How Can Partners / MDs Live With Themselves
I’ve never really thought about this until now, maybe because I’ve never had any desire to become a senior banker or partner at a PE fund, but as a junior, I genuinely can’t understand how someone in a leadership position can consciously treat the people they work with so poorly. How do you become so detached that you’re blind to the toxic working conditions your team endures? In some cases, people have literally died.
Going through this myself as an analyst and associate, I can say with absolute certainty: if I ever find myself in a meaningful leadership role, I would never allow anyone on my team to lose sleep, let alone risk serious health consequences, over this dumb job. And to chalk it up to “paying your dues” is complete bullshit. You’re actively choosing to put your employees in an environment that damages their physical and mental health, all while paying them relatively less than you made when you were in their shoes.
So I really wonder, how tf can you go to sleep at night knowing that the people that work for you are unhappy and unhealthy at the very least - and at worst, not alive anymore. I could never do this to someone. This shit is dystopian.
Pretty comfortably probably.
The reality is that juniors are paid to give up their time and their health. If the top folks were no longer able to fill seats they'd change but, until then, it won't change.
They did it as did the VPs
Kids are so fkn entitled these days
Wanting basic human dignity, sleep, and health isn’t entitlement - it’s the fkn bare minimum. What’s actually entitled is expecting loyalty, sacrifice, and performance while ignoring the well-being of the people doing the work. Also, we get paid less than they did
why join IB then
Congrats on UBS!
99% of MDs would shoot a junior in the back of the head if it meant they could tack another $250k onto their bonus
This really isn't true, more so a case of a toxic workplace. Even my sponsor's partners aren't like that, and PE is supposedly more cutthroat than IB. I think bankers, just like everyone else, are people, some good and some bad. What's true is that this job inherently requires a lot of work given how understaffed everything is at the junior level; you will get varying levels of understanding and empathy by seniors.
Yep. They’d make some excuse to create dissonance like “the analyst should have said something if they saw a gun pointed at their head,” but they absolutely know what they’re doing.
Hi OP - good question. Sadly the answer is that they sleep very soundly (most of them do I'm sure). I think if you asked most MDs (including the ones who have overseen teams with analyst deaths) if they were good people, they would all say yes - and genuinely believe it. They would give excuses like "the analyst should have spoken out sooner if they were overwhelmed etc." Humans have an amazing ability to self-rationalize/justify almost any action, and that gets further exacerbated when you sub-select for the population of people working IB i.e:
- Most who who make it to MD level have to be selfish by nature. E.g. you're a Director up for promotion to MD and have to get multiple pitches in asap due to a ridiculous ask by a senior MD. Your only option is to ruin an analyst/associate's evening, even though you know it's his anniversary and his wife is on the verge of leaving him. What would you do? Most people who end up as MDs would make the guy work through the night and justify it as "he's getting paid well, he knew what he was getting into."
Now I'm not saying that argument/logic is completely invalid, but if you do it enough times you'll end up justifying almost anything in the workplace. Another example - there's a big mistake in a model that you didn't spot. Do you defend your associate or throw him under the bus? I think a majority of people in IB sadly would go for the latter option, and justify it as "well sh*t rolls downhill, it's the nature of the business." Now I personally wouldn't do that - I always think it's the sign of a bad manager to throw his team under the bus publicly. But I've had plenty of bosses who did exactly that - yet if you asked them if they were a good person, they would say unequivocally 100% yes.
- Finance generally attracts neurotic and competitive personalities. So the sub-selection of people who stay long enough/are ambitious enough to make MD, is further selected from people who chose IB in the first place. There are a lot of neurotic personalities in IB (at least in my experience) and I think as you have a family and your expenses/quality of lifestyle steadily increase, you are ever more incentizied to maintain it at all costs. Plus if you've stayed in IB for 10+ yrs it's become a massive part of your identity. So are you going to anger your boss by trying to get an overworked analyst time off? The answer is probably no in most case sadly.
Without being too dramatic (and I usually detest Nazi comparisons) I think on a morbid note I can see how mid-level people in the German government during WWII did a lot of what they did. They probably had some idea of what was going on yet there was just enough plausible deniability that they could deny it to themselves (because that suited their career/ambition) and go home every night thinking they were good & honest people. I'm not saying that MDs are anything like that in terms of actions, but the internal rational of plausibility deniability probably has some similarities.
Because they're not doing it to you. You're doing it to yourself. You can get another job. I mean that . . anyone good enough to get an analyst gig out of undergrad has checked a lot of boxes (smart, hard working, basic competence in finance/excel/writing, maybe diverse etc etc) and will be very employable. So why should anyone who knows you willingly took this deal, and continue to willingly take it every morning when you go into the office, feel bad about it?
What kind of bullshit is this? Name ANY finance job outside of sellside and buyside roles at the junior level that aren’t a dead end. I love when senior guys come on here and show they are totally out of depth on the job market. Better yet, when they act like young people today are entitled when young people literally have to work 10x as hard for the same financial/career outcome as someone 20 years older.
You have the time and resources to be successful. So whether you make it or not, will be up to you. Your choices are yours alone and nobody made you work in IBD. Nobody make you choose finance either. You could’ve chosen just about anything.
The idea that the world has boxed you into this choice because somehow “everything else is a dead end” is one of the most absurd things I’ve read on a very absurd website
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