Why don't bankers work in shifts???
Had a thought this weekend. No one wants to work 100 hour weeks. After 50-60 hours your production just dramatically decreases. Your production is so much less efficient, your work is less accurate, and overall you are exhausted, you cannot possibly receive healthy sleep. This creates burnout, which is why everyone wants to shift over to the buyside.
So why don't banks work bankers in 10-12 hour shifts??
For example, a team of analysts/associates work 8am-6pm and then a new shift comes in 6pm-4am.
Morning shift has 1 analyst and associate staffed on a deal and the night shift has another analyst and associate staffed on the same deal. Everyone is linked on communication and there can even be team meetings as shifts leave/come in so there is constant communication between the two. This could make banks so much more efficient and they can definitely afford it as well.
The efficiency will dramatically increase, can pitch more, be more efficient, etc.
What do you guys think? Just a random thought of mine.
It's a good idea, but a few counter points here
- Bankers are paid to work the long hours. Doubling junior staff and cutting hours in half would lead to a significant pay decrease. This means candidate quality would go down hugely. This would also cost millions more for the bank and IMO would actually be less efficient
- It's just not that easy to share workload on a model. The rare deal where you have 2 analysts, usually one of them focuses on the model and the other does more admin stuff. Anyone can turn text comments but beyond that you generally don't want too many cooks in the kitchen
Makes sense! Like I said just a thought, my mind is always churning to try and make things more effective.
I actually think this could be done with the same amount of staff with rotating night shifts. When I would trade commodities around the clock that’s how it was done.
However, it’s not as easy with this kind of work. Handing things off unfinished to another person and getting people up to speed on what was going on the past 12 hours takes time, effort and there’s ultimately going to be some lost-in-translation that occurs that leads to inefficiencies. The same people taking ownership over the same parts of the process largely avoids this. Sometimes when you’re on a roll and cranking things out it’s better to just grind it out than have to worry about how others will change or mess with what you were doing.
Banks already do this with teams in India.
Trouble is most of the client calls, discussions with seniors and interaction with the mid-level people happens during the day, so the India team misses most of the context, doesn't learn as quickly and ends up getting relegated the easy stuff that no one else wants to do.
Other commenters have made great points but I also think the nature of work in banking is that sometimes, you just have to grind out to finish what you started.
As soon as you introduce shift work, what stops someone from not doing work because they "wouldn't be able to finish it in their shift" and then the next guy gets an absolute dogshit shift?
What if you're halfway through something extremely complex and when the new guy/girl comes in, you'd have to take time to explain what you did, going over your shift, and they'd be lost anyways for hours trying to figure out your half-done work?
I once had the same idea. But after talking to a banker friend, he said it’s impossible because:
1. Significant pay cut. Taking shifts essentially mean you are sharing half of your compensation with the night shift people ( so 60k base, 60k bonus ). Quality of analysts will decrease drastically.
2. No one wants to work in the night shift, everyone wants the day shift. People will back-stab each other to get the day shift.
3. You get less exposure to deals and less learning. That’s a huge disadvantage when you wanna try for the best exit.
Regarding Point 2 the standard is to offer a higher pay for the night shift. This is how it works for most professions that run around the clock. That higher compensation for some is enough to stomach working nights.
Then that means the day shift people will get paid even less than half of their existing pay.
Tons of things make this quite challenging. Some others:
- Would make it really hard to hold people accountable. If the pitch deck isn’t ready in time, whose fault is it? What if the night shift slacks off because they know the day shift will just need to pick up the slack? What if the day shift does no work because they are staffed on two deals simultaneously and had to meet a deadline for the other deal? Yikes!
- A substantial amount of manhours would be lost coordinating the handoffs. There are too many things that just aren’t written down: Conversations had between the Analyst / Associate, rationale for assumptions in a model, live client feedback, etc.
3 6 mafia
Its an issue of "Too many cooks in the kitchen" and even it is not an accurate representation since line cook deliverables/output are essentially the same with a few wrinkles (cooking steak medium rare-welldone, fry eggs over easy - sunny side up, etc).
While analysts deliverable although same in nature (pitch decks, models, IM's) but the work that goes into it wildly differs. You might have a simple operating model, or complicated project financing model with 3 lenders and 2 equity partners. And the dynamic nature of the deal could throw the whole project into a completely different direction, not even line cooks are able to change from cooking steak into deboning a fish on the fly). If you could pull a red string out of the example above, the main issue is knowledge transfer and flexibility.
Having to constantly inform each other teams of every single development would result in inefficiency in time and potentially miscommunications between shifts, fatal in live deals. And cornering each shifts into specific time would create imbalance and unfairness between the two teams (one team might attend all the meetings, while the other would create all of deliverables, guess which one takes longer and more brain power?) straining the team's overall chemistry.
so, divide your salary by 2. will you be happy to work 50-60 h/week for it?
also, do you not have a support team in India? we basically work in shifts with our team in India.
Adding more staff decreases efficacy exponentially, not linearly.
Some banks do. I interviewed for Valence Group (now part of Piper Sandler Industrials), a chemicals focused boutique with a London and NY office. They staffed across offices for basically every single deal with that model of always having someone hands-on-keys.
A lot of the really hard challenges have been addressed already another item that comes to mind:
The scope of work really changes between the day and night shift. The day shift is filled with meetings and calls while the night shift would be filled with "analytical" work...so you've got an issue where the people talking to clients aren't the ones who put together the materials and vice versa.
Because you would have to waste time doing handovers and pointless meetings. When a client calls you up and wants something finished at 2am do you think the analyst can turn round and say "oh sorry I'm only on the evening shift you'll have to wait till the morning shift when a different colleague knows more about this"
Consulting firms actually have been known to do this and so it's not unimaginable for i banks to do similarly. Some of my consulting friends said they would send research tasks and slide-making over to asia for the night (daytime in Asia) and it would be done by NY morning. It's not that much different to send tasks to juniors in Asia than it is to do so compared to them standing next to you in NY.
I think the counterpoints against this miss the point that while not all tasks can be shifted to a second shift - certainly a fair number can.
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