ibanks should hire more people

No, it would not be banking anymore. People complain about the hours, but the hours are a key component to the prestige and culture, which is more or less the essence of banking.

I would not be going into banking if it was 9 to 5.

If you take the hours, the pay, and the "prestige" out of banking, you might as well be working in finance or ops.

I kind of doubt a few more bankers and confidentiality is the main issue.

Possibly, the speed, but with less hours, bankers would get more sleep, be happier, and be more productive and that would offset the loss in speed from communicating between more people.

ibanking is only prestigious because of the hours and pay? So if someone works ops at 2 banks, making ibanking pay and hours, they would be prestigious? I doubt it, I would think there would still be prestige based on what they do and the selectively. Even with more people, it would still be competitive.

im assuming you mean hire more across all junior ranks (junior vp, associates, analysts) which on paper may make sense, but in practice wouldnt work out. a few cons of hiring more junior bankers would be that during a downturn, theres a lot more people to fire which is always bad for image, the talent levels would seriously drop as the prestigous level and pay go down due to the increase in number of employees, junior bankers wouldnt get a good experience due to less dealflow which could lead to exits ops that werent as good as before the increase in hiring and finally, deals/projects require a very focused effort from a deal team. adding more members to the team does not really help alleviate the workload and may cause even more work

Quality of applicants go down? The way I see it, BBers need to find excuses to narrow down the pool to offers after a certain point. There are plenty of capable people applying to any given entry level job at a BB.

I'm a student, so take that as you will.

If the work was spread around to more people it would get too complicated. When you have too many people working on stuff it's easy for things to fall through the cracks, for there to be inconsistencies, etc. It would be incredibly inefficient.

In my experience, the long hours are less a function of having too much to do and more caused by 1) MD's and VP's not being organized 2) Clients asking for crap at the last minute.

Many days I'm semi-bored in the afternoon waiting for the VP to tell me what direction he wants to go in, but he's busy on one of his other deals so I'm not doing too much.

Then at 8PM right before the VP is going to leave, he gives me a bunch of crap that he needs by 8AM the next day. Then at 8PM the next day, we have a client call and we have to change everything for 8AM the following day.

The only reason stuff gets turned around as quickly as it does is because there are couple of people who know each deal inside and out and thus know exactly where to go for information and how to make it look for the MD and the client.

Trying to keep even more people up to speed (and quality) would be insanity.

Alexey's got it right. The act of hiring more people wouldn't fix the main cause of the long hours, which is the understanding that banking is a 24-hour business.

The only people who would suggest that you hire a lot more people and divy up the work, are people who don't do the work.

1st: It is MUCH less efficient. You can't share modeling responsibilities, etc. You'd spend more time keeping each other up to date than it would take to just do the work on your own.

2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc.: I won't bother to repeat what other have already said.

Believe it or not most well-run groups keep a close eye on their analysts and how burned out they are getting. It's the staffer's job to keep tabs on everyone and how late everyone is staying so he can properly staff people going forward. If everyone is running full steam all the time and work still needs to get done, then obviously it's time to take on another analyst or associate.

In my group, however, that's rarely the case (and I know that's not the case with many groups). Not every analyst is there until 4 in the morning consistently. The work ebbs and flows as the deals you are staffed on hit. At the end of the day, a group would much rather be mildly understaffed and any measure of overstaffed. If analysts are idle and aren't getting the experience they want, they will leave for a bank that will give them the experience.

More people means a diluted bonus pool. Considering that there is an oversupply of potential analysts/associates who are willing to work crazy hours and are beating down the doors for a job, there is no need to "lighten up".

Accounting is gay, I would rather killself than work in accounting.

Some of the reasons make sense.