pace will be lighter in PE but I am afraid to go for a run for 30 minutes because of the expectation I will be butt in seat ready to work in ~5 minutes upon receiving an email. Whereas in consulting, I could check out for an hour to go to the gym, which was chill.
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