What’s Harder? Residency (for Doctors) or IB Analyst Stint at BB/EB?

Pure hours IB is worse in most situations. Can’t speak on anything other than that.

Depends on your residency, have family who have done pretty brutal ones (ortho/neuro) and are basically in the hospital / on call all day everyday for years on end and high stress work during that entire time vs banking where you might have blocks waiting for comments and whatnot

Doctor, easily. Residency pays terribly, can drag on for years, the culture can be just as abusive as IB if not worse, and you’ve got the matching system to deal with on top of it. It also takes far longer to get paid well in medicine than in finance. If someone is purely optimizing for pay, finance, tech, and law are the best-paying careers for smart, ambitious people, and that’s not changing anytime soon.

That said, doctors carry far more prestige given the nature of the job, so medicine wins easily if that’s what you’re after. More importantly, they add far more value to society than we do. I find this job genuinely interesting once you get past the slog of the analyst and associate years especially as the job becomes more about buliding relationships and thinking rather than just doing what you are told, but I’m well aware that ultimately nothing is all that important in this job. 

Residency, and I don't think it's particularly close if we're talking overall difficulty. IB has brutal hours, terrible unpredictability, and plenty of pointless work, but the stakes are fundamentally different when you're responsible for someone's health and making decisions while sleep-deprived.

IB is probably worse on the combination of compensation-adjusted misery and having a VP text you at 11:47pm to move a fucking logo 2 pixels to the left. Residency is worse on actual responsibility, emotional toll, and the consequences of making a mistake.

At least in IB, nobody dies because your DCF has the wrong terminal growth rate.