How bad is Moelis NY?

I was there from 2015-2017 and interviewed in 2014 for the analyst role. I can echo comments above though I can’t comment on conditions since I left besides what others are saying, what’s been written in the news, and my interactions with colleagues since I left. I’m not sure if much has changed but it does seem like they have moved in the direction of better hours / workplace conditions (however slightly though some initiatives announced at least seem meaningful) since I left. 
 

nevertheless, I can echo that people in my experience are friendly, nice, relatively down to earth and chill. That became fairly clear and more clear from interviewing and starting there and even until this day for me. However, the nature of the work they do, the assignments they take, the quality they want to give to clients and the general work flow / culture generally leads from what I have seen to pretty intensive hours there (intensive can be kinda always on-call). It’s just kinda assumed from what I know that the analyst / most junior person is going to do the brunt of the grunt work however tedious, monotonous and long it may take. If the client has a humongous operating model that takes just 30 minutes for excel to even open and let you start fixing / working with and freezes fairly regularly while updating / fixing it, my experience is that it is more or less the analyst who is going to be almost the only one touching that thing. Updating trackers, PowerPoint slides, turning any kinda and all kinds of comments whether the analyst believes they are productive or not, models, dealing with buyer requests, diligence, scheduling, emails, logistics, data room, going on necessary trips, etc, basically all the nuts and bolts seem to be assumed to be handled by 1 analyst while I was there at least at times in my experience. That’s a double edged sword. The analysts I believe do learn a lot because they do so much of the work on deals. Also when I was there it seemed like when we dealt with other banks, I as an analyst was often paired off with the equivalent work that maybe 2 or more analysts/juniors at another bank may be staffed on (would just have an email list of the other advisors with heavy junior teams) or even dealing with someone like a VP somewhere else. Or even the outsourcing capabilities / acceptability of using those resources at MoCo may have been less as compared to my peers at other financial institutions / banks. In my limited, humble experience, it can be like drinking from a firehouse there at times. Not sure it’s smart for anyone to drink from a firehouse, but maybe I don’t understand so much and it is what it is. I will say I think the bank has been more open to staffing more at the junior level at least from what I have seen. I think it was rare to see more than one analyst (or even at times an analyst and an associate) actively working on a deal. Now that might not be the case but I really don’t know. It’s like they have a mentality there and at other banks that the senior people are like “we are paying these junior kids so much money, like many, many multiples of what we were paid when we were juniors or of any 20 something year olds, so they should work extremely hard to earn the money” which is fair in some sense. Hard to justify you earning multiples of the average or even top-like salaried job without you working multiples of the effort/time of that average job in my opinion based on the little I know and experience. 
 

again overall, everyone was as a whole nice, helpful, caring and all that. I think it’s just a realization that the job pays very well and has expectations / possibilities of the employee leaving to work for a client / important other job, so the work expected of the analyst I think matches appropriately. Just seems like the culture and the “analyst” program. Like in order to play hard, you got to work hard. The more you want to play / earn it seems, the more you need to work. And that place like it’s peers is in my opinion and from what I know one of the highest paying places for a person at that age and skillset (basically just a college degree, post grad age, some physical and mental health, and understanding of the vault guide) 
 

I am definitely welcome to hear comments on what I wrote and I hope this is a fair, good, helpful comment for you and whoever else wants to read it

If any of Moelis management reads this (as I believe Ken mentioned in an info session that he knows this website and may read it) I hope this was fair and helpful for you. I definitely still appreciate working for you guys, but recognize that for people’s safety and well-being, the reality of the job should hopefully be as clear as possible for anyone interested in working in it. If anything is wrong/unfair, I’m happy to fix it and would hopefully apologize for anything not fair

good luck :)