Why Do We Turn Comments?
For reference, new AN1. I’m sure there’s a reason for this that my infantile career thus far and bottom-up POV prevents me from fully appreciating, but I’ve always felt that turning comments seems to be the most inefficient and error-prone way to get a deck done.
It looks like a game of telephone to me: SMD asks for a deck broadly with X, Y, and Z criteria. D / VP shell it out. Associate adds more granular text boxes / callouts. Analyst tries to get it done. By the time it gets to the analyst, the big picture is likely already jumbled in some way or another - let alone, more granular things like which comps to screen for or which pages to include / exclude.
Then, we go back and forth, passing the deck like a hot potato to fix things - not even necessarily mistakes but just preferences - mainly pertaining to nitty gritty details, like wording, which comps to exclude, or WACC to apply. In the process we introduce mistakes, since one change in the deck has a domino effect; e.g. numbers have to tie, FNs have to change. With each change, we go through every page one by one to check for mistakes.
God forbid a mistake slips through, then we need to pass the deck back and forth one more time with the whole team: from Analyst to Associate, then Analyst to VP (then maybe even Analyst to Director), before finally, the deck gets into the hands of the MD or SMD… and he tears every page to shreds b/c he had a completely different vision. The whole process starts from square one.
Now, my question is: why doesn’t the SMD take a few extra minutes to offer finer detail into what they want in the deck, and why do we not confirm as we’re working through that this is precisely what they want? Because in doing so, we could not only save ourselves countless hours of “turning comments” (both the SMD’s and everyone else’s before it reaches them) but we could avoid making mistakes, since our focus would only be on the few versions of the deck that matter, and not v1000_final_final plus everything in between.
This is not cynical or jaded; it’s genuine curiosity. Why do we do this? Is it b/c 50 hours of analysts’ time = 1 minute of an MD’s? Is it b/c we need to keep mid-level bankers just long enough to replace MDs?
Not a banker but I do manage people and I imagine it all happens for similar reasons. You probably won't get this until you're also managing people but
a) You are underestimating what "thinking through a few extra details" actually entails. It takes longer and requires more effort than you are imagining. It is much easier mentally to feed back on something that exists than to fabricate something new in your head from scratch and then have to describe that, in depth, to someone. I say that as someone who has tried to do the latter with an underlying (because they were re*****ed and needed that much guidance) - it ended up taking a fuckton more of my time - time which I should've been spending on higher leverage things. And also b) was still a problem. Ultimately it can be more efficient (although tedious for the do-ers) or rather economic of my time, to simply have the underlings learn your likes and dislikes over time and anticipate how to handle problems. It's like having an AI Vs a python script.
b) Sometimes you don't know what's going to happen/go wrong etc before you're in the weeds doing it. You may have some way you want to handle such an occurrence but you don't know even if that thing will occur. You can't give instructions on unknown unknowns.
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
That's pretty much how seniors think about pages.The MD or Partner isn't withholding the vision to save five minutes, half the time he doesn't fully know it until he sees the page and reacts to what he didn't know he wanted. I have a broad idea of what I want a page to say; my analysts and associates do the analysis to figure out how to tell it, asking for guidance as the numbers come in. My Principal reacts and reshapes it to his own narrative, then it goes up to the partner, who the Principal and I both already have a good read on.
Over time you learn how each person thinks, which is what makes it efficient.
Because analysts are the closest to the materials, and we are supposed to flag / think through any issues that seniors may have missed.
This separation good analyst vs. bad analyst.
If you expect your MD to think through all the details, why tf would they hire you? They can just AI all the outputs.
Prove yourself is more valuable than AI.
This post is so stupid - if you think your only job function is to compute / output / create as an analyst or associate without thinking then why not just replace you with AI?
You’re supposed to also be thinking about what makes sense.
The seniors are focused on ultimately bringing in revenue - not hand holding you on bullets for you to just shut your brain off
Like I said - AN1 here, so still trying to learn how to execute tasks and manage work streams, haven’t gotten to the big picture yet if I’m being honest.
To your other point, I hope we get replaced by AI bc the shit I spend hours on could be done by AI ideally in 30 seconds. Then maybe I won’t have to do it anymore / won’t be doing it at all.
Did you just do an SA with no other experience? Just trying to understand where you are coming from
The overall inefficiency is perfectly described by you, especially the way that Comment A is going to cause downstream changes that make Comment B totally useless.
If I could pick a primary failure point, it's the associate in your story. The associate should first spot issues in D/VP shell and resolve those, either by himself or by bringing suggested fixes to D/VP. And then the associate should also anticipate issues the analyst might face i.e. populating page 5 screws up the narrative in a way that page 7 no longer works as structured, etc.
Instead, the associate in your story just makes incremental comments, which is too often what happens in IB. I recognize that I'm asking a lot of the associate by saying he needs to anticipate this and that. But that's the value he can add if he works on it, and instead too often the associate has no thoughtfulness about adding value and just makes incremental comments. This leads to a frustrated analyst and negative memes about associates (especially MBA associates).
Pure love of the game
I have already replaced about 10 daily tasks with openclaw. It never forgets and never fucks up the details on these market data pulls. They arrive in my inbox like clockwork every morning at 7:30am. Even 6 months ago analysts would have been doing this
AI will soon turn mark ups or even verbal comments if it can't already. I haven't tried (yet). I'm not sure you will like how this story ends though
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