Anyone who chose IB because it’s “dull?”
I see everyone complaining about how banking is not intellectually stimulating, while consulting is interesting, but I was wondering if there were anyone who actually enjoy that aspect of the job.
Honestly, I don’t think I’m smart enough to be in PE/consulting, which is why I want to be a career banker.
Banking for sure does not require you to be very smart, it just requires you to have a decent understanding of accounting, valuation, how businesses work as well as have the ability to work a lot of hours while producing consistent results. I'm an analyst at GS and would say that 95% of the stuff I do in banking is not difficult and does not require much thought, it's just a question of experience. Once you have done something a couple of times, you just go through the motions.
I think IB is a very risk-averse career choice. You don't need to be that smart and you don't need to be an excellent performer to climb the ranks. I am yet to meet anyone who thinks that the job itself is even remotely difficult in IB. The difficult part about the job is the sleep deprivation, sacrificing everything else in your life and doing simple & boring stuff for 18 hours a day in an extremely hierarchical environment.
Remember that most people in PE are the same people who did braindead stuff in IB for 2 years, so you don't need to be an intellectual mastermind to land a position in PE. However, I genuinely do believe that you need to be smart for real to do well in consulting.
You lost me at consulting man
Found the undercover consultant
no one has ever said "consultant" and the word "smart" in the same sentence
unless its "consultants really aren't as smart as they think they are"
It seems like consultants are mostly 20-somethings talking out of their asses to business owners who have been in their industries for decades. I’ve yet to understand what the value add really is with consulting. One of my last companies hired one of the big 4 firms to put together a “M&A playbook” for our corp dev department, and the result was something a middle schooler could have made. Can’t imagine how much was spent on that powerpoint. Seems like a giant money laundering operation.
Idk man, I think bankers underestimate the intelligence required for the job the same way we underestimate our own comp. You know the comments like "Pshhhh, the average MD only clears $1M-$2M these days, that's not even rich." Kinda reminds me of that when people are like "Pshhhh, yeah sure nearly everyone at an EB or BB went to a Top 25 school and graduated with honors, but a monkey could do this job". I mean yeah, maybe a monkey that had a 3.7 GPA at Wharton but otherwise I do think you have to be significantly above average in terms of motivation and intelligence to break in. My friends that work truly average jobs (Construction, payroll accounting, back office, etc.) get dizzy when they look at my little 30 tab financial models.
Are we top of the top? Fuck no, not even close. But definitely in the top quartile or decile and that's really all one can ask for, no?
Ending up in banking is a function of planning far in advance and having the stamina to follow the path rather than being intellectually smart. Having a high GPA is mostly a function of putting the time in to study rather than being some intellectual mastermind.
Those who end up in IB are most often people that just put the time in and planned far in advance. They knew that they wanted to get into a good university so they put the time in during high school. They knew that they wanted to pursue a high-paying career so they got good grades in university and applied for spring-weeks during the first year etc.
Yes, they would get dizzy looking at your 30-tab model but that is not because you are smarter than them. That is because you have spent your entire time during uni + years of 80+ hour weeks studying and working with finance. The same thing can be said about any profession. I would fail miserably at repairing a car. Just imagine that the average mechanic would be so much smarter than a guy working at GS.
I agree that people in IB tend to be smarter than average, but it's mainly just a function of putting an extremely high priority on your career / money and planning it far in advance rather than being an intellectual mastermind.
This just isn’t true at all. You can’t “just plan” your way into 99th percentile standardized testing and some ridiculously competitive school. Trust me I’d have gone to Harvard if this was the case. You still have to be disproportionately smart and work reasonably hard to even have a shot at half the banking jobs. Then, when you get to a place like Penn, you have to compete with all the other hardos who jerk off to daddy PJT rx but can’t all fit.
I agree that to a certain extent you just have to meet a baseline intelligence to be a reasonable banker but simplifying these kids’ lives to “just planning” is definitely an overstatement.
Your friends get dizzy because they're not staring at models like that every day, it's not because your model is inherently complex, it's because they're unfamiliar with it. I myself would get dizzy looking at a 30 tab model too if I didn't get to spend a number of hours breaking back all the links and understanding how they interact.
Let's not also pretend that the model does anything intrinsically complex aside from a number of If functions, complimented by a number of simple algebraic formulas.
I don't know what field you're in, but assume your model has some growth forecasts. Let's not pretend you've run some regression analysis or stochastic modelling for your forecasts within your 30 tabs, you've simply looked at an average, or stuck your finger in the air, and assumed, "yup, let's grow this by 3%" ..... = variable * (1.03).... Done.
I think intelligence is measured in many ways. When I look back, I always thought I was one of the dumbest kids in my (very prestigious engineering program) but I was interested in a lot of different things (history, politics, literature), was pretty commercial and was a natural student leader.
20+ years later, I’ve come to the conclusion that the intelligence you need to be a successful banker is different than if you want to be a researcher or a quant or even a HF guy but it’s no less valid - clients pay tens of millions of fees for advice to advisory firms for single deals for a reason.
I view my job as a mix of strategic thinking (applying business skills to transactions), understanding local and geopolitics (nature of the industry I cover), hard nosed commercial negotiations (telling a bidder they need a material price increase and doing it convincingly when I know I have no other cards), playing psychologist to my clients and team members, occasional finance analytics and being an effective salesman pitching deals and achieving outcomes for my clients. Most days, I have to do and think about all of these things. That takes a different type of intellectual skill and one that’s sadly less valued in our excessively STEM world.
Guys I get that it's cool to be aggressively understated, but I've habitually tested in the top 90% of any SAT / Pre-SAT / Prep School Readiness / Other Aptitude test I've ever taken, and I am not remotely unique or intelligent among my SA peers.
If we're going full abstract and redefining what intelligence means in today's society, okay sure it's inconclusive and a toss up. But if you keep the definition of intelligence fixed as just practical ability to score high on an IQ / aptitude type of intelligence test, most of the people in high finance be it IB, PE, HF, etc. are pretty damn smart.