It seems like there is so much wasted potential in IB
IB seems to be the industry that attracts the most top students from top colleges and these are supposedly the smartest people in the country right? Why are they spending 80 hours formatting slides for what is really not even that much money? Obviously it’s the highest paying thing you can get out of college without really adding value or knowing anything but that’s my point why aren’t they trying to do something that requires knowing something or adding value?
Shouldn’t they all be trying to do things that actually use their smarts, ambition, and type A nature like being entrepreneurs or quant trading or software development or anything that isn’t formatting PowerPoint slides for less money and less impact?
Also, before the inevitable what do you know you’re just an intern that’s outdated I’m an analyst now but yes obviously just observations from someone with little experience.
Nope, the smartest go into prop trading where they make 300-400k++ as juniors.
I am thinking I may try to do that after a year or two in IB
You wish bro
You’re right we should quit IB and go add value to society by quant trading or starting some BS founder economy startup that offers corporate cards or some shit for startup workflow SaaS companies that sell their product that gets bought and no one actually uses to other BS enterprise SaaS companies that sell products that companies buy and no one actually uses.
More so what I’m getting at is if you’re super smart and ambitious why not do something that will 1 make you a ton of money and/or 2 do something that will have an impact. Not necessarily both but at least one.
Obviously yes not all startups add value to the world but my point is it seems like there must be some better way to direct the energy of the supposedly smartest most ambitious people than formatting PowerPoint slides for 80 hours a week so you can help rich people get richer and collect a tiny bit of the profit for yourself.
Touched a nerve...setup a bunch of straw men to make us all feel better about moving around transparent PNG logos on PPT.
Use your imagination for once - there's a whole world outside of IB and corporate cards.
Look into effective altruism. Earning to give at a high paying career that doesn’t directly benefit society is actually one of the most effective ways to create the most net good. All perspective and finding how you align your values with your work.
Learned about this in my phil 250 class. Nice
There are a lot of causes I can splash out on that I wouldn't be able to do with a much lower salary, such as supporting a children's education charity, the Philharmonic, scholarships at my alma mater, etc. It's a nice feeling to be able to support values and artists I care about.
I’ll chime in here with some important “older person” insight. You don’t “waste your life” in IB doing a 2 year stint. The reality is 2 years is a very short time and the window it occurs in is unlikely to have people be very productive anyway. Let me explain:
Out of college, kids just aren’t professionally ready at all. Even the kids that are out of this world smart, they have some pretty egregious flaws generally like a proper understanding of timeliness, a polished work product, how to communicate in business speak, and more. Additionally, many kids are developing personally where they are learning things like what the working world is like. Many kids go through a little crisis where they realize post college that everyone just works the rest of their life and most people hate their job. Also, in order to have friends as an adult you need to plan things and it isn’t as easy as school.
From my perspective as an older person, IB work actually wasn’t as pedantic as I thought while I was doing it. Everyone complains about how terrible the job is, but I think largely the reactions are just immature undergrads complaining about working mixed with an industry that really has some bizarre cultural traditions. Elaborating further, people complain in IB they are “just moving logos and making slides”. While this is true, the broader product of creating marketing materials is actually a complex process. If you look at it holistically and consider the strategy going on, what you actually are doing is figuring out how to best position a company to get sold. This skill is incredibly relevant if you ever try to fundraise for anything in your entire life. Viewing slide creation as “moving logos” is like saying when you model you are just “adding numbers” yeah, that is true, but it’s only true because the individual isn’t seeing the bigger picture.
I’ll add another point sipping the IB koolaide, post IB and for the rest of my life I will be fast af at excel, ppt, and typing. This sounds like it doesn’t matter, but training yourself early on to do best practices and shortcuts pays massive dividends. When I work with consultants I can tell they didn’t do banking and they look like they are moving half speed next to anyone that did banking.
My personal take is those mechanical hard skills or learning excel, ppt, office culture/presence/ expectations, and learning what actually happens in an M&A deal and how to financial model a business is pretty freaking valuable for almost any career. Looking back, IB was so worth it it’s crazy—for the first year or so. After that, it can get pedantic and frustrating. But I think it’s absurd to say that first year kids aren’t learning a shit load and that they would be better off somewhere else. I have friends that started at startups, vc, asset management, growth equity, every single one wishes that had done banking at the start of their career. The only people who I think are better off not doing banking who are in business (I.e. not doctors or coders or lawyers) are 1) entrepreneurs who create hundred million dollar businesses (lol good luck doing this) 2) hedge fund kids (I know 2 that did this)
Thanks lol this helps me feel better
This, and people who have not worked any other jobs don't realise how mind-numbingly boring every job is until you're more senior.
what about S&T?
Agreed with the crisis after leaving school and going into the workforce. I was lucky to experience it during a summer job before getting my internship and it was a huge shock. Most people, like 90%, just work because they don’t want to starve. If there were the possibility to get free basic stuff they would just sit at home all day and do nothing. For someone who likes to work and challenge myself that was massively disappointing. IB is a blessing in this sense because it still gives you a purpose and even if you don’t like it, it’s reassuring that you can climb up in the food chain after getting some experience. Most jobs don’t give you that freedom that you are allowed to progress
What do you mean by hedge fund kids?
People that right out of school land at a hedge fund—point72 for example. It’s pretty rare and not the norm.
Good points above.
What I would add, you need to separate being smart from being creative (i.e. ability to run a business).
It would be like saying, lets line up everyone in America according to how far they can throw a football, and then automatically picking the top 60 people NFL quarterbacks. If you follow football, how many players had "great potential" but didn't follow through. Being a quarterback isn't just throw it as far as you can, you need to read defense, know what calls to play, make different throws. Same in business/IB, just because you're the top of your class and can do excel real quick doesn't mean you're a good trader or know how to run a start up.
what the associate said is true, but if you actually believe what you just typed out OP, you are severely out of touch with the real world lol, I hope one day you can step outside your bubble (for your own sake)
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This bro. I grew up in a family living pay check to pay check, constantly moving to places with lower rent, and having basically no safety net. IB money is changing my life and ill make sure my family will never have the same problems I faced.
Yeah I’m definitely not arguing that it isn’t the easiest way for someone with no skills to trade their time for money. IB seems to be filled w mostly upper / upper middle class anyways so those people have some safety net why don’t they use that combined with ambition and some smarts to do something else that either make more money or is more impactful / fulfilling
Honestly, the reason I want to go into IB is for 3 things. 1) knowledge/experience. you honestly learn so much if you pay attention to what happens around you and i think that the experience in IB is something unattainable in almost any other industry. 2) connections. connections are super important in business (obviously) so if i can meet people that can provide me with value now or later on in life, i’ll take that. and lastly, 3) the money you make starting out. for me, it’s not just about money. i actually really enjoy finance and reading/learning about it. but my greater goal in life requires large capital so i don’t mind making a few hundred thousand a year to help prepare myself for the future.
thats my take coming from a junior, basically senior, in high school. i really think its worth it and from what i’ve heard about peoples opinions who have worked as an IB, they enjoyed it and didn’t regret it.
I get what you’re saying but my goal was always to be disconnected from most people. A big part of the reason I wanted to do IB was I thought it meant I would join the a large group of the most ambitious driven and intelligent people my age. It really just meant I was joining people who wanted to optimize for the most money and clout for the least risk with providing the least value and no real skills
You get what you’re asking for at the top nerdy buy shop firms, which you need to do IB to get.
also “always wanted to be disconnected from people”…you need to grow up man. Making a lot of money doesn’t make you special or different.
Solid take, I totally agree. Even though some kids ,who are totally detached from reality, think that IB is dumb work, it is still more exciting and stimulating than 99.9% of other jobs out there. Let alone the incredible financial freedom you get from it. Most ppl doesn’t even get a shot at becoming financially independent in their whole life and literally kids making 200K are whining that this is not good and useless
This!
I earned 30k pre-tax between my summer at the beginning of the senior year till the end of my senior year - using that money, I was able to have a lot of fun during the year, afford two trips to the other side of the world, put a down on a brand new car and still have enough money left over to be used on a deposit for a apt. for FT, as well as other costs that come with it. Also, I donated money for the first-ever time and that felt pretty nice too - I think the smartest way I can help society is by earning a lot and then donating - as someone mentioned it above. I can't even imagine what freedom I can attain with my FT pay and bonus. As someone not from a super privileged background by American standards, I think this is probably one of the best jobs I could have gotten.
Dude it’s 2 years then all this “wasted talent” goes to the buy side.
Yes where it’s more of the same shit pretty much.
You still learn a lot of useful things in IB tbh.
The skillset gonna help a lot especially if you want to move to buyside, this including fundamental HF, PE or merger arb & distressed funds.
I did my M&A stint before transitioning to quant, a lot of what I learn during my IB years help me quite a lot with structuring my event-driven volatility bets around M&A, buyback, etc.
Hey, can I ask how you went into quant? Were you always tech-inclined or did you start reading on the side? And how was recruiting for you?
IB -> HF L/S -> did my master in math -> went back to the same HF but rotate to quant desk.
I would disagree on quant trading - it doesn't help society any more than helping companies raise money or merge/acquire another company. I would definitely add to the list doctors. I'd say doctors, medical researchers, engineers, and tech people (both hardware and software development) is where society should direct the most brilliant talents. That being said, even though I graduated from a top school, I could never be successful in any of these fields cause it all just feels like constant mental rape to me. I can tolerate it as long as I have to during school but I would never willingly do this if I can make comparable money doing simple work like financial modeling.
Agreed. I studied CS but there's no way I could code everyday for the rest of my career. Debugging code is so brutally boring/frustrating.
Legit, hated the debugging aspect so much. Like it shouldn’t take me 5hrs to get 98% there and then another few hours for the remaining 2%
Doctors' have such overblown egos already, you can stop now. They get it. They're important and wonderful blah blah blah
luckily they probably don't read this forum, so it's all good
Brilliant minds are needed in fewer numbers, to advance the frontiers of technology/ medicine. The rest end up doing routine tasks, following what the brilliant minds have discovered/ invented. I doubt programming, primary care, etc. need brilliant minds.
there can be unlimited number of people conducting various research and building various robots and apps, and we can certainly double the number of doctors in US and they would still all be busy (all good doctors are booked months in advance or are not seeing new patients at all).
Hmmm, I think investment bankers add tons of value. A few of my entrepreneurial friends have realized absurdly strong exits engineered by excellent bankers. They really did help set the company up nicely 12 - 15 months before exit and secure a much higher valuation.
GS is so bad I genuinely feel like unemployment would be better than this shit
I don't get the belief that an employer is paying six figures for formatting slides. If the work is that simplistic, the employer can hire three FTEs for the cost of one Analyst, if not actually offshore any mind numbing/ repetitive work.
There are not too many jobs where you can make meaningful contributions on day 1 of the job. Unless you want to sign up for a ten to twelve year program to be trained as a surgeon. Or flip burgers at the local fast food.
Starting a business isn't for everyone. The chances of success, especially roaring success, are far bleaker than getting into the Ivies and BBs as a straight white/asian male. Don't forget that for every Uber and Airbnb, thousands of failures are buried in Sand Hills. Besides, these companies came up with technological innovation. Not with an original business idea.
You should allow people work only for money instead of considering adding value, and also those people are merely smart at school work and good at following school rules, not means they are potentially creative or genius
The premise that the smartest go into IB seems like a stretch. In my experience the smartest go straight to grad school and have goals like wanting to win a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal or something. Just my two cents. There are smart people in IB, but there are also smart people in medicine, the sciences, SWE, and even a few in the law :-) Lots of smart people out there. Money is one goal, often the simplest to understand when you are young, but there are lots of other goals. To paraphrase Herb Simon, everyone has a different level of “satisficing”.
Yeah I guess I meant the smartest business students
I don't give a fuck about society.
IB makes the digital world accessible but not really profitable one
Could say the same about other professions.
I think a lot of young medical doctors especially after 4 years of medical school + years of training tend to be so absorbed into the medical industry that they know very little about things outside of it. To me, I don't think there really is any other high paying professional career where their career decisions are very "by the book" in terms of patient care/looking for job openings. I always viewed it somewhat as a career that killed creativity. It's a shame honestly that many who choose this profession are extremely risk-adverse and very few pursue entrepreneurial ventures.
There are exceptions of course. I do know some doctors who have done their own private practices, picked up side gigs (being an industry speaker), working with medical devices etc. But I don't think it's anywhere close to the norm.
Did you, a corp strategy business school grad, just belittle doctors who spend double digit years of their lives honing the craft of medicine to actually help people?
Did you just say that being a doctor kills creativity? Where the fuck do you want them to be creative, while performing a 12h open heart surgery?
I hope this is a satire take.
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