Are there "Cheatcode" IB Groups? Aka Collect Easy Checks and do Nothing?

This is always how it’s been. It comes down to your willingness to sacrifice exits & interesting work flows for better wlb/hourly-basis pay. U made it this far. I’d just try for buyside exits atp

You can coast in a lot of coverage groups at UBS since there is not a lot of deal flow and any mandate the firm wins only goes to the few juniors that are favored. UBS has some juniors who are the favorites and do the few deals a group has. Lots of people at UBS coverage who work 60 hours at most and on nothing live. 

It's more bank dependant than group dependant I think.

I would say that a GS/MS ECM guys or a JP/BofA DCM guy would probably work as long or more than anyone in coverage at a smaller bank (and no need to go to MM/LMM banks, I guess even UBS/Barclays/RBC/WF type of bank can see this applied except in the 1/2 top groups).

At the end it's always the same : do you want to be in a group that is the best in what you do or do you want to maximise your exits?

If you work at a large regional bank that has an investment banking division, you'll be surprised to find their investment banking groups pay close to street with considerably less hours. The coverage groups get all their money from DCM/ECM work, despite being coverage groups. Your work will consists of doing nothing but pitch for M&A mandates that never reach EL signings, and get "deal experience" filling out internal committee memos on stuff the firm is a comanager on or mandates that don't make it past CIM stage.

The MDs are often underperforming MDs that were let go from larger firms and hired on because of "all their contacts at multiple companies and PE firms". In reality, their contacts were simply because they were at said previous firm, and not because of their ability to be a good banker. Most of the pitches you do will be lost to firms on brand recognition alone despite the 70-100 page word vomit of slides your team had you work on, and when the MD does win mandates, there will usually be something significantly wrong with the business like having significant churn or client concentration that other firms didn't want to take on. 

You'll see some of these MDs fired during your time there, or politically engineer themselves as valuable by hosting fireside chats, doing industry podcasts, or random surveys posted on linkedin for the higher ups to see. Sometimes, they will also literally just be golfing buddies with the group head coasting together towards retirement.

At the mid-level, you'll find that these firms will often have toxic VPs and Directors that stress out about the lack of deals coming in and instead obsess about ensuring their junior staff "looks" like they're busy. You'll sit at your cubicle and be told to stay late for the sake of facetime and make countless edits on industry slides to put into future data dumped pitches. 

You become miserable this way because after your first 6 months or so of learning the job, you spend the next 2-3 years literally learning nothing new except how to play corporate politics until you exit to another firm or make a jump to strategic finance/corp dev and BS your way through interviews.

BMO product or any coverage besides PU&I, M&M; those mfers are useless (at least in nyc). Also SocGen, BNP and Cantor (maybe)