Am I being underpaid?

A couple month ago I joined an F50 company as a corporate development analyst II. Including signing bonus and end year bonus I will make $90-93k this year (in a no-tax-state but an expensive city). I am 2 years out of college with 1 year of valuations and 1 year of MM IB experience, all within the industry. 

I quit my IB job because of the hours (although I made $150k my first year). I could have gone to PE but I didn't want to slave consistently 80-90h/week. During the interviews at my current company I've been told that I should expect to work on average 10-11h unless working on a deal, which seemed fine because I thought those weeks would not be the standard. Now 5 months into the job I am consistently working 8am-12pm + additional work on the weekends. 

The questions is, am I being underpaid relatively to how much I work? Are these hours normal at an F50 corp dev?

Appreciate your thoughts on this. 

19 Comments
 

Do you know if they work similar hours? I signed up for this salary, so money is not necessarily the problem, but I make less now than in IB on hourly basis. Also, do the people you know have similar background or did they join straight from college? 

 

Yep, that's the plan. The weekends can be bad too Friday stayed up till 3am, Saturday 6-7h of work, and now it's Sunday 9PM and I'm still on. 

 

For sure underpaid. You are in a no-tax state but expensive city; my guess is Seattle... assuming your sign-on was the standard $5k and annual bonus was the corp finance standard of 10%, that makes your base anywhere from $75k-$80k. That is on the very low end of what a typical Senior Finance Analyst in Seattle would make in a standard FP&A or BU Support function that work easy 35-45 hour weeks with low stress. As a Corp Dev Analyst II with 2 years of IB experience I would have expected $100k base minimum with $5k sign-on and 10-15% annual bonus on top of that. 

Did you negotiate these figures before accepting? If not I think you may have undervalued yourself.

 
Most Helpful

I would hesitate walking up to the VP and asking for a raise seeing as how you started so recently and likely haven't provided significant value yet (I could be wrong here). Unfortunately, getting a significant raise at this point will be fairly difficult as you no longer have any leverage (you had the leverage during offer stage as you could have walked away). Even if you are able to show some serious comp/salary data to prove you are paid way under market, I would still tread carefully as rocking the boat like this as a new hire is never a good look. Honestly, I think at this point your best bet to get a more appropriate salary would be acquiring another offer...

To be clear, I am about the same experience level as you (2-3 years YOE), so I am by no means an expert in any of this. Just my 2c. Best of luck!

 

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