I'm a first year analyst and was asked by my staffer to take on another live deal despite already having several on my plate. I'm only working around 10 hours a day but I have plausible deniability given how many deals I'm on. How does one artfully push back to your staffer when you reach capacity?
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What does "several" mean in this context?
1) it depends on your current workload and how many live deals you’re actually on. You have to have enough on your plate where your staffer knows (or at least would believe) that you’re at capacity
2) I think the key is always to make the point of “I don’t have the capacity to do a good job on this. If I take this on my quality of work will decline across all of my other deals, and I don’t want to do that to the team”
Assuming you're at a BB or equivalent and working 10 hours on a day on a regular basis (i.e., this wasn't your one slow week and you're usually working 16+ hour days), the honest answer is that if you're genuinely pushing back in this scenario, it will be better all around if you find a different job.
Trust me - people might not call you out on it, particularly if you're a diversity hire, but they know roughly how many hours you're working generally have a good sense as to when people are lying about it. How I've seen this play out in the past is that people haven't said anything to that person and then at the end of the year, fight hard to make sure they got a $0 bonus (not bottom bucket, actually 0).
Why should anyone be punished for working 10 hours a day let's be honest. Nevertheless 16 hours is simply inhumane. I realize we are talking banking but sometimes I wonder if people in the industry think they are just invincible and realize the fragility and potential shortness of life is serious possibility. I know there's no good in thinking this way but damn sometimes you can't help but wonder. Maybe it's irrational fear. Who knows just talking to myself here really.
You're asking why you shouldn't lie about your hours so that you don't have to do your share of the workload?
Obviously everyone should have time away from the office, but you knew what you signed up for and that is not 50 hour work weeks. If that's what you're looking for, that's completely reasonable and you can get that exact experience doing corp dev. IB pays twice as much because of the longer hours and faster pace. It's not reasonable to expect the higher pay but not be willing to put in the work required to get there.
You can't push back as a first year until you are actually underwater. You don't have plausible deniability - don't think the staffer won't call your other deal teams to see what your true workload is if you say you're at capacity.
Save the push for when you are actually busy, or you'll be the boy who cried wolf and will be staffed more even when you are truly jammed. You get more freedom to do this after your first bonus.
Look, I agree with your comment that 16 hours a day is inhumane, but your staffer won't. If you are actually disliking the job/workload, that's something you should look at separately from trying to punt staffings. Maybe a different part of the bank or a move to a new job would help.
I have no plans of staying here more than 2 years and don't think the tradeoff in hours/effort is worth it for top bucket. What is the downside here?
The staffer will talk to your other deal teams, realize you're not doing much, and you will end up getting the deal anyway. And then you've used your first year get out of staffing free card when you're not that busy. Next time when you're really busy and you say so, the staffer won't believe you.
If you want to work less there are plenty of ways. Don't respond on weekend mornings, give yourself a break instead of sending that next turn off right away, be slow to respond to emails. Top bucket isn't really worth the hours, agreed. But making the staffer hate you is not the way.
Bingo.
Always good to have a VP or senior associate on your side. When I would get asks for nightmare staffings, I had a couple of VPs I could go to and say "Getting asked to be put on Project Clusterfuck - can you protect me on this?" VP would then hit up whoever made the staffing ask to say that he needed all of my capacity on whatever we were working on.
Never gets old https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/files/DLJ Too Busy.pdf
In all honesty, it varies by group, staffer, etc...
Bed checks??
Don't answer the call, and tell your VP or MD you just took a dump for 40 minutes and now are on your way to see a doctor, or buy a banana. That statement would be physiologically repulsive that your seniors now associate them calling you with you taking a d**p.
Mission accomplished.
Definitely don’t make it too obvious. Every year we have analysts who try to do as little work as possible and obviously ur colleagues are not dumb… we manage analysts every year and have seen all types of people. We didn’t say anything at all in order to be cordial but on performance review day we slaughtered him. Like what the guy said above, we make sure he got near to $0 bonus. Some analysts are smart but just too darn lazy. Don’t treat your associates/VP politeness for ignorance - they can easily find out about your workload.
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