Recession Hours
What have all your hours been like? I imagine that dealflow has been pretty dry, does that translate into less late nights at the office?
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I've heard that during the 2003 slowdown it translated to smaller headcount, less deals, and way more pitching... with similarly long hours but low morale. If I had to hazard a guess, I would estimate that average hours would stay about the same but with a lower standard deviation as a result of less deal-related work spikes.
Bury_Bonds described it to a "T"... lots of pitches, no deals, hours still brutal (in industry groups... product groups have it better).
You forget the fact that during lean times the junior guys in product groups are always the first to go. Though the best ones stay and the ones just below that are ushered into other groups or offices, the bottom half of 1st years in M&A and especially LevFin are the most at risk in IBD during any tough times. This is due to the two simple facts that the number of deals getting to the execution stage is obviously lower than during normal times and that those few deals that actually get done can be executed by the much less busy industry guys. The 1st years take the brunt of the hit because they lack the experience of the 2nd years who, after inevitably finding that an abundance of prestigious exit opportunities to PE/HF are no longer available to them during a recession, choose to stay on with the bank for an additional year.
This is certainly how it went down the last time around. GS even went so far as to simply disband its M&A group in its entirety.
My friends who are still at BBs and hadn't yet jumped to PE/HFs are getting killed at the moment. Enough people have left that there isn't enough experienced analysts to go around and they are all pitching. Currently, most of my friends are working as bad or worse hours then when they were on some nasty live deals.
All a recession means in banking is that its harder to get fees and therefore you must work harder to get them. So, less deal experience, more pitching and bitch work, worse exit opps because the market is bad and you don't have deal experience.
But in general, tons of pitching and very little in the way of actual deals.
LevFin (well, assuming you haven't been fired) and the like in some ways have it easier because when there's no work to do, there's really... very little work. Better to do no work vs. tons of stupid work in my view, the end result is the same either way.
I'm basically in pitch-mode right now... in some ways I don't care because I got the deal experience I needed last year, but I do feel sorry for the new people.
So if you had 2 offers...energy M&A or a small ($150 mm) hedge fund, you think it would be better experience to work at a hedge fund during rough times?
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