Industries/Firms with Most Partying
Hi all. I am wondering which of these four industries (IB, PE, VC, HF) has the most partying, and which firms/groups have the best party culture.
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You hear these stories in lore and on here, but this is never the reality. Some teams will have the internship be a huge party, clubs every Friday etc to give the interns the impression that it's super fun, and then it's just not the reality when you start FT.
I would go for "fratty" groups (you can search on here) but realistically the analysts, youngest associates, and maybe a few rogue VPs party a lot but it's generally kept separate from work, no office environment is wolf of wall street. This isn't the 70s anymore unfortunately.
I made a similar comment on here before, I even went further to say I highly doubt things were like that in the 70s and 80s. More blatant racism, sexism, drinking & smoking sure, I can see that, but this idea that people were doing lines and lines of coke and other hard drugs in IB or even trading seems very far fetched and is likely just people over exaggerating how hard they partied to be seen as some sort of badass.
As someone who also grew up in the entertainment industry, I see the same thing happen where people claim they made songs in a recording studio while blasted on LSD and Coke in the 70s and 80s, well as I grew older and began experimenting with these drugs with my friends we all came to the unanimous decision that those stories were bullshit, making music in a studio is a very technical process that even the very best of producers and instrumentalists find it hard to operate once they get a little too drunk and the stories of some of these older people claiming to do songs in one take while barely being able to talk due to being so high started to just seem like tall tales.
As I work in IB now, I see the same thing, I have done a lot of drugs myself, this is not a job where staying up till 2am going to nightclub doing hella cocaine and molly then waking up at 8am to head to the office is a feasible thing to do if you want to last more than two months or even have any meaningful quality work.
Anyone who's used drugs more than a handful of times will testify. Just like you hate going to work hungover, you would hate going to work on a cocaine comedown even more.
Hearing people in their 40s and 60s claiming they did that in the 2000s and 1980s sets off my bullshit meter, yes the guys who got top grades all their lives, went to HYPS, are still awkward around women and was likely a teachers pet suddenly turned to Ozzy Osborne when they got a full time office job.
Another thing that people miss is that drugs actually kill you. I know way too many people that died from non overdose drug related issues (accidents, suicides, physical illness) while young to know that aspiring IB monkeys beacon of factual info from the 80s/90s, Jordan Belforts stories are likely greatly and insanely exaggerated as well.
If you do count overdoses in the amount of people i know who died from drugs then you'll know its not a very sustainable addiction to have, if your pockets don't run dry, your heart or even worse your mind certainly will, this isn't a movie like most people would want to believe. I still struggle with undiagnosed mental/psychological issues from when I partied growing up in the entertainment business even though I would never have classed myself as an addict and I am only 25 years old. These people saying they did heroic doses of LSD, cocaine or molly for decades and are now MD's in sweaty nerdy BB's are lying.
Living like that, you'll be very lucky to make it to your 40s.
There is only one IB guy I know who lived like that, I cant remember his name but someone on WSO spoke about him and how he tried to kill someone, used a lot of drugs had guns etc. He has a wikipedia page but i cant remember his name. Anyway from memory he died sometimes in the early 2000s in his 50s, in my opinion he got very lucky.