Which groups should you avoid at all costs?

Cantor Fitzgerald is about the worst combination of toxic culture, shit hours, non-lead engagements, trigger-happy layoffs and bad deal flow you could possibly imagine. Normally groups that toxic at least have good deal flow and that's why they're all on edge (ie, Jefferies). My roommate used to work there as an An1 and in his words it's like the workflow and dickishness of Jefferies with the exception that exits suck and you're somehow working until the AM every night despite only doing ~$50M co-mgr deals. The prospect of getting shit on by an asshole MD while working until 2:00AM.....for a small-time co-mgr engagement with a few hundred K of fee potential? That's gonna be a no for me.  

At BofA, FIG is the worst, specifically their “Banks” team. I interned there so can speak well to it.

In general, I think the FIG team is decent. The group has about 5 verticals (banks, specialty finance, fintech, asset management, and insurance). The problem is that you’re placed into a vertical a few months after you join (full time, as an intern you’re a generalist). It sounded like most people don’t want to do banks/specialty finance but someone must do it and so they are forced there. Fintech is the one vertical everyone tries to get but it also has its challenges.

The banks team doesn’t do any deals. 99.9% of the work the juniors do is pitch work. Most have never been on an actual deal process. Somehow, they still manage to work insane hours with a lot of weekend work thrown in there. Seniors give very tight deadlines and make a lot of last-minute changes (dropping in new pages, asking for some analysis 30 minutes before the meeting, changing everything, etc.). Mind you, this is for just regular pitches, but the pitches are treated like live deals/bake-offs (usually 40 page decks with some kind of a model). So, you get no deal experience, work insane hours, are always stressed, and can’t get traditional banking exits due to the niche nature of the work. Emails still fly in from seniors late on Friday night which is pretty sad if you’re a junior with a social life. Sunday morning is brutal too (we didn’t have to work on Sundays as interns so would only come Monday morning to find 30+ emails from Sunday alone). Of course, this would probably be the case at any other bank but it doesn’t make sense for non-live deal work. I don’t think it makes sense for your career to pigeonhole yourself early on in an area where you won’t get any technical experience and traditional banking exits are non-existent.

BofA FIG is fine if you can avoid the banks vertical, but I don’t think this is guaranteed. If you’re really intent on doing FIG, GS FIG seems to be the best in the space (not siloed to one vertical, they do a lot of deals, and exits are some of the best on the street). Otherwise, the rest of the people on the BofA FIG team are pretty nice and very knowledgeable. 

Would avoid any power/utilities/nat res group unless you want to build 50+ tab excel models about wind turbines…

Source- I unfortunately work in one