Why does Banking/ PE attract the worst personalities?

Why does this job attract just the most garbage people. Anyone who has been in this industry understands that you can do a process without staying up past 10pm a single night if you have a great team, but instead the industry is riddled with assholes and a rigid way of doing things that makes it unnecessarily bad. It seems like behavior that just wouldn’t fly in tech, medicine, or even consulting, is par for the course for bankers and I’m curious why you all believe that’s the case?

13 Comments
 

A lot of bankers don't have much added value to have. So they feel validified of making 21 year old's have the right league tables right, of making them run pointless shit.

CEO of whomever you're presenting to does not give a rat's ass that BB bank is #1 ex- deals that are $45Bn and larger than >$20Bn, but excludes deals where the bank does not have greater than X% presence, and ignores last 2 years. This is the type of shit which is not value added.

As I say to everyone, do your 2 years and get the fuck out if you want more fulfilling / interesting work.

PE / HF / CF / Tech are all great careers. 

Reality is many of these careers they do not want to train you on PPT, they do not want to train you on excel, and this is where investment banks are great at. 

Don't confuse $$ earned by MDs by intellectual horsepower. Some of senior bankers still think moving commas is going to land them a fucking deal. 

No one who is actually is seeking more to work than pay, stays in banking. 

 

This happens in every industry.

Egoistical doctors/surgeons just because they have a MD after their name (not a hard degree to get)

Delusional engineers just because they did a STEM degree (philosophy/classics is much harder by the way)

Grandstanding lawyers because they think their moral compass is much more rigid and accurate (it's not)

Bankers are the only one with justified egos because of their superior intellect, pay and prestige. 

 

I get your examples but when you said philosophy/classics are harder than STEM I chuckled. Come on, how can a STEM degree that requires lots of studying and hard exams be easier than a liberal arts degree? I had to take an advanced literature class as part of my curriculum and basically everyone in the class was reading the materials with the help of sparknotes and repeating word for word what they read in class, and the teacher would say wow excellent. Writing papers for said class was also a combination of bs, sparknotes, and notes taken in class.

Now compare that to a basic calculus class where if you're absent for just one class it's like you've missed out on one quarter of a semester. The higher the level of the math class the worse it gets.

 

Here is a course description for an intermediate logic class I took:

A development of logic from the mathematical viewpoint, including propositional and predicate calculus, consequence and deduction, truth and satisfaction, the Gödel completeness theorem, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, and applications to Boolean algebra, axiomatic theories, and the theory of models as time permits.

 

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