Analyst Paid Less than Fast Food Workers

Are IB analysts extremely underpaid?

In a city such as San Francisco, the minimum wage for fast food workers is getting bumped up to $20 an hour starting April.

Given CA’s OT rules (1.5x over 40 hours and 2x over 60 hours) if we assume that the fast food worker works 80 hours / week (typical for IB) that’s an income of ~$125,000.

The street base for analysts pays between $110k and $120k. Assuming a bad bonus this year - are analysts paid less than fast food workers? 

4 Comments
 

If you’ve ever worked in fast food, you’d know that managers would rather send every single employee home and make customers waits 20min+ than pay a single cent in OT. No one in fast food is making close to that, except managers at chipotle or in n out.

 

No. This is ludicrous on its face. Why assume $0 bonus on a risk-adjusted basis? Why would Mickey D’s work someone at time and a half for a worker to top them up to 80 hours a week for a whole year when they could just hire another worker? What fast food employee would even go for that? McDonald’s has over 100% annual turnover as attested by many sources, so why do you expect someone would even spend the whole year there?

You should be ashamed of yourself for doing these mental gymnastics to say why investment bankers are worse off than fast food workers, many of whom are drawing government subsidies because their private enterprise job doesn’t pay them enough to live, which makes McDonald’s and Walmart the mothers of all welfare queens completely objectively.

 

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