What does working 80-100 hours actually FEEL like?
I’m in my third year of uni and when I was networking I always heard bankers talking about working more than 80 hours a week. I just cannot wrap my head around how there could be so much work to work more than the equivalent of two full time jobs. How do they get through with such little sleep? Do they actually track their hours in a week or is it more a gut feeling? Do the hours go down as you get better at the job or do you just get flooded with more work?
Like shit
Imagine you have a hot gf with a massive dump truck at home but you don’t have time to smash.
I’m sure you can find 2 minutes out of your day.
I need to Google what he wrote!
You joke but your libido gets completely shot when truly busy far above 80.
The difference between 80 hours/week and 100 is huge. 80 is doable for a stretch… I’ve gone through stretches in the 80s multiple times. By contrast, I worked 100+ for a few weeks at a time once and it made me borderline hallucinate. Take the example below:
- Mon-Thurs: 9am-1am
- Friday: 9am-8pm
- Sunday: 10 hours sprinkled throughout the day
This adds up to 85 hours. Don’t get me wrong, these hours definitely suck to pull weeks at a time. But, you can get ~6 hours of sleep during the week, no work Saturday, and some downtime on Sunday. Would also note when people say they “work” 80 hours, that typically includes some downtime being on call waiting for stuff where you can recharge a bit (in addition to Saturday).
Now let’s look at a 100 hour week:
- Mon-Thurs: 9am-3am
-Friday: 9am-midnight
-Saturday: 6 hours sprinkled in
- Sunday: 8 hours sprinkled in
You don’t get enough sleep during the week, and you also don’t get Friday night and the weekend day to recharge. I’ve always maintained that 100 hour weeks are not sustainable on a consistent basis, and those who claim they do this either are lying or have a lot of downtime / dicking around that they count as “work.”
The most I’ve ever done is pull a 130 hour week and damn near died. Having gone through this experience, I am not shocked at all that a few people have died doing this job. My body felt extremely weird and heart palpitations are very real.
TLDR: 80 hours is borderline sustainable on a consistent basis, although it sucks. 100 is not.
What were your typical hours closer to?
An average week for me is in the 70s
I get this is a hard job but at the point your heart is throbbing, can't you tell a senior hey man I'm not feeling to well need to catch up on a few hours of sleep today. Like even a live deal you can't find time to nap, are teams not considerate of your mind going numb. Again I get the less sleep and no social life but dying ??
100+ hours:
You feel like a zombie, no feelings, no nothing. Also, the heart starts acting weird - palpitations and stuff, body hurts, you feel sick, can’t think etc
80 hours:
It’s fine in the sense that your body doesn’t feel like you’re dying, and you can handle it mentally. But it’s still not fun
80 hour weeks are paradise. You average 9-2am Mon-Thu, 9-6 Fridays and, throw in a few hours Sat-Sun so life is still manageable. The 100 hour weeks kill you inside out
Agreed. I can do 80 hour weeks all of the time no problem. 100+ hours crushes you. There is HUGE difference.
Considering 80 hour weeks paradise is outrageous lol. It really shows how bad the standard is
Someone mentioned above but at 100+ your heart doesn’t function properly. Your eyes are heavy, hard to string together thoughts / sentences. Everything you do begins to take longer because of this.
In the end it is all worth it to make sure the MD likes his little PDF document.
80 assuming a 14 hour Sunday isn't even bad as other posters have noted: 9-11 S-Th and 9-7 Fri, that is not a fun week but that's not even remotely a hard week. Once you cross 80 in to deal sprints for weeks on end of 110+ things start to fade.
I can recall individual moments from intense periods like the month preceding announcement on public mega mergers, but largely everything just meshes together. You don't see your apartment/SO on M-F but for the 15 minutes it takes to fall asleep and the 15 it takes to shower and leave, the weekend is worse because you never step away from your bed or desk, missing out on invaluable transition space time/commiseration. You are on calls all day and too stressed otherwise to meaningfully connect with your SO, if they are home.
Everything you eat is delivered by a courier. You don't even think of working out let alone try to slip away. As people noted your body starts to play tricks on you, screaming for you to get rest: heart palpitations, shadow flashes in your periphery late at night, tendon pain in your hands from mashing the keys.
The 120+ weeks, while rare, really test you. Anyone who has actually worked these and has not thought of quitting on the spot is likely lying. 17 hour days 9-2 every day of the week - of course not evenly distributed to ensure maximum sleep cycle disruption.
Once its over it takes you about a week to start feeling human again.
Agreed. After doing a 130 hour week… I am no longer shocked that a few people have died doing this job. The heart palpitations are very real. It can also take you to a dark place mentally
Man I wonder if there's a significant portion of former bankers suffering from Dementia and/or Alzheimer's. There has to be some long term effects right?
I got on the treadmill to do a little jog before going to bed after a week at >100 hours and felt what was like an electric shock in my whole body every time I took a step. Decided I should just go to sleep instead.
And to what the others said the heart doesn’t feel good. You know you’re doing something horrifically unhealthy and it’s no longer a surprise people die from doing this at length
Everyone on here commenting on their heart palpitations, wonder if highly trained athletes like Usain Bolt would feel the same effects after working a 100 hour work week
Likely yes. It has to do with disruptions in the autonomic nervous system
80 is low key a relief for me these days. The jump between 80-100 is what kills you. You either quit or become numb to the pain.
Reading some of these comments suggesting that 80 hours is a "good week" is disturbing.
100+ hour work weeks are hell, and there is no getting around it. Whenever you read about bankers killing themselves or dying from a heart attack, it's more often than not a direct result of the 100+ hour work culture. It will mess up your physical and mental wellbeing in ways you can’t fully anticipate before you are there.
100-hour work weeks, or even 80-hour work weeks, should be the exception, not the norm. For this to change, clients must start holding advisors accountable for fostering a more sustainable and humane work environment, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Let's not pretend 80 hours are paradise
Do not normalise this
Also volatility of hours is important, imagine you have one or 2 nights to 3 or 4am, rest of the week chill. Those 2 days will fuck you up a lot, you feel weak and bad physically mentally the day after a stretch
And you're by no means rewarded for it. 5he higher ups want to see you fresh and on top of things. How easy do you think it is to come across as on top, confident and ready days like that?
Protect yourselves. Days like these are never rewarded and self-penalizing.
Ironically, putting in the hours sometimes makes you look inefficient and bad at your job as if you're dragging the team
It's a very unhealthy paradox
This is incredibly accurate
100% agreed on volatility and unpredictability of the hours - it's what I always tell college kids who are confident they'll be able to handle the hours since they work an on-campus job, are on a sports team, do all these extracurriculars, and consistently study until midnight or later, etc. Just not the same when you're the one controlling the schedule and can plan things out in advance fairly well, and then you don't have the mental drain of unexpectedly missing out on events that you thought you could go to but had to cancel last minute or leave early for.
Original poster above
To align with what others have said, indeed in ibd it also depends on what you work on and from an internship I had in M&a earlier on I do recall these late afternoon wait for comments times
Have however moved to levfin - our days are intense and the real work slips into the night
Am not gonna say it's harder than ibd, it's all person amd team and project dependent, but man in can be intense
You need to learn to manage yourself, expectations and your image just as much as your actual performance
Agree, came to this thread following my first (and will be my only) 130 hour week looking for solace. Straight up abusive and insane, also sucks seeing the Baird article drop this same week and knowing I’m basically those guys at this point.
Staffer gave me off for a few days after the week wrapped and genuinely feel I woke up from a coma. My gf was the only person I interacted with and barely sent her two or three texts a day. My MD was right alongside me and doing the same hours (maybe 120 instead of 130) and because he was in the trenches with me was why I kept going. Very unique situation with a deal and respect that MD a ton after this week. We joked about how an 80 hour week would feel so nice afterwards, but important to acknowledge 80 hour weeks should not be normalized. Even 80 hour weeks are exploitative and would be mitigated if banks hired more bodies, anything beyond 100+ is down right criminal. Don’t end up as a headline guys.
What’s disturbing is reading how common people have Friday night off (not logging off at midnight) and most of their day Saturday… I need a new job, thought we all made it out at midnight
Protected Saturdays not being protected is worse than just being told you dont have protected saturdays
Here‘s a few symptoms I have experienced in particularly bad weeks
- tiredness, always having to push myself to get up and keep going
- concentration problems
- ongoing head ache
- goosebumps throughout the day
- feeling as though my hair is going to fall out
- sweating
- face starts twitching
- stomach feeling like it’s turning around and being squeezed
- blood-shot eyes
- heart palpitations and abnormal blood pressure
- getting a cold easily as immune system is weakened
Feel like a lot of this is due to energy drinks. But if you didn't take energy drinks, you would just fall asleep at the desk. Yeah its happened to me once or twice so I just go to a random room and take a nap when it seems like I can. But I set an alarm for 20 minutes and if I dont get a message I go back to sleep.
.
I nearly fall asleep multiple times a day
Have to go around and take a walk and I'm good for another few hours
Thankfully, haven't actually dozed off yet
was horrid, i became the worst version of myself
Can attest to this
It's like being awake all the time. So imagine you go to sleep and feel refreshed. In a week like this you go to sleep and wake up feeling like you never went to sleep. You know how you pull an all nighter in college and you have this weird feeling of tiredness in the morning but you aren't sleepy? Yeah thats what it feels like every day for a week and then on Saturday (if you're lucky) you sleep until 3 PM. Then you realize you fucked your sleep cycle so this shit never ends.
I've interned in banking and remembered it as brutal. But back then it was only a summers so the overall vibe was much more fratty and frankly at that age it doesn't feel *so* bad for that short period of time.
I then went to MBB and witnessed a variety in workload, with recently rather "chill" hours (8-9 pm max). I would say it gets really nasty from anywhere after 11.30 PM. Bare in mind these are already insane hours but there are lightyears of difference between clocking out at 11.10 pm vs say 0.40 AM. The latter repreatedly I just wake up feeling really "greasy" I would say describe it best. Just makes me feel dull, kind of messy, not really sharp. My eyes are red, my face looks less fresh, my general attire looks and feels really worn out.
The thing about consulting for me was that these hours happened occasionally (say 2-3 weeks, but then not even everyday but like 2 days a week) with weekends always completely off. Then I went on the beach again for 1-2 weeks where I logged off around 7-8 pm and recharged.
This is what amazes me about bankers. Working occasionally until the wee hours feels bad but is doable, but consistently doing it over months while simultanously not even having the full weekend off is insane to me.
...as someone a bit further down the road:
These weeks of long working hours, couple with intensity from tight deadlines, demanding clients/Mds etc are heavy. Here and then ok, understandable and doable. But not easy on your body and mind. Over longer periods not sustainable on your body, mind or wellbeing (relationships, interests, motivation, etc.).
In general, when they lead to great accomplishments you feel great (exhilarating sometimes), which helps to get around it. When it leads to failure it is double crushing. In any event, the recovery (physical and psyc.) is many times tricky and it may trigger other issues (disruption sleeping patterns, etc.) that may lead, trigger or facilitate other issues (cronic conditions).
The issue is, at the moment, particularly when young and healthy, you don't feel or realise it's full effects and brush it over.
Later you start receiving the invoice for these exhausting weeks. Some health issues appear, which may (or may not, as many are multi factorial or even non related) have a connection to these weeks. And you wonder.
You know that scene in the Harry Potter movies where the dementor wraiths suck out his soul.....yeah like that.
Working 80-100 hours in any job is horrible - here's some differences though for banking vs. PE. Overall both horrible; same shit, different toilet.
Banking: I felt like a Zombie. I will counteract this though with the fact that many times in banking, you have 80-100 hour weeks but with some solid downtime during the week (i.e., waiting from 5pm-10pm for the dreadful late night comments). There is a certain stress that comes with the waiting, along with the firedrills. I would literally sleep with my phone on my forehead as I'd only be sleeping from 4am-6:30am, expecting MDs comments by 7am. Strangely, I will say that even as a 2nd year analyst, the "environment" was still fairly light and fratty. Yes, tensions ran high sometimes (like in any finance job), but there was a solid amount of interaction between teams, consistent chatting with VPs/associates, etc. But yes, there is no doubt that after a week or two of this, you're half asleep fighting for your life. And you could care less about the "good" atmosphere when all you want is just 8 hours of sleep on a Friday night.
PE: There is no down time during deal sprint, to the point you don't even feel like a zombie. I've never had days go by as fast as they have during PE deal sprints. Basically something to do (with urgency) from 8am-2am, including weekends, for about 2 months straight (if you get to second round). In some ways that's actually good, there's no "dread" of waiting for comments like there is in banking. Quite literally 0 time to even mentally or emotionally process. Sadly (as many have noted on this forum) not a fratty/fun environment where you "share the pain" with your deal team. Extremely stuffy / corporate enviornment more broadly (particularly at UMM/MF). Downside to this is that the pain of 90-100 hour MONTHS (and again, this is REAL 90 hours worked, and if you've done this for weeks on end I can't really even articulate how exhausting this is) hits you like a fucking truck at the end of your deal. The exhausion you (and many of my friends) feel after stretches like this is pretty horrendous; just an absolute physical and mental and emotional crash. Legit gives you burnout for 3-4 months afterwards. Anyways, long story short is that they are both atrocious in their unique ways.
Another thing you gotta realize about these hours — they genuinely mess with your mind.
My worst ever week included travel & a team hotel that resulted in back to back nights of sleeping at 3am and waking up at 6:30am, and then sleeping at 4am and waking up at 6:30am. This isn’t common, but if it happens, it sucks.
The day after that second night, I was genuinely depressed. Someone would give me mildly pointed feedback and I’d feel the urge to blow up / quit / give up on life altogether. I felt like I was losing my mind. Luckily, I could recognize that these thoughts weren’t “mine”, but in the moment it was kind of scary.
If you are going into a career like this, try your absolute hardest to be in a good / happy place mentally before you start. If you go in depressed, you’ll be crushed by the end.
Its like playing MW3 and the final killcam is you dying from a tomahawk
Instead of a tomahawk it's just your MD writing a big ass X across the page you stayed up until 3am working on bc your try hard VP thought it was value add.... pain
Not in IB but consulting and this happens here countless of times too - lol.
My favorite part is when we go through the deck with the partner and arrive at the page the AP/principal wanted to have newly created and you already can see the dislike on the partners face. AP goes on to defend the page and in a matter of milliseconds changes his tone to "we can also take it out again" in the most observant way.
Worked at a notorious energy sweatshop. Typical hours were 9 AM - 3 AM, and I pulled two 120 hour weeks back to back once. After that 80 hour weeks were paradise. In a weird way you get used to it, if I got 6 hours of sleep I felt totally refreshed.
Lemme guess - Jefferies or JPM?
genuine question:
Why can you not just work 9-midnight 7 days a week for your 105 hr work week? seems more doable and less unhealthy?
what am I missing here?
Work ebbs and flows so you’re at the mercy of someone at a higher level - have heard that IB does have more downtime than PE since there are pockets where you’re waiting. But, you still feel like you’re on the clock since it’s the middle of the day and you can’t really go anywhere / do anything. My understanding is that at the VP+ level, you're more in a management role over execution. Definitely more stressful by far but absolute weekly hours are lower and there is more flexibility.
Because you would very quickly become burnt out. You’d quite literally would have 0 freetime or downtime the entire week
ur mom
Imagine ur heart is palpitating and u get an email from a kid "Hey just wanted to let you know submitted my app! any advice ?"
Maybe keep the energy with your MD causing that palputation in the first place lol
I have a question for investment bankers since I was just reading about the BofA banker who died cause of 100+ but was reporting 60 hours: Why not just report the real hours? I understand maybe those who want to stay in ib care but those who are in it for exit why not report it as it is? If JPM says 80 cap, and u tell your MD u beyond ur cap can't he legally just not do anything to you? Are you scared to get fired? Or you'll just get a shit bonus? Someone explain
There was not a hours cap at any of the banks before the BofA associate’s death last year. That’s a new phenomenon.
Most people do not want to look weak while on a live deal and believe there might be unspoken repercussions to tapping out. Banks legally can’t do anything but they can instill bias in your reviews, etc.
Actually I just remembered JPM said the cap doesn't apply to live deals so one couldn't do much about it anyway. I'm just surprised ib has kept so many lawsuits from happening
but most of all, I think it’s hard to describe the mental toll that working multiple 100+ hour weeks in a row will take on you…by the end (if you make it), you’re either (I) on drugs, (II) a true psychopath, or (iii) depressed and could quit on the spot
To piggyback on a lot of what has been said…
Working 80 hours:
- sucks but I was doing it for majority of two years in IB and was overall fine
- able to sneak out to gym or occasional dinner on weeknights (while panicking about checking email)
- make plans on the weekend (with consistent potential of cancelling)
- can go out / drink on the weekends if that’s what you’re into
- sleep 6ish hours a day, which isn’t actually enough but you’re able to convince your body it is for now, wake up okay ish
- takeout or delivery for vast majority of meals, get sick of literally every restaurant in your city
- maybe cooking a meal on the weekend or a lighter evening
- can overall manage your chores and personal errands: dishes, laundry, cleaning, haircuts, dry cleaning, appointments
- some downtime certain days, others may be complete sprints
- if working Sundays for example, I would turn on NFL in the background
- I’m not going to normalize it or make it sound “doable” but in all seriousness as a 22-24 year old I was okay with it
Working 100+ hours:
- experienced this for about 3.5 months during my stint in PE
- really didn’t set foot outside the apartment or office
- no chance for gym or physical activity really
- wake up fighting alarm clock every morning
- zero attempt to make plans, even evening or weekends were expected to be fully blown up
- spent free hours of the weekend sleeping anyways, had no other interests at this point
- never been a huge drinker but I refused to touch alcohol at the idea of having to work even slightly hungover
- lack of appetite, would sometimes skip meals, never cooked, basically only delivery
- apartment wasn’t cleaned for months, did my laundry but just lived out of the dryer
- didn’t watch a single sporting event (which is insane for me) including entirety of March Madness and NBA and NHL Finals
- cried almost daily, went on antidepressants at one point which did nothing
- I think everyone’s health issues are unique depending on what you’re most susceptible to, personally: woke up sick frequently, had headaches that persisted for 24+ hours, a few low blood sugar episodes, multitude of skin issues including cystic acne and eczema flare ups
- spent about 80% of my time consumed with the thought of quitting
- after 14 weeks straight of this… finally quit
- so burnt out that now I work a 25-30 hour a week job and don’t think I could ever go above 50ish without triggering some serious PTSD
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