Weekly Hours London
Currently a A1 at a top mm firm in London. Was curious what everyone's hours are currently like? For me, averaging around 60 hrs per week, pretty much all pitching midweek stuff, no weekend work
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At a MM bank in London - pulling consistent 80+ hour weeks
Damn that’s rough, what sector are you covering?
Real Assets style group
80+ here too with weekend work, American BB.
Currently at MS and it's a complete sweatshop
Have heard the same from everyone I know at MS (across teams).
MM and pulling 90+ per week. Covering natres
A1 at GS and would say the average is 90 hours a week. My best weeks have been around 80 and my bad ones are around 110. Consistently pulling these hours does grind you down heavily.
Out of curiosity, is it common to pull 60 hours a week at your bank or are you just in a very good position at the moment?
Which team? Analysts in other groups experience similar hours?
Industrials. As far as I know, hours are pretty similar across GS. You won't find a group at GS working 60 hours a week. Have heard that Natural Resources (as far as you don't work on infra-related stuff) and Consumer are a little bit better though.
I'd say it's pretty common for 70 hours across the bank bar the restructuring arm who are more 100 hours.
Am considering applying restructuring for summers. I was under impression hours would be similar to M&A, perhaps even a bit better, but this sounds brutal.
do the hours improve as you get more senior? what kind of hours are An2 and associates pulling?
and does GS protect your saturdays? what about fridays after 9pm?
They do improve, but only marginally. No major improvement for An2 and I would say associates are around 80 hours a week in my group. At VP the hours go down to around 70. Not that great, but as a VP you do get more flexibility with your hours. Difficult to say for MDs as they travel a lot but when they are in the office it's not uncommon to see them leave quite late. We have partners that rarely leave the office before 11 pm and MDs are often active on emails until 1 am or so but they often start earlier (around 7-8 am vs. around 9 am for the rest of us). With that said, hours and flexibility do get better but at a bank like GS, this job will always be very rough in terms of hours and availability.
Saturdays are pretty protected and they try to avoid Saturday work unless absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, Sunday is almost a regular workday and I have worked ~90% of Sundays. People try to leave earlier on Fridays but if there is work that needs to be done, no one will tell you to go home and enjoy your Friday night.
Bump
As a junior if you are not working 80+ hours you are probably at the wrong place
60 hours feels very light for any level of analyst.
I would expect a top MM shop to be busier than the bulge brackets at present, the main activity in London and the UK is Mid-Market, which has held up far better than big ticket mandates.
Consumer groups or some Sponsors groups might be lighter. Both are more "lifestyle" groups as a generalisation (certain top teams at certain banks are obviously busier).
Either you're not getting flow, you're not pitching a lot, or it's not a "top" shop. Or a combination of the 3.
In theory yes, but in reality we are still pulling 90-hour weeks on average in my group because we're pitching for everything under the sun. We're also spending a lot of time on semi-live deals (i.e. boil-the-ocean strategic reviews where every M&A target and potential buyer for every single division needs to be analyzed or mandates where it is obvious that the client doesn't have a solid plan on what they want to accomplish or the means to execute on it).
This is my point.
In up times people are busy with execution of mandates. So you are busy.
In down times - MDs just throw sh*t at the wall and hope something sticks (mainly for optics so it is harder to fire them). So you are busy.
Whatever the market, with the exception of ECM - you are busy. Nature of the beast. Hence - 60 hour weeks is light.
Left a US BB just over a year ago - would say my hours were averaging 75-90hrs per week, across A1 and A2, when working across pitching and live execution. When it was pure execution, and particularly towards the final deadline, I'd say average was more around 90-100hrs. Over 2yrs, I'd say a handful of weeks were 110-120hrs (and these absolutely kill you, both physically and mentally)
Currently averaging 50-60 hours at LMM firm in London. Although this is exceptionally quiet
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