Maybe a dumb question but is banking actually worse for learning now?
This might be a naive take since I’m just about to enter the field, but something I’ve been wondering after talking to a few analysts.
A lot of them say the hours are still brutal, but the actual learning feels thinner (ex. more templates, more rushed feedback, less time spent explaining why things are done a certain way).
I’m not expecting hand-holding, but I thought the tradeoff for the hours was you’d come out much sharper technically and commercially.
For people already in banking - do you feel like you’re learning as much as older classes did? Or is the job slowly turning into execution + survival mode?
Good on you for picking up on that just through conversations.
I interned in a tech group at a MM boutique and had a pretty jading summer of 2–3am nights. I ultimately decided against tech (though I still returned) for two reasons: (i) tech banking doesn’t really give you technical or transferable skills relevant to the actual tech industry (who would’ve thought), and (ii) the job is fundamentally learning by doing — or, as you put it, execution plus survival.
I don’t know if this is how it’s always been, but banking in its current form feels like an apprenticeship model in which someone might show you how to do XYZ in PPT/XLS, but there’s very little structured effort to walk you through the industry itself or the nuances that actually matter. It's a learning by doing job not what Suits (for lack of a better comp) might have you believe.
That caught me off guard and made me stop drinking the Kool-Aid a bit. At the analyst level, the job is very transactional: get paid well, absorb the hours and health trade-offs, and position yourself for exits. That’s basically the deal. Maybe things change at the associate level, but most of the “learning” in banking is about execution, and whatever industry knowledge you pick up tends to come slowly and almost incidentally.
Just my $0.02.
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