Scheming IB as an Analyst
First year analyst checking in - have been on the job for around 6 months now. Considering I intend to leave after 2 years, I'm almost 1/4 through the stint. I'd like to share some thoughts on how I have maintained a good WLB in a sweaty group while building goodwill with all my colleagues:
-WFH is great. I wake up around 7:30 and the hit the gym almost every morning. This gives me two hours to workout, shower, read the news and hang out until work begins.
-Usually, half my day is filled with Zoom meetings, which I never have my camera on for. A lot of these don't require my full attention, so I hit the dab pen and scroll through Twitter, or read up on interesting subjects.
-I try to to be as vague as possible when describing workload to my staffer. This has allowed me to maintain a reasonable load of staffings; only have worked past midnight a handful of times.
-I am very fast to respond to emails or Teams messages, which gives the facade that I'm constantly working. I programmed my computer to make my Teams appear online at all times. Most of the time however, I'm lying in bed or out somewhere else. I usually take twice as long to hand in a deliverable than it actually takes me. Quality work that takes longer is better than work littered with mistakes handed in quickly.
-I make sure to have light-hearted, personal conversations with MDs, VPs ect, and have good friendships with most of the analysts. It's very important to have a good attitude and bring a sense of humor when appropriate. When your colleagues see you as a good human being, they are less likely to throw unreasonable requests your way, and treat you better overall.
My philosophy is that it's better to be competant and in middle bucket, than being the top bucket bitch boy for incremental after-tax pay. Serve your time as pleasantly as possible, and then exit. Curious if anyone else has similar tips to expand upon in the comments.
I very much agree with your outlook and approach here particularly over that other hardo analyst that frequents the forum and wrote that ridiculous write-up on being “top bucket” recently. The only issue you have here, and maybe you have a good solution, is what the hell are you going to do if we have to head back into the office or more likely hybrid?
This is so far in the future with covid ramping up
Well shit I hope you’re right don’t get me wrong. I want WFH forever. I just don’t want to be foolishly optimistic or if this new COVID thing is even going to be a real thing again?
I have had to go into the office for around a month, which obviously is worse. However, facetime culture is over - I still have time for morning gym and get to leave around 6 or 7 every day. In this case, I try to maximize productivity for a few hours in the afternoon and leave the deliverables sitting until later in the evening to send out. Hopefully wfh continues tho lol
Yeah I get what you mean honestly just don’t see this working well in office unless you are really close with people lmao. Let’s just hope to stay WFH.
Would this have any effect on you being promoted or exiting into MF PE? Or is it something that you’re not really worried about?
Deleted
How would it impact your exit to the buyside? This isn’t the NFL draft. Blackstone and Apollo aren’t sitting around reviewing your stats from IB to make a hiring decision…
If you have time to hit the gym every morning, you aren’t in a sweaty group.
I am getting sweaty though
This has future rainmaker MD vibes. Not even kidding, good for you!
TBH it just sounds like you have a good lifestyle group, which does exist on the Street. Congrats.
Have you thought about going A2A? I’m in a similar situation, like my group a lot plus it hasn’t been as sweaty since we’ve ramped up hiring. Also trying ~70% as much I did when I started which has been huge for my health. Feeling very content. The pay as an associate is great, WFH has provided a ton of flexibility, and overall the job just seems less stressful and more stable than some of the potential exits. It’s not as interesting obviously but I don’t really care that much about finance, it’s just a job not a passion. Though it does seem like very few associates really get to coast like I am now, but that could be because most are MBAs trying to figure it out. Feels almost too good to be true at the moment. Defintiely comes in waves and there are periods that suck, but overall its been fine. Would appreciate any perspectives
Are you at a BB/EB/MM? Also NYC/SF or regional bank?
I've been coasting a bit as well after the A2A promote and have personally had the best months workload wise and in terms of actually closing deals. No interest in leaving at the moment if the pay keeps being this solid.
If you enjoy your job in IB, then stay. PE is hell.
A2As are paid really well. You'll also have a leg up competing against the MBA Associates; will take them a full year to get remotely as competent as you.
Make sure you don't slack when you become an A2A though, I see this a lot. Still keep producing good quality work, and keep strong relations with the senior folk.
Why do you say don’t slack? What does keeping good relations with senior folk vs. coasting make it worth?
I think doing good work for say, 1 MD that you actually like / is a good relation for you and slacking on the rest is a much better deal. Focus on the 1 and go easy on the many tbh.
This is me too. My group hired a bunch after every analyst quit last year.
We’re all staffed on 4-5 deals and have work but it’s been reasonable. Hoping it stays like this.
I'd take the A2A, all things considered (but especially comp). You avoid the most painful part of associating - the first 18 months of learning how to do the job (+ building trust with senior bankers, who understandably keep new hire associates on a pretty short leash).
100% agree with you on the culture part and getting along with colleagues - makes everything so much more bearable
Im not as fortunate as you (VP at Apollo), since I'm an actual big boy and not some invisible Excel monkey nobody wants to see or speak to. So I actually have to talk during meetings and keep on camera on so the women see my pretty face and are motivated to do their best work.
I have taken the liberty of working from home from Ibiza, which makes my entire work "day" during the night. Frequently, I am clapping some 9s and 9.5s while "working".
Dam bud, I bet you pack 9 inches on the rollout too
Can someone please footnote to read OPs username before his actual comment?
fucking beast
Apollo doesn't have VP's. Bottom Bucket Hardo should know this.
i swear bbh says the funniest shit ... but is there actually any correlation between saying funny shit and having high NW in the future ?? only time will tell i guess
You think you are clever, but you just haven’t been staffed with assholes or staffed on a hairy project yet (I pray you don’t during your stint).
Staying up past midnight is the result of a bad manager and or culture. It’s not something you can weasel around like you describe. Although you can pushback eventually as a second year and some of what you describe is correct, it’s not always in your control and more often than not isn’t. Just a few examples:
Point being, yeah, what you say is true. Be middle bucket try to craftily dodge work, but also count your blessings my man. You clearly aren’t working with wildcard MD’s who demand 6am calls and ping analysts individually at odd hours in the night and fully expect responses/ will cc the entire team after you don’t respond at 1am with things like, “it shouldn’t take this long for me to get an answer” From my experience, this isn’t most MD’s, but every shop has 1 and if you have to work them it’s hell.
I was in FAS and had a similar experience to your #3. My then manager would constantly require me to sit in the office until 11pm or 12am after he agreed to me working from home. I think it's a bit unusual to see FAS analysts pulling 85-90 hours constantly on a live deal. That dude made one ex-analyst bring a sleep bag to the office (ex-analyst's a girl). Eventually seniors told the manager to dial it down a bit because you know, FAS is not investment banking.
Now I am in banking, no people don' ask me to sleep in a bag. That was pure bad culture.
FAS?
How did he get to VP if he had no idea what he was doing?
You have so much to learn and I’m both excited and sorry for you. Not trying to be patronizing, just this is a question anyone with banking experience will chuckle and be like “what an amazing question.”
First off, the structure of an investment bank’s employees:
Intern
Analyst
Associate
VP
Often, analysts begin right out of undergrad and there are sometimes, depending on a banks structure, 2nd or even 3rd year analysts. Being a 3rd year analyst doesn’t mean you are bad, it might mean your bank just has different levels they draw experience for new titles (think Citi might be like 2 year promotes with centerview and evercore being like 3).
Now a 3rd year analyst likely faced a very competitive undergrad interview process and had a 3.7+, learned the technicals, and now has 2+ years of working at the bank they have been at.
A VP might have had not great grades, gotten a job at a random consulting or accounting firm for 3-5 years, gone to business school (bottom of the m7) and became an associate at the investment bank, worked there for 2 years and got early promoted because the bank has a hard time keeping associates.
The analyst understands the industry better than the VP due to being there longer and is naturally just smarter. You also can have a situation where people lateral in from worse banks where they maybe have seen less processes, so they aren’t as aware of what goes on or lack confidence, so they defer to the analyst. Lastly, as an analyst, all the work eventually falls on you, so it’s easy for a vp to just say, “hey analyst 3, I want you to create a rough draft of the model and I will review it.” The analyst then might create the model and the VP not actually know how to model, but just sanity checks everything the analyst did.
In theory, you are exactly right! How the hell did the VP end up making almost a half a million dollars a year, while not really understanding how investment banking works. The truth is, banks and many large organizations promote on seniority not understanding or effectiveness. So, VP’s are often just people who have been in the organization post MBA for 3 years and who haven’t left. Personally, my view is generally really talented people eventually leave and the people that don’t are the people who are equally as surprised as you are that they are making a half a million dollars a year because they know they aren’t really that sharp or clever.
But also, VP is a weird role because at that point the job begins to switch from being an analysis person to a salesperson. The directors and MD’s are tasked with talking to people and bringing in business, not really understanding the model or helping the execution of a deal get done. So a VP might be crap at doing the execution, but eventually a very strong director or MD because they can bring in clients.
So in conclusion, how the hell does a VP get to VP without knowing how to do their job?
Off the backs of the competent analysts and associates who carry them and make sure nothing goes wrong. And this skill set is what an M7 MBA teaches you.
I've seen it in new VPs that lateralled from a different bank. Makes sense when you think about it - a VPs main job is to know what an MD is talking about / asking for, when he/she makes really hand-waivey comments like
"yeah, let's use that page, from the deal with the thing? you know what I'm talking about?
-Sent from Motorolla Razer"
To which the VP replys
"oh yeah, page 39 from that Blockbuster Online book we did back in Q3 '98. No problem"
Imagine there's a period of growing pains or "bad VP-ing" when they're just getting onboarded and going in the first 6 months
Middle buckets get promoted to Associates, as well. As long as they are producing good quality work and keeping up relationships within the team, they'll have no issue getting a promotion.
Top performers usually leave to the buyside
At top group at LAZ/EVR/PJT, maybe 10% of analysts in the group want to do PE. The rat race is pretty clear and most of us don’t want to do banking 2.0 with even bigger assholes managing workstreams. I’d rephrase and say the analysts who are most “prestige” focused and still have personal insecurity despite at being at a top IB are the ones focused on PE, the rest of us are focused on optimizing personal interests / money
How do you keep your computer on at all times so it doesn't fall asleep? I have a rotating fan attached to my mouse and probably do 4 hours of work per day at most.
All companies are different with their rules obviously but if you can download third party software then try "nosleep"
Caffeine as well
"I programmed my computer to make my Teams appear online at all times" - can you share how?
You can also run an excel macro so your computer is on at all times.
Just turn the teams status to always offline or away. Set some boundaries cucks.
Wouldn’t most of this end when your bank returns to in-person?
I'm not an expert on the PE/HF exit landscape - it waxes and wanes - but since your plan is to exit, where are you planning to go, and is it feasible if you aren't top bucket? It might be, or you might not care.
Curious to know whether you are working in an Industry Coverage or Product Group?
BOA guy wrote this
poonany
Pretty sure most competent institutions these days have methods for tracking productivity outside of simply is your Teams bubble green or not. My company does at least. Wouldn’t bank on that method for hiding for anyone FYI.
What else could they be tracking?
^ most IB seniors are incompetant in regards to management ability
There’s software that monitors your desktop activity, lot’s of it. Some take screenshots of your desktop and deduce productivity from the various screenshots throughout the day, some monitor mouse activity and applications opened/closed, etc.
The mannerism “if it’s too good to be true it probably is” definitely applies to simply shaking your mouse and keeping your bubble green. Now maybe your bank doesn’t have any of that software but tbh most companies do have that. Everyone knows the green bubble trick.
Explain, really doubt they can track
They take screenshots of your desktop throughout day on some and others track mouse movements, keyboard strokes, and applications open/closed. It’s fairly simple stuff and if you’re just shaking your mouse to keep it green it’ll easily show up
You would be stunned how inefficient Wall Street banks are. The lack of knowing a concrete output and endless boundary of client services means there’s no way to track output. Additionally, even if there were, senior bankers are way too stubborn to learn new technologies, so as a result most banks operate with the same tech that existed 10 years ago bar a few incremental improvements analysts could push through.
For context, there are numerous senior individuals at my firm that brag they have never opened ppt or excel. It’s just a joke really.
I don’t disagree on manager incompetence but these software packages are pretty basic, cheap, come along with some security suites so HR could share some productivity scores with your manager around review time. It definitely exists at many places and if your bank doesn’t currently have it they eventually will
Please lol…Banks have enough trouble making sure the shared drives don’t crash. I think their only
way of tracking (realistically) is your status on teams or whatever else is used.
Look it up yourself. My firm definitely has the software
Turn that shit teams bubble to white and never worry again lol. Tracking whether you are busy or not based on some status icon is the dumbest thing ever. as long as you complete you deliverables well and on time, who cares whether you are "online" or not
Obviously ppl like you are more ikely to succeed because they are clever. Never forget that quality > quantity
Probably just not in a sweaty group or you work with really considerate people. At least in my group, there is no way to "scheme" your way out of a heavy turn of comments dropped off at 9:00pm for a meeting the next day. Or working with a client across time zones with early morning meetings. Or an associate that turns comments at 11:00pm consistently. I've met people that can dodge more staffings, but just one staffing with the wrong person can derail this whole plan. Hope you are able to maintain this though--very envious.
Agreed, was able to get by pretty well in the fall but have gotten some high workload staffings/staffings with two MDs recently which have just made my life hell and thrown out all semblance of WLB I thought I had in this job.
Sounds like someone has some capacity
i just tell senior employees to ligma
This is actually the dream but I feel like realistically it’s not like this for most analysts in ibd
How would this adapt to an in-person environment? I start this June.
Anyone still scheming?
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