How busy are Analysts and Associates actually?

Former EB VP now off to corp dev. Humor me for a moment.

Everyone would talk about being busy and not having time to get to work. Then I hear them also joking about avoiding work and how they find ways to take shortcuts. Are you all actually busy or is part of a huge facade to avoid work for institutions you believe to be taking advantage of you? Is it really 80 hour weeks? Most people don't come in until after 10am and take their time for coffee chats and long lunches throughout the day.

Now that I'm gone, what's the story?

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Uhh .. if you were a VP, wouldn’t you have been an Aso or An at some point? How busy were you? 

 

Not OP but I went CD instead of IB after my internship because CD is a better job. You work on less deals in total but (1) you work on a lot more of the deal than what you do in IB, (2) you have more agency and are doing far more of the actual decision making (although this shouldn't be overstated), and (3) you work on actual deals and aren't pitching to maybe do a deal (it is a bit more complicated than this but that is the gist). Sure. You are paid less. But I am at least at a place that positions me well for a pivot to PE which will take care of the money

 

How much were you making as IB VP? 
 

What does your new role pay? 

 

EB anl, getting crushed because you VPs love to create slides no one asked for that go straight to appendix and the associates would rather put comment boxes on small formatting preferences than do it themselves….

 

I found that it varied a ton week to week and sometimes I truly was getting crushed with work. But there were also a lot of people that exaggerated how much work they had and were somewhat inefficient with their time throughout the day. It's a mix of both.

For what it's worth, when I made it to VP I highly encouraged finding ways to take shortcuts to get shit done. I don't care how long you spent on it, as long as it's right and gets the job done.

 

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