I’ve seen threads on WSO all the way back to 2007 where people complained about hours being insanely long.
I guess what I’m trying to understand is what time frame did people start realizing that Investment Banking is not your typical 9-5? Was it during the dot com bubble when M&A was robust? Was it before that?
I also think with time the process for completing an M&A transaction or IPO’s has become longer with the amount of parties and stakeholders involved and how much things have evolved in terms of legal, QofE, and other docs that drag out the process.
Does anyone happen to know how hours in banking have evolved and if we’re better or worse off than we were 20-30 years ago?
My MD said it was just as bad in the 90s
Unfortunate hours didn’t get better with massive efficiency increases since then.
I guess the competitiveness of the industry just creates a space where everyone will work these hours regardless of tools at their disposal.
M&A Titans (book, great read if you like banking/corporate history) covers this topic of hours pretty well. Basically, the hours were never good, but the one thing you might have had protecting you was when you left the office, you didn't have a phone. One story in the Titans book describes a client calling one of the famous MDS (I believe Greenhill) at his home and his wife answered and told the client to never call their residence again. Thus the MD apologized to the client and adopted a second business line inside his home. I believe this was one of the first MDs to take to the 24/7 business model we see today.
when there’s activity it’s always nuts
I would venture to guess slightly better. Those memos from DLJ proved that the hours were always brutal. Bankers are better off now that there’s more visibility into the issue, and because bankers don’t get paid as well as they once did anymore - meaning, less people willing to make this their life.
They were usually pretty bad. I believe it was at Drexel where a letter was sent out that essentially said “people are getting confused as to whether or not they have bandwidth. If you are working less than 85 hours / week, you have bandwidth.”
DLJ, but yes. And it was 96 hours a week, by the way. Mandatory reading for people in the industry.
I think the issue with “capacity” or “bandwidth” is flawed. I think you should be staffed on timing of projects, not hours worked.
If you could work from 9am -5pm on a project then switch from 5pm - 1am on another, fine. The problem is both projects have a requirement to be done RIGHT NOW and you have two VPs breathing down your neck trying to make the same deadline.
That was the source of most of my stress at my old bank. Too often I would be slammed from 7am-2pm with the same deadlines on multiple deals and then not get comments back on either until 6pm. If MDs would talk to each other about who they were asking to do what it would have worked better.
I'd add that even in the 80s/90s the hours were long but not necessarily because of corporate policy, but because people were greedy. They worked themselves to the bone (happily) because they wanted to become rich and Wall Street was the only known path to do that fast (which nowadays is a joke).
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