MS Menlo is Going to Shit
Many many problems with this group, including the below. This group is going downhill, and frankly, just doesn't get the best talent anymore.
- Absolute sweatshop, hours are the worst in tech banking, consistently to 3/4 am everyday. One of the analysts recently got sent to the ER after a near heart attack from 9am-6am for 2 weeks straight
- Huge facetime culture, including name call (yes, like in elementary school) in the mornings
- Group COO is incompetent and bringing back bad culture. Covid policies like work from home and other perks are being taken away, culture is headed in a bad direction
- Recruiting is biased, diversity focused, and terrible at screening for good talent. Interview questions are a joke compared to boutqiues like Q and EVR. Somehow top analysts & talent get offers at other top banks (Qatalyst, GS, etc) but can't even get an interview here despite many referrals. Meanwhile group keeps pushing diversity hires from total non-targetville. The lateral full-time hires from boutiques like EVR are consistently the best analysts, showing 1) other banks have a better screening process for talent 2) they were better trained by their old bank
- Most of analysts are frankly braindead, some can't even build a LBO model, and have a very peripheral interest in tech. Interns/new analysts are horrible technically, can't stay awake during training
- The only good thing we got going are the weekly basketball sessions hosted by the ED at the local middle school LOL
Hope changes are made.
The repercussions of aggressive diversity recruiting is finally in full-effect.
Not just that. Low deal flow and getting ran by Q/GS in pitches right now.
They were good at IPOs but now that's dried up they're suffering.
lmao a simple scan of MS's linkedin filtered for menlo park and investment banking proves that >2/3 of the team wouldn't even count as diversity, and that's only if you count every single woman as diversity. and @OP, i guess chicago, wharton, yale, and stanford aren't target schools anymore? if only you didnt include this tired rhetoric against diversity, your post would have so much more credibility
Congrats on uchicago
Maybe the diversity hires spelled Morgan Stanley wrong on their LinkedIns, and that’s why they don’t show up
Just because their skin color doesn't scream diversity hire doesn't mean they aren't claiming to be LGBTQIA2S#%&()^=+ or "neurodivergent" (literally know a straight white guy who got in through a diversity ramp claiming Autism, OCD and ADHD). It's CA, there's no limit to the stupidity of their politics even if it is/was a top banking group. That these programs even exist incentivizes that exact type of behavior.
Women are diversity
Recruitment is inherently biased. There are almost always multiple people who more than satisfy a junior role's standard requirements, so it all comes down to the decision maker's objectivity or lack thereof. I'm not a fan of forced and skewed diversity policies that disadvantages talent and merit, but the repeated baseless whining and blanket blame of diversity for all of a company/team's perceived problems is moronic, ignorant and borderline far-right. To categorically blame a group of people for a not-proven-to-be-meaningfully-statistically-correlated event is the typical racist loser playbook. It's as if people of one race/gender are entitled to these roles that are "taken away" by others, and that these issues would not exist if ppl of a specific race/gender filled all those roles up.
Now I'm not saying the initial comment poster is specifically the above, but on many occasions those who pile on in the comments drag humanity's bar even lower. There is a legitimate criticism of certain affirmative action policies and diversity hiring, but only a select few actually engage in such debates in an intellectually honest level.
Congrats on the MS Menlo rejection
100% agree with this based on my experience recruiting with these guys. Super unprofessional and a huge sweatshop. On top on that, Menlo Park is one of the most boring places on planet earth (live in the Bay Area, so I can say this for a fact).
How can you agree when you couldn't even get past the interview to work there?
Who says I didn’t make it past their interviews… also, even if I didn’t, I have more than every right to say that the office is generally unprofessional when it comes to recruiting candidates
The basketball was a great time tho ngl
Crazy how the interns with 10 weeks of job experience (or less because they never got an SA offer) are always the most well-informed and strongly opinionated on what defines a good or bad group.
I assume 100% of these posts are made by either A) People who got dinged from IB and work in Corporate Banking now B) Interns who complain about how much their fellow analysts suck, because they hear Associates doing it, but don't realize that they're in the category of people who suck
Hopefully this marks the beginning of a shift back to better hiring practices that don't sacrifice talent for diversity
I'll talk about our new and 1st year associates. All except 1 amongst the past 2 incoming classes received some sort of diversity bonus or treatment (female, ethnicity, military). I passed forward many candidates from HBS/GSB/Wharton with solid professional backgrounds (law, consulting, even banking) but most of them didn't even get interview invites from our office. Hate to say this but the quality of our juniors' work is continuing to go to shit. Our management's push towards diversity has really gone out of hand.
Same, I’ve heard FIG/IND at GS place better than TMT nowadays. GS TMT is just filled with nepo babies and diversities.
Can also confirm that some of them have no humility. Q analysts/associates can come off as really grounded when you talk to them, but the same isn't true for MS analysts/associates, although the VPs I spoke with seemed fine
I’ve also read about complaints on diversity recruitment in Jefferies in another post…but based on my observation MS and JEF are the two most “white” shop I’ve ever seen.
Care to show statistics of how much % diversity hires were brought into these two firms?
Sounds like another witch hunt post for minorities by a white male who already enjoyed all the privileges but still can’t get a banking job and now whining.
Btw lot of investment banks don’t even hire international students for banking jobs(as opposed to a lot of quant investment jobs , which required much more technical skills, send lots of green cards each year), meaning that they don’t need to select the ‘best of best’ because literally everyone can do a banker’s job.