A few months ago, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, admitted to leaving the office at 5:30pm every day. And, apparently, she’s been doing it for years.
Unsurprisingly, WSO readers were pretty skeptical. Everyone knows that big money jobs in finance don’t lend themselves to having much of a work-life balance, and if you’re getting out of the office at 5:30pm, it’s likely only because you just pulled an all-nighter, haven’t slept in a couple days, and were sent home to rest up.
To many, finance’s long hours are a badge of honor. But, having pulled some pretty crazy hours in my career, I’ve been in plenty of situations where the extra time on the job seemed detrimental both to my health and the quality of the work I was cranking out.
Apparently, there’s evidence to back up my intuition.
In the early 1900s, Ford Motor ran dozens of tests to discover the optimum work hours for worker productivity. They discovered that the "sweet spot" is 40 hours a week–and that, while adding another 20 hours provides a minor increase in productivity, that increase only lasts for three to four weeks, and then turns negative.Anyone who's spent time in a corporate environment knows that what was true of factory workers a hundred years ago is true of office workers today. People who put in a solid 40 hours a week get more done than those who regularly work 60 or more hours.
Beyond the issue of decreasing productivity, consistently long hours can take a toll on your personal life. Anyone who’s done a stint in banking knows that the hours, the stress, and the unpredictability of it can lead to burnout. It’s tough to maintain a pleasant demeanor when you’ve spent 16 hours a day turning edits on a CIM for weeks on end. It affects everyone differently. Some people get very irritable, some get angry, and others simply start to question their existence.
Personally, at this point, I think consistently working 70+ hour weeks is counterproductive. I’m sure there are some superhero types out there that think they can pull 90 hour weeks again and again, but I really doubt that. Even if you can handle it for a couple of years, unless you are truly driven by the promise of a big paycheck, you’ll run the risk of a major burnout. At one point in my analyst stint, I went a good six weeks without a full day off and I started to lose my mind. When you start to see your Friday nights and Saturdays get eaten by time in the office, it really takes a toll on you.
How do fellow monkeys react to the grind that is high finance? At what point do you think the extra hours are counterproductive?
The hours in banking aren't driven by the sheer amount of work as its unpredictability. You might have a slow day, get slammed with something at 6pm, then stay around until 2 am working on it.
Because you are responsible for any work that comes in, you are in the office 9am to 11pm whether you need to be or not.
Constant revisions and changes also kill a lot of time. You make a multiple of however many pages end up in the final book.
If you actually looked at the work product coming out of an ibanking group, you wouldn't think bankers worked anywhere near 100 hours. A team of 20+ guys working on ~5 books, some live, some pitches? 20-50 pages on average? You would think that would be doable in a normal 40 hour week.
Unfortunately, the client always comes first. If nudging that graphic or changing that font at 2am increases the chance of success by 0.1%, you are doing it. But this is why analyst programs are 2 years long.
It probably is, but by virtue of the quantity of work you do in IBD, and measures done to complete deals (revising pitch-books until the morning of), it is necessary.
For instance, when I am studying in school early in the morning (4, 5, 6 a.m.), I start making silly errors, have a harder time grasping concepts. However, during the day, I would have grasped concepts much more easier than when I was studying earlier in the morning.
Does that make sense?
My father have been working +80 hours/week, every single day (no days off except for his 4 weeks vacation once a year) for the last +10 years.
The downside of it, in the last 10 years, I probably spoke to him a grand total of 1 hour.
He's 61 years old and seems to be still productive.
wtf does he do?
Anything more that 55-60 hours in a week is too much, anything more than 10-12 hours solid work in a single day is too much, and anything less than 4 weeks vacation per year is too little. Working more than this might be counterproductive, but more importantly, it's bad for your health and well-being.
Work to live, don't live to work.
I'd say 50-55 hours per week is optimal for a serious career, and by that i mean one with a significant intellectual component.
The IBD people working 80+ hours just do dumb administrative stuff half the time. It's a crappy career - boring and unrewarding.
It's pretty sad that people work so hard in college to do such mind-numbing work.
I think if you own something i.e. are developing a business, designing something etc, longer hours are fine. But if it's editing pitch books and updating excel numbers with phoney earnings estimates and accounting figures... i don't know what to say, how could someone want to spend 80 hours doing that kind of stuff?
Just waiting for people to rip me apart..
It's the exit ops hehe. I'm only impressed with people in business development these days. Most of the senior bankers look like huge tools...
I liked that post with Deepak Malholtra. He could do anything, but he chose to be a prof...he just has that look about him - he's in the "flow". I never see that with IBD or consulting people
Just his tone, facial expression, the way he communicates ideas....it just seems effortless.
When I see my friends in IBD, it always feels like there's something nagging at them. They're constantly stressed out by trivial, yet "important" details, and just never seem like themselves. The administrative aspect of the work is soul crushing (same old message, i know). No job is perfect - there's obviously going to be a bit of that in every job - but in IBD, it just seems like SO much time is spent doing stuff like that, hence the burnout effect.
Fuck working more than 60 hours a week. For a week or two during a busy season sure, but not every..single..week..
I'll take a paycut if it means not hating my life
I would also add that at times you do need a break from your desk to get your brain to work again. Investment banking is particularly mind-numbing because once projects start rolling you don't get a break during the day, but then at other times you don't have anything to do. Most productive people understand that taking a break from your desk allows you to get some fresh thoughts and add value.
Yeah Abdel, are you trolling? I wanna know dawg
I personally start rapidly losing brain function when the sun goes down. It amazes me that people can consistently pull those hours. I have yet to work more than a 70-hour workweek, ever.
So the French were right all along? haha!
My philosophy to work is less is more, more or less... I think not trying to do everything and not overwhelming oneself with too many tasks allows one to focus on what matters and delivering results. You can't have 25 KPIs and there's no point in having perfectly designed presentation materials on the JV you've been working on if your deal sucks because you were too tired to think clearly during the negotiations, etc...
Balance is important. I prefer to have 2 meaningful meetings a year with the management team of a potential target / partner rather than calling on them every two months without much of real value to say. Just showing face.
A lot of us are in careers where we will become the product / service at some point, or a large part of the "value added". If you lack balance in your life it's going to show through in your work relationships and with clients.
I agree that a lot of the time we spend is due to the need to be responsive to outsiders, or senior people, but I think a lot of the busywork in business is politically driven. Both by managers who need to show that their staff are active and by professionals jockeying for position. This is where I think a healthy camaraderie between peers is important to avoid burning one another out. Maybe this is symptomatic of the corporate model and is not as prevalent in a partnership model where the junior professions are socialised through apprenticeship, rather than being human cogs in an assembly line?
One pattern I do find worrying is that many managers seem to have this mentality of trying to maximise the utilisation of their staff (i.e. a process / throughput orientation). As if their philosophy of management is to ensure that their staff are constantly doing something without regard to whether what they're doing needs to be done in the first place. I'm much more concerned with my analyst getting the investment thesis and model right, rather than having an extra 20 pages of irrelevant data formatted into nice charts.
Maybe it's a symptom of our industry in that people are promoted on their ability to sell, or execute deals rather than their ability to manage teams. The only time these managers respond is when they get collective push-back from their team, which I've only seen once in a crisis.
I don't see any virtue in working long and hard for it's own sake. Surely our measure of success as human beings should be the amount of leisure we have for the few hours we work as opposed to the amount of suffering we have endured in order to "make stuff".
Rant over...
Maybe this is why our generation is always switching jobs as opposed to making a career at one company. Switching companies not only gives a gap, ie needed vacation, but people are always burning out and then need a change.
But is it the context or the people themselves? I mean, has the expectation of hard work incrased over the years or is it that new generations are not willing to put up with such pressures and would rather switch jobs?
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