Advice: Bankers asking technicals during coffee chats..

Lol thats such a dik move but many of us are diks so expected lol... sometimes people drop technicals to help you and not to formally judge you but seems like in your case it isnt

Yes it is a thing now for some EBs. 

My associate was proudly telling me he asked an undergrad about ifrs 16 adjustments during a coffee chat…

Hey man kind of off topic but my friend in psychology training has been making fun of me and asking if I'm getting ready to work at McDonalds even since the OpenAI thing and is insisting that his work is too intellectual to be automated. So anyway I've been playing around with something in ChatGPT and here's what it came up with for your little issue, hope it helps:

One element in which IB recruiting resources are failing prospects is in preparing them for the neurotic etiquette of the junior banker. The average college student does not inhabit sufficient mental insecurity or intrepid delusion to have predictive insight into the behavior of a 20-something who has allocated their waking life to formatting micro-adjustments and niche accounting, and so it will come as quite a shock to them the level of sincerity which is placed on seemingly innocuous information at inopportune moments. 

An improved strategy for navigating the psychiatric turpitude endemic to contemporary adolescent "high-finance" is simply to assume as though everyone you speak to is trying to be Patrick Bateman, until proven or given signs of life otherwise. Strategies such as these can be a useful when existing mental modal structures fail to capture conduct phenomenology not encountered in normative daily life, such as the insistence of the junior banker that the lease accounting question they just asked you will be indicative of professional performance. 

what kind of technicals are they asking anyways?

Agree don’t have enough background and generally not a nice move. With that said sense is some of it due to bankers sometimes feeling their oats / asserting themselves in not so great ways. I also think a function though of trying to manage sheer volume of inbounds coming in and the thoughtfulness / thoughtlessness of some of them. I have gotten inbounds from students who should know we have a core campus recruiting team and a bunch of alum they can reach out to  - telling me no connectivity, or asking if Friday 7pm works for me as they are busy with classes (their time more important then mine as they ask for a favor), or as someone mentioned above they go and highlight their experience (or lack of) and spend time highlighting what they don’t know which leads to obvious questions, or they are too casual / intimate or have done zero background work. You have 2-3 of these go south and I think some can get jaded. 

With that said do believe that there should be care and a lot of open-mindedness on the part of bankers engaging in coffee chats but also think - and a general statement that doesn’t apply to all - there needs to be a lot of work done with those asking to make sure a mutually beneficial use of time that is thought out and it’s great practice for starting / growing a network. Also always guide those asking me to think about this tactically. Spending 10m on my career or my view on interest rates (my guess is as good as anyone else’s) may not be best use of time if you are trying to tactically navigate how the resume selects / interview process / works at a particular bank.