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'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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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