Let's be honest - is anyone actually working >80 hours a week?
I've just completed my analyst years at a top group and can honestly say I've only really crossed 80 hours a couple times (<5) since I started.
And I'm talking "log on to log off" hours (ie. NOT subtracting lunch / hours doing nothing waiting for comments / real downtime)
The only instances I can see the above being untrue is if either i) they're in a group where Sunday is seen as a FULL actual work day and MDs are trickling new work down on Sundays; or ii) they've been unlucky to have been working on multiple poorly staffed high-intensity deals non stop throughout their analyst years.
FWIW I'd say my true average throughout my last couple years has been closer to 60 (or less if you include the summer weeks where we do jack sh*t).
I think this whole "we work 80-100 hours a week on average" thing isn't doing any of us any good if it isn't true - it just attracts the wrong kind of people into banking and instills a horrible culture of busywork at the junior level to fit the statement.
What do y'all think? Have I just been really lucky at my bank and group, or is the whole industry just exaggerating it?
It is an exaggeration. These people literally include time spent on transit / subway / lunch / casual chats / goofing around into the 80-hours. The real work is 30- 50 hours at most
Yes
The market has been so slow the past ~2 years, so consider yourself lucky. The majority of my first year analysts have not been on a live M&A deal, and barely any of the second year analysts have either. Most have never had to draft a CIM before. They definitely have not seen any IPO processes, and very few lead-left equity deals or financing deals, as well. This is at a BB coverage group in NYC. There are a few analysts in my group who tend to get crushed and are often requested by VPs (and above) for “important staffings”/RFPs since they are viewed as competent/reliable, who I think definitely put in 80hrs/week usually — but the majority of analysts don’t see anywhere near that number unless 1) they are exaggerating 2) they are just slow at their job
Say if your doing your first analyst role at a MM firm - would having 2-3 deals under your belt enable you to lateral up to BB AN1 without alot of difficulty? Asking as I am starting a role soon at a firm that does lots of lower middle markets.
Dude, it’s not humanly possible to work 80 hours a week the way people are describing it. No human being is a fucking robot. It’s exaggerated. They’re just counting in Subway and being on calls and never mentally checking out from work. You would die from working 80 hours a week consistently with three hours of sleep a day.
Theres 168 hours in a week. 80 hours is nowhere near 3 hours a night. JPM has allegedly had a few medical incidents the past few years.
my old banking team was absolutely butt in seat 9 AM to 7 PM. Lunch at desk. Uber home + seamless ordered. Log off at 1-2 AM.
infrastructure sponsors (GIP, etc) were worse.
would love to hear more about the infra sponsors
GIP is insanely sweaty, also all the Japanese/korean firms in infra sponsorship led to some really brutal work months on some deals.
had 2 months of logging off at 6am and getting on at 10 am then crashing all day Saturday. Had some hours off for food/gym, but I’ve never felt closer to death.
It's possible and I'll go even one step further and say that it's not so hard. The work doesn't even require brain power, so you reach a point or you're simply enter a state of flow of wanting to finish something. At one point I just started to feel it like a game where I simply need to keep clicking some buttons on the keyboard, look for something from time to time, and deliver it.
I had some internships where I really had to think when doing something and after 3 hours I was fried. I really wanted to go home. But for mindless work it's just physical and mental stamina.
What is your job that requires so much involvement that you need to be doing something for 10+ hours a day, but requires such little brain power? I assume this is IB, but I still find it hard to believe this could actually be the reality expected of a role. Sure, making apparel in a sweat shop might demand this, but finance in the world's most developed city...?
I've had some weeks where there were of 80+ hours of working and it's quite tough. Surely everyone experiences long weeks like this, especially when first starting out, but usually its around deal closing periods or an urgent pitch and its not super frequent.
The vast majority of weeks were not that busy. Definitely closer to 40-50 hours of actual work, but after a lot of hours of sitting around, talking, eating, taking walks, watching a show if WFH, you could say you were
The toughest weeks would be like Mon: 9am-5pm no work, so you're scrolling through the news or looking through materials. Then you get 8 hours of work for the next day after sitting idle so then you have a lot of work to do in a short period of time, so you stay up until 1am to complete it, and sleep at 2 or 3am. Then the next day you're more tired than you would be, and get staffed on more materials.
9-5 no work, then that should not be included in the time working. That’s why I said yours is always exaggerated. Half of 80 hour is just sitting around waiting for work
No that part was a general statement saying how some weeks suck as you’re still in the office until past midnight many days, even if it’s just doing 40-50 hours of actual work that week
If you're required to be there its obviously work whether or not you're doing anything. The brutal part of the job isn't the job function, rather the total hours required to be at the office/online.
During my analyst 1 years, I've had a lot of weeks where I was working for 80 hours. This was during a busy year (2021), and we had a lot of deals per analyst.
Typically people aren't as efficient with modeling, excel, general computer navigation in the beginning, so they take much longer to get work done. By the time I was wrapped up with my analyst program, I was probably only working around 40 hours per week to do the same amount of work that would initially have taken 70-80 hours earlier on.
yes, people 100% are working 80+ hours per week and I am one of them. I’m on an incredibly lean, high volume team where I am routinely required to work late into the hours and all day on weekends. this looks like 9/10am until 2-3am M-F and 10/11am until 9/10pm saturday and sunday. you can do the math. it is unbearable and has wrecked me and therefore I am leaving.
sure, am I absolutely working for all of those hours? no. but outside of eating, sleeping, and showering, I am doing work. maybe 30 mins here or there waiting for comments or commuting. for sake of argument, subtract 2-4 hours a day for human activities excluding sleep and the hours are still fucked. consider yourself lucky to have been in a group where you were staffed properly, but making the blanket “I didn’t do this, so therefore there is no way anyone else is” is highly disingenuous. you got lucky, I got unlucky. people should be aware its a possibility.
Fucking thank you. This this this and this. There is always a fuck ton of work to do and many M&A deals are happening they just are not CLOSING so this class has almost nothing to show for all the bitch work we’ve done for clients for free over the course of my stint. Contrary to the previous poster, I have worked on IPOs, lead left transactions, capital raises and a ton of M&A+industry coverage work and have literally closed only 1 M&A transaction and 1 capital raise. In 2 years. Top group on the street and no one in my class has more than 3 closed transactions under their belt. We have all worked on AT LEAST 30-40 separate projects over the last 2 years, most of that being FAILED or paused M&A transactions.
If you didn’t work that many hours, congrats you probably have a healthy amount of analysts on your team to divide work evenly OR your group sucks and has given up on their demand gen process for M&A/capital market transactions entirely. Or maybe you’re just not that great in your class and the actually strong analyst is getting crushed. I don’t wear these hours like some badge of honor because it’s super toxic and I wish our seniors were more considerate of the work load they force on their juniors when they know the market is essentially frozen, but there are a TON of analysts in the 2022/2023 class that are getting a shit load of work done - it’s just “the market” and our seniors are not pulling THEIR WEIGHT to get the deal over the finish line. Even our rainmakers are having slower years. Let’s not make blanket statements about general work capacity and quality of work because my health issues due to 95+ hour work weeks for literally almost every week - and the health issues of about half of my class have something to say about that for sure.
Sorry if the question comes across as stupid but why are so many transactions falling thru or being paused?
what are you exiting to?
Gen Z is a labor union of a generation so not anymore. People not long ago did work 80+ hour weeks as analysts though.
it's a generation of hall monitors and narcs
lmao so much ms from gen z
In a top group. Work M-F, and Sunday. Usually log off around 2-3am, barely eat or sleep. Since hitting the desk, don’t believe I’ve worked less than 80 hrs during a normal week. Hope these sleepless nights pan out at the end of the year.
nope
Echoing the other comments. I am in a good group at an MM. Due to the nature of the bank (volume shop), I have been working 9-3 am in the past few months with a lot of work on the weekends. It’s miserable and you have no time to shower, eat, etc. Consider yourself lucky and thank God you don’t have to go through that. I’ve closed 11 M&A deals and it’s soul crushing, please don’t take this for granted.
No time to shower? Dude listen to yourself…
The comments show a trend where the more deals you close (or more live deals you are on), the worse the hours are.
This means if you are not in a top group and/or do not have heavy staffing on your lap, then yea, there is not a lot of work to be done. Only when live deals happen in parallel (for instance, holding pen on the model or an IM for two different projects) will certainly guarantee 80+ or even 100+ hours.
AN 2. Have had two weeks that I have not worked at least 80 hours since starting. Average around 90 per week getting up to 110 on bad weeks working both Saturday and Sunday most weekends. And yes this is “actually working” with every days goal being getting to bed before 3am. Often times don’t have time to leave my desk to get lunch
what type of bank? bb/eb/mm/boutique?
This is insane. This is life-endangering. Why is this even legal
Yes some unlucky people really do work 80-85+ hours on average a week. But also, most fresh analysts cap and wear it as a 'badge of honor' of grinding, so also take it with a grain of salt. Most people are at work from say 9-10am to 10pm - 3am but are not working 24/7 in that timeframe, plus many banks don't have analysts working past 5-7pm on a Friday and/or try to have a protected Saturday policy, so that inherently gives back a lot of time to people. Live deals, you can easily clock 100+ (I've recorded 120+ before), but that is not the regular.
That said, some unlucky analysts do get absolutely wrecked and average a lot more (depends on bank, group, and deal / market environment). I'd say in my banking days, I see most people average anywhere from 65 -75 actual working hours a week, but some poor bankers get wrecked way more and pull 80 - 90 during their 2-3 year stint
I'm going to add some perspective here for all the finance monkeys to realize how good they have it. My current profession is a soldier in the Army. My standard day is something like: wake at 4am to hit the gym at 430, show up to work at 630, work until noon, return from lunch an hour later, and finish the day between 530 and 730 PM. If you count the 1-1.5 hours at the gym as work, which I do as maintaining fitness is literally in my job description and I can be thrown out if I don't maintain it, then that's 12-13 hours of real, hard work. And that's on a normal week. When you're prepping to go the field or deploy, add an hour to that. And then I'll throw in my most recent field training for reference. We did a three week, no weekend off, field op that focused on night ops. It was 18 days of: wake at 0800, train and do mission simulation until 8pm, then put on NODs and do more mission training at night until 2 or 3 AM. That's 18 or 19 hours a day of continuous, physically demanding work. And not even counting having to pull night/fire guard shift every fourth day where you lose an hour of sleep.
I get that 99% of WSO users have never even considered serving, but I just want the perspective out there of what kind of hours we as humans are able to do. Working in high finance can be incredibly lucrative, certainly more than my career, but just remember what other people are doing.
Yes, have definitely hit 100+ hrs consistently on M&A deals.
Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t.
Friend in IB definitely counts the time he's playing cod while waiting for comments as part of the "hours", but also know people who are genuinely locked in for the 80
Regarding actual time spent working, think most people would be between 40-50 hours per week for most of the year, with a few weeks or month periods where they may need to work longer, but definitely some weeks that are more relaxed as well
People should take more pride in working less on the job, rather than more
I think my group loves to create work for no reason and are shitty planners and managers. 90 hours is the norm on my end. Very rarely less than 70 and more likely to be 100.
Yes. I'm in a sweatier group now than in my analyst days, but also actively avoid work much more than in my analyst days, so on the whole have fewer of them. In large part, bad clients and MDs dictate whether or not you're clocking those hours and there are no shortage of them. If it's such a foreign concept to you that you don't actually believe someone is working those hours w/ any consistency, you're very fortunate.
It’s always going to be a 168 hour workweek. One big lead per month takes you forward when things are good, time logged on research, documentation, and communications is not the KPI. Organic social angles (friend-of-a-friend) under a mutually warm context is the only way that major deals are ever sourced.
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