Does It Ever Get Better? Working in IB is Truly Soul Crushing
I’ve been doing this for 5 years now and I am still working 90+ hours a week even when the group is not “busy” with deals. I look at my seniors and it honestly does not seem like the lifestyle is a lot better for them either. Even my MDs are always “online” and either reviewing things or taking calls well into the night and on weekends.
Maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way, but I now make way more (3-4x) my household income growing up in an northeast state and I feel like I have an objectively worse life than my parents did. I find it EXTREMELY difficult to leave NYC and truly unplug - even for a weekend without being blown up with random tasks and to dos. I have tried pushing back and setting boundaries but that has just resulted in me getting flamed in my reviews for being unresponsive and lazy. So I don’t do that anymore and have turned back into a submissive drone.
I find the IB lifestyle to be extremely frustrating and restrictive. Vacations are not truly vacations when you have to work 50% of it. It is also not recharging when you have a cumulative 5 days off a year. The unpredictability of the schedule is really wearing me out and I am really considering calling it. Before I decide to go on the path of no return to corpdev or corpfin, is there anyone who has made this work? Could this just be a group problem or is this all of banking? Sorry for the rant, just really burnt out.
do something about it. exit to a japanese bank or something. it's been 5 years.
Why would a Japanese bank help this guy?
they are totally not sweaty, similar work, and hardly retrench due to japanese labour laws (not nomura, but SMBC, MUFG, Mizuho)
Lol I thought a first year was making this post... get a new job man it's not worth it and there are many groups where they do not work like that.
I would try to exit at this point bro
Seems quite common, also for people on buyside, to be experiencing this. That said, move to a different group if you’re able to. The 80+ hour weeks are only somewhat bearable as a 21-25 year old, after that it starts to feel too draining. Associates at my middle market group typically work quite a bit less, usually 9am-9pm on most weekdays
For me it got better when I stopped doing that last 10% of the work that sucks up all the additional time and stress. Like when you get 30 comments on a deck, and 29 of them are straightforward but there's that one that is super frustrating because it either (i) requires way more creativity than a banker has or (ii) blows up other parts of the deck and the idiot MD didn't realize that when he commented.
Once I built the courage to half-ass around those situations and accept the small risk of annoying the senior banker, the job got noticeably better. Not great, but better.
Main way I built the courage was looking at my savings. Once the pile got to a point where I knew I wouldn't need to scramble for the next job if I lost this one, I decided it wasn't worth it to bend over backward for that last yard.
Thank you for that valuable insight, Dr. Rahma Dikhinmahas
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