What was the most toxic investment banking environment that you have experienced?
For me, there's a senior analyst that always requests "favor" from me to help him out on something that is not urgent and yet, must deliver to him ASAP. Be it searching for data that is not available nor research reports that he won't be used. He doesn't want people to disturb him during weekends but he always likes to message for "favor" during weekends evening, sometimes even midnight. How do you deal with toxic people like this?
MD thought he was the smartest guy in the world (most MDs do). He would frequently ask me for vague research for calls that he had in ~2 hours.
"Find potential buyers for XYX segment and find potential buyside opportunities for them."
Would get mad at quality of buyside opps found because they weren't actionable enough (didn't like my thesis for why it could be potentially for sale), ignored the potential buyers (he was allergic to complementing anyone). Probably the worst personality i've worked with at this point. Frequently belittled people's intelligence despite giving "direction" in wonky run on sentences and streams of thought as opposed to clearly explaining what he wanted
Frequently had people transfer/leave within ~1 year of working for his team. God i hated that guy.
Currently in a living nightmare of a group. No such thing as protected Saturday - passive aggression to the max in all emails and expectations to be turning things 24/7 even on weekends. I would get emails on Saturday morning asking for the latest draft of a random side deck we're creating for the client. Second year analysts are treated like VPs / Directors on shitty deals. As someone who is currently working with these analysts, they are terrible managers and do not know how to mentor people at all. They only care about getting their work done and leaving, throwing you under the bus to deal with the MD when he asks why something is not done yet.
I'm currently acting like a VP on two deals and it's just terrible. The amount of work that needs to get done for the shittiest deal pales in comparison to the multi-billion dollar deals that I am working on. SEniors are never appreciative of your work and many times, will never end up sending the deck to the client. You are expected to know exaclty what seniors want as they will reprimand you for not knowing everything in the industry though you are just an analylst.
I hate my current bank and looking to lateral ASAP just like most of my class right now. People have literally left the bank saying they have never worked for a bank taht terrible in their lives. Everyone in my bank has expressed in some form or another the desire to leave except for the seniors as they do not do any deal gathering , only execution.
AGC?
AGC is by far the worst I've ever heard from a pure culture standpoint. Compared to like things I've heard from friends at Piper & Moelis, and some of the stuff I hear on this forum, there really is zero competition. There are places with bad cultures, but AGC goes out of its own way to make its culture objectively worse. Like they force analysts to be in on predetermined weekends even when they have nothing to do and like call their desks to make sure they're sitting there. Most analysts quit before a year, many in under 6 months, for jobs that are objectively "worse" than an IB gig just because AGC is so fucked up that they don't even wanna try to lateral. Plus they pay like $60k.
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Thank you, Richard. I hope you stop copying me
I too, hope you find peace.
I feel that many seniors are actually quite annoying/incompetent/try hard to impress... Tbh they are just so f**king annoying not knowing how useless the crap they come up with..
Also, most seniors don't value your time vs efficiency. Sometimes they can give you a 5 minute guidance and you can kick start the stuff with do it quick and easy. However, they will just give you one or two lines in email and tell you to f**k off and DIY. You will then spend hours thinking how to approach the shit and getting it wrong in the end, wasting everybody's time. It could be because he/she is incompetent and trying to leverage you to do the thinking (he/she could also take hours to think through it as I have met seniors with horrible market knowledge as well) or just doesn't care your experience/learning/efficiency/time.
I am now at an MM PE fund. I was at a notorious BB IBD team with junior attrition rate >40%a year (most just cannot stand it and leave finance instead of exiting to HF/PE). Things above happened a lot but only till I move to MM PE I know things can be worse.
In my current job, we have Zoom happy hours (and company/senior does not sponsor delivery for the happy hours). 8am conference calls due to WFH, Calling names to check whether you are AFKing during calls (which you have little involvement). Occasional 10pm Friday assignment that is due by Saturday noon or Saturday morning work due by afternoon. I couldn't believe my hours are more unpredictable.
It is not really due to the job nature itself but rather everyone tries hard to impress their seniors and want to over deliver ASAP. I had several stuff that were simple request (just one or two charts for senior management as quick reference). But it can evolved into a 13 pages deck just because everyone is trying too hard. Literally the senior's feedback for the deck was: "Where are the charts I asked" after we spent days working on it.
We also have endless amount of benchmarking, calls with management/IB/expert network just to "keep ourselves updated". The amount of calls and note taking are too excessive to a degree that we actually know what we are going to hear anyway but we are spending 1/3 of the time to do "dictation" in order to keep ourselves updated.