What was IB like in the 80s/90s for analysts and associates?
Just curious to know how different the day to day was for the entry level people and 1-3 years.
Did they have similar responsibilities? Work more or less hours? Was it more or less of a grind?
I know the culture was wilder and pay seemed to be much better but there doesn’t seem to be too much info about what the current leaders and rainmakers did in their early years.
I’ve asked a few older people and they usually just harp on how fun it was or make it seem like despite better pay they were working 140 hour weeks nonstop (I think they’re full of shit). Can anyone provide unbiased context on this?
Yeah also curious. I have no idea what it would be like to work in such a time. Did people even have phones or computers? How did people build a model? Was it in a notebook?
I think things were hand drawn and there were a few programs before excel too. But before regulations dropped later in the 80s and early 90s a lot of functions had to be outsourced.
I also never worked in banking but I talk to a few senior bankers and have many friends in it. I’m just curious if younger guys are being spun a false narrative about how hard or not hard they’re working.
As a dude in sales I can say when I started a lot of the old heads were and are still very out of touch especially for when it comes to cold calls…everyone should start out or experience it but your “tested method” that younger people coming up don’t feel like doing isnt because theyre pussies…it’s because it’s not remotely as effective. Still useful but only the smarter leaders now are aware of that.
If they didn’t have computers or email, how did analysts get comments? Did your associate just scream changes for you to make in the bullpen?
What about after 7pm where senior people went home, would you just show the next iteration the next morning?
Telephones/Fax Machine
If they didn’t have computers, were peoples desks just a table with paper and pens?
How did people make slides and pitchbooks? Was everything just drawn on paper? There was no excel or ppt..
How did people make a CIM?
While there is merit in discussing excel (back in the day most banks had one central computer at most, with calculations done manually and reviewed by multiple people of varying seniority), the biggest difference was research.
Whereas now you can just google away, back in the day a lot of your time was spent physically researching the bank in a library that probably had copies of newspapers and general books on industries. Perhaps what will take an analyst now a couple hours took a few days back in the day.
Also most teams where super lean, with less than 20 individuals per team and perhaps a few MDs specialized in a vertical (you used to be generalist). Many banks did not see much business in M&A and preferred underwriting instead. It was guys like Rob Greenhill from Morgan Stanley (yes, the one who would go on to found Greenhill) who pioneered the M&A industry as a viable business line for banks.
To conclude, one perhaps better thing is that expensing was widespread and it was not uncommon to fly private to a client meeting as an associate (this being said an associate then had VP-like responsibilities)
Data rooms were literally rooms of boxes and files. Total mess from what I hear
I wonder how many uneducated interns go looking for “the data room” when they’re asked to do something in it.
Too many
Did your data room sales rep also tell you that story…?
Yes.
How about affirmative action and URM programs? How did companies help achieve equity for minorities?
Brother that didn’t really begin until the 2000s and didn’t expand dramatically until early-mid 2010s. Almost every woman in this industry from pre 08 you can bet your ass is a talented killer. Lots of props to those 40+ year olds who got zero special treatment especially brokers. Bad asses
Yea any woman who came up in finance and is 40+ years old I have immense respect for.
You know they earned that shit.
Coked up Ivy League grads wanting to make 'bank' within high finance jobs.
That pretty much sums it up.
Oh so the spirit is still there! Back in their day the coke wasn’t laced with fentanyl at least
Lol what else is new..
Analyst classes are now often laced with non target and dei hires
Wouldn’t have happened if the ivies didn’t tank their reputation lol
Lol it’s because kids from ivies typically aren’t interested in going into ib - they usually prefer to go to software engineering or science related fields instead
It’s somewhat seen as unprestigious at some schools to study something complex and join a field that only requires basic arithmetic so people decide to do other more intellectually stimulating jobs instead
Students from ivy leagues often still get lots of interviews and opportunities when they’re interesting in applying
What were client meetings like? Heard there was more fun stuff potentially but unsure of what that would entail
Nyc sounds like it was a much different city back in the 80s and 90s. Where would analysts typically reside and what was it like for someone in their 20s in the city? I have heard from someone in my analyst class that basically the entire west side, east village, and LES which many people nowadays very much enjoy living in were previously the slums?
Is it possible IB could’ve been much more simple back then?
Sounds less likely that people made 50 page pitch books or CIMs… models were hand-drawn? Imagine if people wanted to do an LBO, would they just have to do a paper LBO since there wasn’t excel to do a more in depth one?
How did people spread comps? How would people even know what other companies existed in a specific sector?
How would people do precedent transactions if there was no internet to know what transactions occurred in a specific sector?
newspapers, etc. helped stay up-to-date on transactions and I assume there were also some public filings of accounts on big companies. If not, the companies could also keep some accounts from the company's if the approached them in the past for some transactions and just make some assumptions for the years that they don't have the financials. Even for not so public financials, I think that's the idea of having a brokerage arm, you request the financials of some companies to write reports on and advise on buy/sell (clearly all stocks were buy considering that companies made a favor to the bank to hand them their financials).
but that's the general idea of many businesses back then, they were paid by actual knowledge/information, nowadays, with internet, everybody can build a M&A wit some tutorials with the latest public financials, so IB lost its edge on the information/knowledge side and nowadays it relies more on relationships/network
Watch the movie "Barbarians At The Gate", which is about the take-private of RJR Nabisco, and you will get a glimpse of what doing an LBO was like in that time period. The scene where they have to load different funding assumptions into the model is hilarious as it takes the computer all night to run the calculations.
Heavy survivorship bias. The older people you'd come across and ask them this question are the people who made it and thus are the people who'd enjoy the culture. The people who didn't have left or flamed out
heard from a senior MD that they usually did some financial analysis by hand/on paper when checking accounts. No excel.
This thread is gold...
All nighters at the printer getting fat on milkshakes and good food while you waited for the next draft of the prospectus to page turn, reading S&P tear sheets on every company comp, LOTUS 1-2-3 and not Excel, slow computers with floppy disk drives, documents received/sent physically by mail/fedex, old Bell telephones with an attached speaker box, a library in your building where you spent hours looking through microfiche, using a dial-up modem to transfer files to other offices, black and white decks where you prepared the pages in WordPerfect and printed out charts to be physically cut-and-pasted with scissors and then xeroxed. Smoking in the office all day/night.
But, the office humor was old school and people would really party at the closing dinner.
Surprised no one’s mentioned it but highly recommend reading Monkey Business by John Rolfe and Peter Troob. It’s a little dramatized here and there but I have yet to find a better account of this exact topic at the junior level. Two Ivy League MBAs start as juniors at DLJ in early 90s and they go in detail with how the work actually worked.
agreed, sb'ed.
Thank you this is exactly what I was looking for. Now I can let all the other sales team on the desk know I’m slightly superior based on my recreational reading… just a joke but excited to read it I love this stuff.
My favorite part of that book was when the associate was making iterations of a draft. Guy started with v1, sends to VP, who proceeds to ask for various changes, creates v2, sends back, vp asks for more changes, v3, sends to director who makes other edits, v4, then sends to MD who asks the group for other changes, v5
Then v5 ended up looking exactly like v1 lol
Just finished the book a minute ago after seeing your comment yesterday morning - great read, thanks for sharing. Would consider it a must read for any monkey tbh
So the people who started working during a time before computers, did everyone have to learn how to make graphs and PPT stuff much later on? Like in their 30s or 40s?
Prob dude
Probably never learned as by then they were too senior to be handling those tasks
Someone told me when they were running analyses on companies, they would have to go to the GS library and "check out" company 10-Ks
There was undoubtedly a lot of snow and relations during diligence during those “checks”
Ib sounded more chill back in the day
before excel there was lotus 1-2-3. and before that there was visicalc
Were those used to create excel models? Could people build a DCF or LBO using that?
Why is office culture so different nowadays compared to back then? I’ve read so many finance books about the tales of people in ib who worked in the 90s back in college, and when I started the job it seemed nothing like what was in the books
PC culture and DEI making the world a better and more inclusive place
We’re almost in 2024 get with the program
Back then did people tend to stay in ib more often? Seems like there probably weren’t that many PE firms out there
what was pe like back then?
Didnt fully exist on an institutional scale earlier on. Old school corporate raiders / barbarian-at-the-gate-types where just small teams, not the megafunds that they are now.
My guess is that exiting IB to work for them was akin to joining a search fund nowadays. It was a risk, not an established path
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