Am I a Loser?
I’m ~1 year into my IB stint and I’m already thinking about quitting. It’s not the hours, it’s the culture and it’s the work.
Culture:
Everyone walks around like they are emotionally numb work drones. I don’t need HR employee appreciation fests but damn. Spending 12+ hours on a damn near perfect task for zero thank yous takes a toll.
The Work:
Graduating with a 4.0 and multiple career prospects is making me question why I chose IB. Why would I spend my life working on shit a 3.0 student could pull off? Not trying to qualify people by GPAs or asking for rocket science here but I did expect somewhat of a challenge.
If I’m having an An1 freak out everyone goes through, please call me out. But I’m coming to grips with the fact that IB might not be for me.
Everyone junior banker in IB is a loser. We're all working 90 hours a week, meaning we barely have a social life or any interests outside of work.And yea the robotic culture and empty-headed work doesn't help
We do it for the money. Yeah it’s thankless and my MD doesn’t give a fuck about me, but it pays.
Just curious, OP, how did you make it this far and are still under the impression GPA matters? Soon as I finished my SA stint it was evidently clear how little GPA came into the recruiting equation besides filtering resumes. Is this a LARP? Lol.
OP is not saying that GPA matters for recruiting at all; OP is saying this job requires so little intellect that a student getting a 3.0 GPA could do this job as adequately as one who got a 4.0 GPA. OP wants to be in a more challenging environment where GPA would actually have to matter. Work on your reading comprehension skills before talking down to people
IB is for money. SWE, ML, or Quant is for intellectual stimulation. Go back and grab a masters in cs and go into fintech
SWE is pretty mind numbing as well
Some thoughts:
1. Sure, investment banking has a lot of mindless work. However, this is the case for most jobs. Do you think there aren't boring tasks in SWE? Debugging code for hours or writing code to change a color scheme? Every job has its share of mindless work. At the end of the day, your employer is paying you to make the lives of more senior employees easier, and do you think any manager wants to coordinate catch-up calls on his own? Hell no. It's just the nature of being at the bottom of the totem poll.
2. I strongly believe that the best and smartest analysts find intellectual stimulation in their work. Putting together a CIM for a sell-side? Think as if you were an investor. Would you buy the company? What diligence questions would you ask? What's the market like--fragmented? Consolidated? Are there large competitors? Asking these questions will not only give you intellectual stimulation, but they'll also make you better at your job.
3. IB is a path to more stimulating jobs. There's a reason why so many people leave for the buy side. IB is primarily a learning ground to develop the baseline skills needed to excel at investing. PE, for example, is really just an application of many of your IB skills. You'll make similar materials (operating model, returns analysis, presentation, etc.), but you'll also have to use your materials to come to an investment thesis. IMO, investing is arguably the closest thing to a purely intellectual job. Your job is to make convincing arguments and think about companies. Not sure if it ever gets more stimulating than that. Of course there's the usual bitchwork involved, but every job has this--see point 1.
4. I think your argument that a 3.0 student could pull off IB is naive. IMO, GPA is really just an indicator of your work ethic. I've known many genius students with terrible GPAs, and many more below-average intelligence students with 4.0s. Most schoolwork can be accomplished through enough effort. Even "hard" majors like math or biology benefit greatly from work ethic. There's definitely a rough correlation between GPA and intelligence, but I think it's probably not that significant. Honestly most of the standout geniuses I've met have average GPAs since they've learned to coast by on their intellect. My point is that a 3.0 student might be smart enough to accomplish the individual tasks in IB, especially the mindless grunt work, but he/she likely does not have the work ethic to respond to emails within 10 minutes, work 100 hour weeks, and manage multiple workstreams at once.
Just my thoughts--I'm open to criticism.
I graduated undergrad with a 2.5 GPA. Finishing up my first year as an almost 33-year-old MBA Associate, so I am doing a lot of the same work, and yeah, it sucks and even a dumbass like me can mindlessly do it. It'll get better regardless of whether or not you stay in banking. The first few years are going to suck no matter what career path you choose because you are starting at the bottom. My first few jobs involved working retail, stocking warehouse shelves, and cold calling commercial tenants door-to-door. It all sucked ass.
If you want to be a BSD, you will have to get good at something and stick it out. I changed careers, so now I'm starting back lower on the totem pole, but I know that if I stick it out, it will get better both intellectually, financially, and with the hours required.
Just try to be the grittiest mfer in the office.
“A 3.0 kid could be doing this”. I’ll answer the question for you, you’re a loser.
.
Didn't even bother doing the due diligence to see if IB was "intellectually stimulating" before making a major career decision. That is on you. Maybe you're not as smart as you think
You're doing the same work as somebody with a 3.0 because once you hit the desk, none of that shit matters. The clock restarts, you're at the bottom and the playing field is level regardless of school, degree, GPA whatever. The game is output, impact and social capital.
A2s are the most valuable junior resource, fucking powerhouses. Have the deal reps, and jaded/mature enough to figure out how to work efficiently, i.e., its not about being perfect, its about being good enough. They'll coach downwards (A1s), upwards (MBA associates) and know how to get shit done.
If one year in you don't have that kind of standing, maybe time for some introspection. More responsibility and higher value work is earned, not handed out for seniority. I'm not saying its a performance issue, I don't know you, and frankly, a lot of times it just isn't. It's anything from not "getting it", a lack of social/political capital in the group, and sometimes just not being the right fit.
Banking is a stepping stone for smart ppl and a career for idiots like myself
You are not a loser. You are trading misery today for opportunities tomorrow in the form of experience and money. Only you can decide which side is winning this deal.
Even with this community as a baseline you are a loser.
a. A 3.0 guy “can do” anything that a 4.0 guy can do. There’s people in PhD programs and even literal rocket scientists with double engineering majors that got closer to a 3.0 GPA in undergrad than a 4.0. Just pointing out that there’s no career path that a 3.0 student literally cannot do, so I wouldn’t tether your happiness to that (for many many reasons including the one I wrote and the ones others have written above.)
b. I don’t understand how you are so unstimulated. I’m 2 years in and still learning and being challenged on every bakeoff and M&A deal. There’s always a new type of situation to model or a new capital / financing structure to incorporate, and I get more independence and responsibility on each rep. Sounds like you’re either just not working on complex transactions, or just not in a very active group, or just aren’t very good at your job so other people are getting the challenging work and learning opps. Sometimes you gotta be humble and wait and build your skills.
I mean honestly even my MDs that make over a million dollars a year proudly say that they learn something new and face a new challenge from every new client and deal so I’m amazed that you already know 100% of what there is to know about corporate finance, investment banking, financial modeling, valuation, and your industry coverage. This is a classic Dunning-Kruger situation where you’re at the left peak of the chart and just too stupid to understand how much there is to learn and explore and master, in IB and beyond.
It’s just the mandatory grinding phase of your career. Everyone builds their career like this. Keep grinding. Grinding is the only path to success
Absolutely you are.
This post has such loser mentality. I can't believe someone actually thought of typing this out and then actually submitting it.
People who quit IB aren't losers. One guy I know was C suite of a 30b market cap firm until retiring at 40, another has a cool job helping kids in the NYC school system as an admin, another has his own business...
Don't let people look down on you in this field. A lot of finance are fail up nepobabies from CT or wherever anyway.
Yes
It depends on the balance between your priorities, i.e. money, wlb, impact, interest, exit opportunities, risk tolerance
I'd say most grads who pick IB out of college have money, exit and low risk tolerance as their top priorities. What would be interesting alternative career paths? Research might be intellectually stimulating but you earn virtually nothing, tech is clearly not for the most risk averse of us at the moment, etc.
IB is also just a temporary job to get to a more desirable position to most. I'd be surprised if >30% of your analyst class plans on staying more than 2 years in IB.
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