When did you realize IB was far from glamorous?
In college, students are often pitched the high flying investment banking career with the promise of working on multi-billion dollar M&A transactions, advising CEOs and CFOs as a mere 22 year old, and earning a fat paycheck and the prestige of working in high finance.
While some of this is true, many students still don't realize how unglamorous the job is at the junior level, and how 90% of your time is spent performing highly repetitive, unintellectual tasks. The client relationship is with the senior bankers, not some 1st year analyst. Do any of you feel that you also bought into this dream as a student? When did you finally realize that this vision we are sold doesn't materialize until you slog through the grind for a decade to get to MD?
What a unique concept - you have to be experienced and competent before you are put in a position of responsibility.
i would bet anything that you've pitched banking to potential analysts/interns as "being an advisor to large fortune 500 corporations"
I pitch it very simply - if you’re good, you will have a ton of client interaction very quickly and play a real role in deals. If you’re not, you will be rearranging logos for pitchdecks all day. The people who are doing to grunt work for longer than an year aren’t good enough to do more.
Every job is unglamorous at the junior level. You have to learn, pay your dues, and prove yourself before they trust you around their revenue source.
you think this is unglamorous but try a junior position at a normal corporate job or even something like 'trade settlement' at a bank - very decent job and I'm not knocking it but it's a lot more administrative than banking.
One of my relatives is in trade settlement and from what he's described it sounds completely mindless but the lifestyle is fantastic because of how little work you need to do to make a decent salary if you understand what's going on. Lots of free time.
Great job to have while you have a side hustle.
I’m a first year analyst (soon to be second) and directly communicate with clients everyday and have decent amount of discretion over materials
Why does everyone on here try to make themselves so miserable ?
I think there is an important distinction to be made between BBs and MM banks / small boutiques here. I'm currently at GS and it's far from intellectually stimulating. 99% of work is pretty simple and just a matter of execution and going through the motions once you have done it 1-2 times. It's especially boring because you never go super deep on anything since you just leverage the expertise of people who actually go deep in various fields (equity research analysts, consultants, lawyers, accountants etc.). Never heard of anyone below VP level interact with a client (except for admin emails) and even VPs just discuss very simple high-level stuff with clients rather than any form at advising.
Meanwhile, at small boutiques and MM banks, I've understood people get A LOT more responsibility. Did an internship in PE before going into IB and there were several cases where an associate at a small boutique bank pitched a deal to VPs / Directors / Partners at the PE fund. Hours also tend to be quite a bit better at small MM banks / boutiques.
With that said, being at a BB and being at a small MM / boutique is a completely different experience. Juniors at BBs hate their lives because we have the combination of working really brutal hours and mostly doing simple, boring and repetitive work where we get very low levels of responsibility at the junior level. Stepping down from 100+ hours a week to 60-70 hours a week and getting much more interesting work makes a huge difference I can imagine.
This is such a classic analyst perspective, and I say that as an a2a. You feel it is all surface level because you are just going through the motions, leveraging recycled content and mindlessly refreshing / updating. Take the time to think about what you're doing, why, or how it could be done better, differently, more efficiently. Use that to ask insightful questions of the people around you and pressure test the assumptions you are given or their view of "what makes sense". Thats what makes this job interesting and you will find many are actually very sharp. If you can't do that because you are on too many things, push back and get on the right number of staffings so that you have the time to actually be thinking critically about the work you're doing.
Great input and I totally agree with you that it is a question of time. I feel that I rarely truly understand things because I never have the time to actually think about stuff on a deeper level. I've produced 150-page decks on companies but if you asked me to give a simple description of what the company does I wouldn't be able to do it. I imagine banking would be at least a little more fun if I had the time to actually think about stuff rather than being expected to execute the maximum amount of work in the shortest time possible.
I was always grateful for the opportunities given to me and what life turned out to be. My career had: multiple countries, interesting jobs, a lot of seniority early on, promotions early on, and eventually also wealth and security. Not a single day felt like it was "glamorous", but that's ok. It's an office job, not the catwalk at L'Oreal in Paris.
I was never sold on the prestige or the cool work. My problem… is that I have an ADDICTION to the cash. Idc if I’m cleaning toilets for the CEO as long as my bank account is being ran up
When my bald, obese and single at 32 VP tried motivating the juniors in a drunken stupor by saying “we are INVESTMENT BANKERS”
There was a brief period during which I thought being a banker was cool and that the work that I was doing was sophisticated and important. That lasted for the first couple of months on the job before I realized it's just a highly demanding job that doesn't have a cool factor to it. Even still, I had a glamorized idea of what closing a big deal would be like. Wound up getting staffed as an associate while still an analyst for a deal that lasted a year and was the largest fee my group had received for a few years. Vividly remember when the final counterparty confirmed receipt of funds and it was 100% closed. No adrenaline rush, no "fuck yeah, we're popping bottles tonight." Just got up from my desk in the middle of the afternoon, told the pen "we're done w/ Deal X, thank fuck," then popped into the staffer's office to tell him that we had closed, I was going to the gym, and would have my phone off for a few hours.
Same here. Thought it would be super cool to work on these huge deals with large companies. Have been doing stuff like preparing board materials for a $50bn company, buy-side for $90bn company, $5bn sell-side for MF PE etc. Nearly came in my pants just thinking about such deals when I was in university. However, when you're sitting there updating the comp slide for the 17th time during the course of the last 3 days, you're not really thinking "WOW, I can't believe how sexy this is". Updating that comp slide for the 17th time is just as boring for a $90bn company as it is for a $200m company.
If anything, larger deals are probably more boring because your client will likely be extremely professional and as a result, your bank is not really needed for advice, they just need someone to do the heavy lifting and your job becomes more focused on producing materials than advisory.
When I updated my job status on Bumble and Tinder and I still got 0 likes
1 week into my summer analyst stint. Immediately made the move to the buyside for FT but knew I would still be at the bottom of the totem pole. I would describe IB as the blue-collar finance Job, you are doing all the dirty work and heavy lifting for transactions that make up our industry. End of the day, it may "suck" but not a bad way to cut your teeth.
Biglaw is much worse, trust me
I don't disagree - but this is about IB, not big law.
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