My A1s are SO BAD

Obviously, I don't know your situation or what the last two years were like. But I had a similar moment at one point and ended up realizing at least part of that feeling was due to the fact I had entered the high-slope part of my early-career development and I, myself, was significantly better at my work than I was the previous year. So the same work output from a junior the year before appeared to take longer, be crappier, and not as thorough because my expectations/perspective had skewed so much, so rapidly. Gave me new appreciation for all the seniors who had the patience to deal with my dumbass when I was just a baby banker.

Not sure what advice to give you since I've not been at IB desk, but if the above is partially true then perspective can help you be a coach to them?

If the above is in no way true and these kids just suck... then damn. I've experienced the same degradation in base talent over time, too. At least when I was coming up, I was willing to think and try. Kids these days will just go "I dont know" and produce nothing. Very frustrating. 

Mine are starting to get pretty good, y’all stay safe though

Sometimes you have to explain to Analysts; "Look dude. This is your core job responsibility and it is an essential skill-set for an Analyst. It is explicitly what you are employed to do. I can do it myself and so can any of the Associates, but if we consistently have to then you are essentially left without any role or place in the group."

Specifically if it is the case that your Analysts just aren't making the effort to learn & work efficiently because they feel like they can rely on you to do their job for them. That's when you have to make it clear that you having to do their work essentially means they are useless to the company and don't have any place being staffed on anything, let alone employed to begin with. Always good to be as gentle as possible but you need to make sure they understand this point for their own good. The job of an Analyst isn't to just show up and survive the day, it is to complete wide arrays of tasks for your team, if you are just focused on surviving the day and leaving as early as possible you're going to be pushed out. 

Same dude, they’re awful this year. 

Not sure a lot can be done when you consider service quality is down in every walk of life.  Surely I'm not the only one who's finding incompetence in every little interaction compared to just a few years ago. 

Until very recently, every employer of every kind has been begging for more help and I can only imagine that it's a cause of every service process sucking whether it's your analyst or your barista.  I can't even get the damn Taco Bell app to apply a promo code properly.  In 2023, 54 years after we put a man on the moon.  It just feels like we've become a nation of low standards.

I thought this was only going to affect lower-skill areas because that's the group that got stimulus checks.  But it seems to be broader.  Saw some of my biggest knucklehead friends get jobs in 2020-22 where they wouldn't get past the screening interview in normal times.  I'm not sure what's going on (something something Fed something money printing blah blah), but it's been going on long enough that my expectations are permanently lowered now.  

I'm a hiring manager with >5 reports, but I work outside of finance now. It does feel like quality is down. At my company, despite having a fairly difficult interview process, which includes a take-home assessment, I've found that:

• More new hires lack basic professionalism like showing up to meetings on time, communicating when they will miss deadlines, and just remembering to do their work if they are tasked with more than 1 responsibility. It's shocking to me, because these are core skills you should have just from doing well in college. But I know the majority of good schools grade inflate to the max.
• Work ethic is generally down. I remember myself + my other entry level friends starting work and being hungry to do well. I'm not in finance anymore, but still in a fast paced industry where we pay top 1-5% of the market, yet most of the younger guys have a very 9-5 mentality or work even less even once they are hired. This is despite explicitly stating during the job interview that this is NOT a 9-5 job and you have to work hard. 
• Interview performance can still be good. It's not hard for a bad performer to work really hard to pass an interview process with flying colors. 

That said, I still have a few young hires who are great and can absolutely crush it. Great self-motivated people will always exist, but I feel like the recent crop of undergrads are probably worse for a few reasons:

• Shift in values, with SOME Gen Z being a bit less career focused. I think this is totally fine, as they follow basic professionalism and don't deliberately go into a career that's highly demanding. However, naturally, everyone wants to get paid a lot and not work hard. So people who aren't a fit for demanding careers still try to join.
• Worse education, which is not just due to Covid education. Many schools, especially top ivy league schools, are grade inflating to the max. I feel like this is causing a lot of younger people to lack basic core skills like completing work on time, basic time management, and basic communication. My friend is a doctoral candidate at an Ivy (HYP) and helps with grading students. Some professors have explicitly told my friend to not give any student a grade below an A-. Even had a student not show up to class all semester, turn in all her assignments 2-3 months late, and the student still got an A-. Also saw an article recently that the average GPA at Harvard is a 3.9 and I believe it. 
  • So you can imagine a student like this entering into the workforce. They've basically gotten As throughout college, even without putting in a significant amount of effort, without delivering things on time, and being told that they are special. It's really bad conditioning for the working world.
  • When I was in school, I had classes where only 1-5% of the class would receive an A. The lesson for me was clear - that to get a good result I had to bust my ass. Now for many top schools, it's the reverse with only 1-5% of the class NOT getting an A. 

What I've found to be helpful in managing low performers, which fortunately for me, I can also make direct PIP and firing decisions almost unilaterally. 

• Be brutally honest and blunt. Society has trended towards having a very soft culture and people have selective hearing. Delivering feedback in a nice way works great for top performers since they are highly self-motivated and eager to improve. Low performers, on the other hand, have selective hearing and if you sugar coat negative feedback, they only hear the positive parts. I have learned to explicitly say "You are underperforming and your work quality is low". You also need to be pretty direct with negative feedback early in their tenure. I used to make the mistake of being really nice, thinking people will naturally improve. This rarely happens and then when you later deliver negative feedback, it comes as more of a shock to the individual. Being honest is actually the kinder thing to do, since it gives them the best chance to improve
• Don't be afraid to PIP/fire/rate someone poorly, AFTER you've given them explicitly feedback and they have not improved. This might sound mean and brutal, but your top performers will leave and get frustrated working with low performers. Better to trim a team of 5 down to 3 top performers and pay those top performers more. Obviously try to work with the low performers to elevate them, but having a never fire policy is really bad. I worked with a company with a never fire policy and it led to droves of top performers leaving and a ton of deadweight. 

Our Analysts even at bulge are getting worse each year. Honestly it worries me if these people stay and become associates who cannot do the job or teach the new analysts correctly. 

I'm sad to say that quota hiring and diversity push has been the main culprit. We are forced to choose Summer and FT Analysts that tick boxes rather than people who can actually do the job. You may find the odd one that surprises you. 

It's a joke being at a Top 5 IB and having to deal with shit juniors. Sorry if that's harsh but it's so tiresome.