An2 at an EB and after this much time on the job its pretty clear most associates are really just here to “check” work and add useless extra work/pages.
I’d like to hear perspectives from other folks on what the role of an associate is at their bank? And maybe it would be helpful is more senior people could enlighten us on how associates get ranked if all they do is review.
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I see this a fair amount on here and I need to ask. Do you need to put together a book and you have first year associates not making/owning pages? Sounds kind of wild to me.
Its all levels of associates. Funny enough a few senior associates grind out pages/excel. But for the most part, the associates are just “reviewing” work while commenting on colors, spacing and alignment.
How long have you worked in banking? 6mo?
To be fair you should be getting colors, alignment, and spacing right at this point in your career.
I've worked with a good number of associates during my time in banking and honestly based on my experience as well as from my friends, only 10% of all associates are truly "good" at what they do while the other 90% are coasting and lying to themselves about their performance, thinking that they are adding a lot of value "reviewing" when in reality all they do is open PDFs, misinterpret MD instructions and flipping out when things go wrong as a result of their miscommunication and failure to take ownership.
I realize that being an associate, you need to "manage" the process and make sure the quality of work going to the VP is high -- however, a lot of lazy associates (90%+) don't realize that managing upwards and content creation, especially when it comes to important things, aren't mutually exclusive. They just use this as an excuse to not be "in the weeds" and offload work onto analysts who are already overwhelmed. There needs to be a re-framing of associate responsibilities in this industry and I think that this type of behavior is why there was so much attrition during COVID and why so many analysts check out the moment they hit their 2nd year.
The good associates I've worked with obviously weren't as deep as I was in the analysis but did split work to try and lighten my workload especially during busy times whether it be making some slides, doing market research, playing with the model, etc. The bad ones just let you drown despite knowing that you're on 5 other projects.
My advice is: if you have an associate who is offloading every drop of work onto you without taking ownership and doesn't give good guidence / doesn't know what hes talking about half the time -- just do exactly what is asked of you and nothing more, deliver a quality of work that is consistent with the quality of the associate and at the end of the day, hes the one who will be responsible for producing shit work
“Misinterpret MD directions … failure to take ownership” hits different
Some aso’s constantly creating shit MDs never asked bc they don’t actually do the output even after you reiterate the MD’s direct directions from the email
Fucking remarkable how much time is wasted bc insecure ASOs want to show “value add” by adding more logos and different slide formats
Same exact problems here- would say I enjoy working with maybe 25% of aso’s in our office. I used to hear the adage that aso’s should know how to do everything that the analyst does (and well), but I don’t think that’s true anymore. The job is now delegating and scrolling WSJ lmao.
I’ve noticed that I’m starting to get more staffings directly with senior bankers as time goes on- sounds like seniors want to get more turns of the deck in with actual value adds rather than wait a week for v1 because the associate has had me go on a wild goose chase for shit that they didn’t ask for (and end up red penning).
I think the COVID analyst exodus had some pretty big implications- analysts have had pretty much zero mentorship for a couple of years now, nobody does A2A anymore, and the cycle continues with banks overhiring garbage MBAs. Once the new class comes in I really hope mine can help change that since we’ve had it easier than current AN2s
You’ve never worked in a toxic group. Generally, speaking, toxic groups are top down. If the MD promited the associate from AN to AS, they sure as hell aren’t going to believe that the shitty work product is coming from them and not the inability of the Analyst to follow directions. Was in this exact environment and it was horrid.
One of the associates I work with is literally like Houdini in the way that he manages to escape responsibility and get out of doing shit. It's honestly remarkable. I fucking hate his guts but you have to tip your cap to someone who is that slippery and still considered a top performer. Another associate I work with is the most patient person on the planet and gives really clear guidance and feedback. It honestly feels like he is invested in analysts succeeding and learning things. I'll let you all guess which one is A2A and which one is MBA.
Made me chuckle. But really, fuck Houdini.
I worked with an awesome associate on a $2b live deal. She was an associate 2/3 and did a lot of work. She was staffed with me (an intern at the time), two first-year analysts, and another associate. Basically, she took care of all parts of the IM she knew were very important and would be difficult for the rest of us to get right. She did a lot of checking too, but we also had a VP who was pretty hands-on and reviewed everything in detail. She did this while being on 3-4 other deals and she managed to be out of the office at 8-10pm every day. Extremely talented. I wish all associates were like her.
I'm about to start FT at a bank and my question is, can you ever call out the associate that does nothing? Can you got to the VP and say "hey I'm drowning and MBA associate is not doing anything". How would that be perceived? Or do you have a reasonable discussion with the associate face-to-face saying I need you to do some work on this?
I worked with an associate like this over the summer and didn't say shit because I wanted a return. Now that I'm joining FT wondering if it's dangerous to bring attention to this.
As a first year I would never approach the vp and say my associate doesn’t do anything. It won’t ever end well for you - I saw this when a bunch of my analyst class tried it. In the end, your associate is responsible for your work and for the fix 6 months you get a pass on what however slow you are and no matter how bad your pages are.
In my experience, the way to tactfully give the vp the hint is when you’re jammed send your to-do list / whatever else you’re working on (task, deadline, senior, estimated time) and ask what the deadline is. For my first 6 months I also had a daily call / meeting with my vp every day for 10 minutes (because there was massive turnover) where I went over everything I had to do that night, the deadlines, and what order I need to do things in.
It sucks when your associate doesn’t help, but the tasks that are given to interns / first years aren’t hard and are critical for you to figure out how to do yourself (comps, formatting, text comments, random admin tasks, etc).
Yeah I think this is a solid play. Wait a few weeks but then go for it.
troll was too obvious
classic associate
Nah just grow a pair and tell your associate to take some of the book. I’ve honestly never had an aso say no when I say “with all my other assignments I’m not sure I can get to this before deadline. Would you be able to take pgs a-f and I do the rest? That would already be a big help”
For particularly unhelpful associates I have listed out item by item / page by page who is assigned what (to show that everything was assigned to me)
P 1 - Me
P2 - Me
…
P 9 - Me
You do understand that if your associate contributed more, you wouldn't suddenly be done with work at 9pm and have less to do. You would just get more staffings to fill the time.
They'll give you as much work as they think they can get out of you. Whether or not others are pulling their weight really has no baring on how much work you get.
The comments are largely true, but something that’s not talked about is the KPI differences between analysts and associates.
I tried to do as much as I could myself for the first 6 months-1 year (which paid huge dividends later on). However, I started delegating more as time went on, especially after a new class joined. My overall work product improved significantly, as I was able to spend the bulk of my time checking analyst work for errors and thinking about what to include in terms of industry commentary, etc. (NOT creating new pages, I hate associates who do that).
The harsh truth is, seniors do not care who on the team is doing what, as long as the work quality is good. Associates should know how to do everything in the event of emergencies/jam jobs, but the high-performing associates I know are typically the ones who best leverage their analysts and spend their time doing VP-level work and managing the process. The ones who try to “act like analysts” often get burned because there’s no second layer of review to catch errors or deal with nuances.
If there’s something straightforward I’ve done a million times like benchmarking charts, comps, etc, you bet I’m giving it to the analyst. There’s a lot of other stuff that associates are expected to opine on as they get more experienced. Should we use XYZ as a comp, how to frame research/industry commentary, etc. Associates are often “graded” more on their performance on those kind of tasks, while producing good work product is a given.
Not excusing shit associates who are essentially pass-through entities. Rather pointing out the thought process of an experienced associate and how they have different motivations.
Fellow associate here - this is the truth. Exactly how my approach has evolved over time. I did pretty much everything myself the first 12-15 months then started delegating repetitive tasks that I've done many times before or that are clear analysts' tasks, and I've been honing my focus on checking quality product and doing more difficult analyses, as well as managing the process. VPs and directors are hugely thankful for that and the strategy pays dividends.
Of course if we're in a jam I'll do analyst work but I think we're past doing that on a regular basis at the 2 year mark or you don't evolve in the role.
If an associate need to do an analysts work, it’s not that the analyst needs help cause he is so busy and drowning, but it’s more they are drowning cause they don’t know how to swim. And instead of learning how to swim, just wants to be thrown a life jacket with someone paddling for them.
It would be nice if analysts actually knew how to format a slide at birth and no one had to comment. But 80% of them make something so lazily that it actually hurts peoples eyes. Pick up a printed magazine next time and see if they look as whack as your creative slides.
This is true, but appendix slides also don’t win business so idk why someone gets paid 300-400k to just look over work and layout formats on slides, sounds like a good job. VP/Director even better if you don’t have to generate revenue then you can just review the reviewed work and comment on commented slides
You sure do know a lot about the industry for a first year analyst…I feel like you could make MD next year
My Associate gets his hands dirty a lot and often takes the blame. Realistically its completely up to the person.
These comments are wild to me. I was an MBA associate and I was actively in models, building pages for pitches and CIMs, and reviewing. Now, I came from a year of valuation and advisory work and did a long time in public accounting and TAS, so I may be an outlier in that I just do shit that needs to get done.
I start as a VP at a new firm on Monday, and my expectation is that I will continue to do “grunt work” as needed to push deals along. The “I’m to good for that” attitude is for fucking losers.
Not sure what banks y'all are working at, but at my EB, the associates grind almost equally as hard as the analysts. If they are delegating more work to analysts (which is fair), they're just staffed on more projects. In crunch time, they're building slides and reviewing models. I also have yet to feel like the comments I've received from my assos have been frivolous at all - they do have a better pulse on what the seniors want (especially for vague af requests). Maybe I've just been lucky (admittedly have mostly worked with either A2A's or extremely technical MBA associates who can crank).
I was an associate and I can say that if it was a senior analyst + 1st year associate that really doesn't add much.... If you have a 1st year (or usually 2nd year) analyst then yes you need an associate imo.
think it depends from shop to shop.
i'm titled as an "associate" but i literally do analyst work and double checking their work to "help them learn" is even more work. doesn't help that MD/D/VP is always telling me to "step up" and 'think more big picture and client management" when i have to ensure quality of work by analyst and even do some of his work.
edit: maybe it's a A2A thing. not so sure about MBA associates, but most A2As i've seen are generally okay
This is exactly what analyst don’t get it. They expect work split to be 50/50 or 40/60 all the time
Receive work email, immediately reply “will do” (note: this will be the most demanding part of the job - any lag time greater than 90 seconds will leave you DANGEROUSLY exposed to the analyst potentially confirming), then immediately forward email / ping analyst and ask for completion as soon as humanly possible.
Receive analyst work, say you’ll make a minor direct edit, then send it back up as own. Throw analyst under bus if anything isn’t perfect. Take full credit if everything is fine.
Kiss ass for a few hours in between the work day. Never miss a full hour-long lunch. Never miss a 6 pm dinner at home. Never miss a weekend trip with MBA buddies (and never miss a chance to talk about it). Never log off on Fridays past 4pm.
Welcome to “BB” investment banking in NYC.
is this really how BB life works or are you exaggerating? do associates at BB's do negotiation, committee stuff, etc? Wondering what "associate" level responsibilities really are asides from assisting on slides/models
I'm an MBA associate. So, I think that a couple things often happen:
I think these come together to form a view of associates as do-nothings. Probably not unearned in some cases, but not the norm I think. After 3 years, it gives me heart palpitations to not know exactly how the math is running for our pages, but I think many just ostrich their way through (head in sand) and hope the math is right. I will say though, the worst is when someone comes in from either side with a bad attitude. When an associate thinks they're a senior VP generating pages OR when an analyst (especially a 1st year...) takes threads like this to heart and treats every MBA like a waste of time. Both are recipes for disaster and late nights.
You seem like an associate any analyst would want to work with. Used a rationale line of thinking to explain why something is the way it is, instead of replying with an aggressive/rude comment because could not handle any questioning of your superiority.
what are your day to day responsibilities if no slides/model? do you just delegrate? im wondering what associate level responsibilities are
I will sometimes build the model, especially if it's a more complex transaction, then ask (force lol) the analyst to walk thru with me before handing off the model to them. I'll also generate slides if a firedrill, or if they are primarily text based (as in, "take a stab at some bullets", not transcribe handwriting lol). I'll also generate slides if it's an add that I think should happen but wasn't in the ask - mostly bc I know what I want and I'm not gonna make an analyst stay up til 3, making mistakes, on something that wasn't asked for.
Outside of that, my job is to translate what might be unclear guidance ("give me a page on the [ ] landscape and recent developments, a page on valuations, op benchmarking", etc) and create clear actionable guidance for the analyst (sketching out pages, pointing where to find information, basically laying it all out) . Then I review, almost always in PDF as that's what the MD is gonna see. First I'm gonna look for 1) obvious mistakes, then 2) places where we need to fill out info to make the message clearer (add a legend, add a FN, specify cash number and bridge, etc) 3) if the math makes sense . I think the problem with most bad associates is they stop at 1 (we need a period on this footnote). If it's higher stakes, I'm gonna ask for the backup and check the analyst's math. The reality is that there is almost always a number of mistakes in any deck, even from the best analysts, because you're doing the work while on little sleep and high stress. It's a TEAM SPORT. So we need to treat it that way.
I don’t know, I came in as an associate with the attitude that the analysts know more than I do and I have a lot to learn. That said, I treat the job as if I’m an analyst because I will never get those valuable analyst years under my belt and I want to show them that I can grind wherever possible. I always break up the work evenly and try not to bother analysts wherever possible and take on as much work as I can because I know as bad as I have it, they have it marginally worse. I do my best to learn from them to learn and win credibility. Down the line they respect you more and will enjoy working with you and for you.
There is so much about bad associates on this forum. Why is it that so many associates are bad? Are you guys mainly referencing MBA associates?
It is mostly analysts bitching, specifically analysts at tier 2 and below banks/groups. That’s why you see these overrepresented. Look at some of the recent threads of analysts complaining about being asked to take notes on internal calls, something that shouldn’t even need to be asked to be done
As you move through the ranks you’ll realize that every position thinks that their job is the hardest and [insert position not yours] are useless freeloaders. Ie analysts think associates and vps do nothing, associates think analysts and associates do nothing, etc. welcome to the jungle
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