Do you like your job?

Curious to hear some answers on this. In my circle of friends, I feel like most people in IB/ER/PWM/HF enjoy their work a lot, even though it can be stressful and the WLB can be awful at times. Despite that, they're pretty thoughtful about the work they're doing, try to contextualize it and derive some meaning from it, and take the time to learn as much about / become proficient at every role they have.
 

I do, however, have some good friends who are miserable and absolutely dread work on a daily basis, but they seem unwilling to let go of the prestige / compensation that comes with their role.

I enjoy my work (SS ER BB) a lot, and I feel pretty lucky that I get paid to read, write, and talk about companies and the market, but the fact that I get off at a reasonable hour may be positively skewing my views, lol. I'm curious what bucket you all fall in / what you observe about your friends in the industry.

27 Comments
 

I flip between love/hate depending on the day but generally like it.

Every day is a new day. New companies, new deals, new people/egos to manage, new problems to solve in execution, lots of learning opportunities. Keeps things fresh and exciting. It's what has held me back from moving to industry into a corp dev / strategic finance role. Plus I have an awesome team of really fun people which helps.

I hate being at beck and call and unpredictability but it is what it is. And fuck clients who treat us like "vendors". 

 
rabbit

I flip between love/hate depending on the day but generally like it.

Every day is a new day. New companies, new deals, new people/egos to manage, new problems to solve in execution, lots of learning opportunities. Keeps things fresh and exciting. It's what has held me back from moving to industry into a corp dev / strategic finance role. Plus I have an awesome team of really fun people which helps.

I hate being at beck and call and unpredictability but it is what it is. And fuck clients who treat us like "vendors". 

Thanks for writing my exact response for me! But seriously, this is exactly how I feel about it too. So I would say that yes, I do like my job for all these reasons.

The poster formerly known as theAudiophile. Just turned up to 11, like the stereo.
 

Yes and No.

Yes for my current role - HF.

I run an event driven volatility + arbitrage strategy and have enjoyed great returns in this choppy market with gyrations. 

Like the intellectual aspect of it, absolutely love the risk-taking part of the job.  The adrenaline & dopamine from killing it with strong P/L contribution and alpha generation is just unreal. 

No for my past role - IB

I hate cranking out long ass pitchbooks with cliche language. No meaningful ownership of my work.

The formality was just so boring, the conversation was dull, and face time culture in IB was miserable. 

Questioning the meaning of my existence everytime I had to move logo on PPT. 

The only positive thing when I was in IB was that my coworkers were cool & nice, easy to get along. That's all.

Array
 

haha good points

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
Funniest
DisgruntledAppraiser

No.

Username checks out. 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

Sure I just started my own company so all I'm doing is cold outreach to try and sell. I don't mind just banging out cold emails all day. Doing some cold calling as well but kind of tough to find phone numbers for people in software sales. My product is a sales tool that could help anyone who is doing cold outreach, financial advisors/insurance brokers/software sales/etc. Haven't gotten any sales yet but just only started selling yesterday.

 

I used to work as a sales development rep - basically doing the same thing that I am doing now (except for now I get to actually conduct meetings versus my old job I was just setting meetings up) - and I mostly liked that job. I think I will like selling my own product more.

 
Most Helpful

I think I do however I think that this is the case mostly because of my role and also the company I'm working at. I could easily visualize myself hating doing the job of other people sitting in the same floor as myself. And I also could easily visualize myself doing this same job but in a company with a shit(tier?) finance culture of which I know many and hating every second of it. I have nothing better to do right now so I'll lay out some of the reasons for why I may be actually enjoying this job. Maybe others can relate.

  1. The exposure to world events I get. I mean, of course I'm not some kind of Global Macro PM but still I feel like everything that happens in the world somehow impacted my work. War in Ukraine: directly impacted my work and I have dozens of emails mentioning this exact macro event. Chinese lockdowns these past few months: directly impacted my work and I have dozens of emails mentioning this exact macro event. I think that if you saw any important headline for the past few months, it somehow affected my work. I have a real exposure to macro events that I had never felt before. It's no longer me talking with my college buddies about these things happening - these things are happening to me! Every time some shit happens I have to do something about it because my company is a global player with exposure in literally every single country in every single continent. 
  2. Impact. Let's be clear, I have a kinda 'senior' title... maybe? But it's nothing close to being like a division CFO. However, I communicate my work directly to ED and VP level finance people who act as division CFOs. And... guess what? They have called shots based on my models. They have called shots based on my emails. They have called shots based on my suggestions. It's a really weird feeling when a single email I send technically ends up moving millions of dollars but I think that's the reason I wanted this job in the first place.
  3. Culture. I have a kind of intuitive feeling that this is what a 'good' job feels like. To be clear, I have pulled all-nighters and I have had to sit through a VP shitting on my answers to their questions but that only happens when the market demands it. When the world demands it. When things are business as usual I just feel really comfortable. I read emails with no rush. When things are particularly slow I've even involved myself in projects not directly related to my particular position so that I can make a name for myself around the company as a whole, not just the people I directly report to. I have time to think and rethink about everything I want to dedicate my attention to. It just feels good. I don't feel pressured to be laser focused on one stupid thing I don't care about all day. I'm, for the most part, focused on the business and how I can improve things. Every now and then I will have to really focus on one really small thing but once I solve it and it's closed, it's back to thinking about the business as a whole. And that's really all I can ask out of a finance job. 
 

Only job I ever enjoyed was a volunteer job I had a long time ago in gap year at university. Since then it's been a 15 year suck fest of unpleasant experiences and unfortunate events.

I write this as I unhappily for home to my ingrate of a wife so that I can daydream about curling up with a charcoal burner in my one man closed door WeWork office for the weekend.

 

not a joke mate. Like a recovering alcoholic, it's day by day.  That plus I'm relatively certain there's a sprinkler system in the Wework. One of my friends, a fund manager, offed himself with a charcoal burner in his Tesla up in the hills a few years ago.  Thing is, I don't have a car, and I live w/ the ingrate wife, so I guess I'd never manage to pull it off without getting interrupted.

 

Fortunately, I’m not bound by market hours either. I work for a commodity processor/trader and my work specifically is building statistical trading strategies over long time horizons. 2-3 months when I identify structural price dislocations given what we know about the supply and demand and some other factors. The other part of my job is building/maintaining models for predicting world export flows, new crop spec prediction, etc and helping out with ad hoc projects focused around potential capital projects that need a commodity pricing/statistical approach to valuation. So all of that is pretty much on my own schedule as long as the project gets done in a reasonable time. 

 

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