It has been awhile that tech & start up companies offer more comfortable and lucrative careers to top tier students, and banks have been enforcing protected weekends to secure their talent pool.
Do you think these past few years work/life balance has changed in the industry or have the hours just shifted to different days?
Nope, work-life balance is still very hard to come by in IB. The transaction volume never seems to slow across all reputable firms. Personally, I got fed up and put in my 2 weeks. I now work at bed bath and beyond.
BB&B is second tier. Everyone knows it's Crate & Barrel or bust
Can people stop with the meme about tech competing with finance for top tier students? It's not happening for most of the demographic that goes into finance.
The vast majority of entry level hires in finance are kids that go to top schools and self select into econ or some business major - there isn't a clear path for the best folks in that demographic to make it in tech. You're more likely to find top technical and design minded students being sought after in tech rather than the wannabe gordon gekkos.
The wannabe bankers get the "other" jobs that also exist in literally any corp (and ergo, have always been "an alternative" which is more like a backup for high finance in reality) like HR, Ops, FP&A, Sales, Marketing etc. This narrative of tech poaching kids who would have gone into finance is just not true at the undergrad level in non-quant roles.
True "poaching" happens after kids have already started in finance or consulting.
Personally, I tell all the underclassmen I talk to that one thing I wish I had done was at least looked at CS / tech earlier on in college so I could've tested the waters there instead of just going all in on finance.
I think you definitely have kids who are undecided going into college about what they want to do and who knows, they decide to major in CS over econ because they know to make the big bucks as an econ major that you'll likely have to slave away in banking first.
Uhhh I disagree with this...
I mean you're right to an extent. The kid who goes to NYU to study finance is still pretty damn likely to go into banking. But...
1) I think more talented people are choosing to study Computer Science than study econ/finance. CS is the fastest growing major at a lot of different undergrads. So at that branch in the decision tree, a lot of talented people are choosing to go down a path that leads towards tech than a path that leads towards finance.
2) By junior year, yeah there is the demographic that is committed to banking (although per point 1, this demographic is smaller than it used to be), but there's also always been a much larger demographic of more open-minded folks who just want to do something that gives them ego gratification and pays them well. In the past, this group leaned more towards banking, and now, it's clear that tech is taking more and more of these people.
YMMV and at some schools, banking is still the "it" job, but trust me, at a lot of schools, tech is becoming a real thing.
Source: Being involved with UG recruitment professionally and having cousins/siblings/family friends who are in school now at a variety of top tier schools (specifically Penn, Harvard, Northwestern, Michigan, Cornell)
Eh....true but consider that tech has been "hot" for a really long time. I went to college in the early 2000s and was at one of the first schools to have Facebook. It was super obvious to anyone with half a brain that tech was going to be super important. Guess what? Almost no one I knew got a CS degree. It's fucking hard....people don't like doing that shit.
So yes, there will be a few more CS majors but don't expect some huge wave of them. Here we are 20 years after the internet became huge, and I'm still not seeing a huge surge in CS majors. When math becomes cool, we'll see that wave. Until then keep your fingers crossed.
There has definitely been a focus within the industry to improve junior work / life balance, led by the bulge bracket banks. JPMorgan had a ‘pencils down’ policy where work had to stop between Friday at 7pm and Saturday at noon. We also got 1 protected weekend per month. This did promote shifting work more to the weekdays. But as you would suspect, lots of people broke these rules. I wrote a blog post about this here.
At the end of the day, it is still really tough and I don’t see that improving significantly. It really is driven by your individual group’s culture and the team you are on (not just your bank). If you have good senior people who plan ahead and are thoughtful, that can drastically improve work/life balance.
In my opinion, IB is still 100% worth the experience, regardless of the hours.
Could you go into some of the biggest things you got out of your analyst experience?
Efficiency here is key. Turning a CIM until 4am just to work on the most idiotic things such as printing out a color coded map repeatedly to hand to your VP who keeps saying things like "make it a little warmer," "how about a little darker," "I don't like that orange" is fucking stupid. That by the way, is a true story. Literally spent 45 minutes after midnight running back and forth from the production printer (since the regular printer wouldn't be "accurate" enough) and the douchebag VPs office who thought that would be the difference maker to somebody wanting to buy the company.
The joke is on the VP for being in the office at that hour.