Cant decide if i want to take the risk and put in the significant effort to go to PE and risk my career promotion track or stay where i am. This is pretty lame given i have a relatively good understanding of the vast differences between PE associate life and banking associate life but I can’t decide. Anyone willing to share their opinion or guidance?
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Only go to PE if you want to work as a professional investor. If that isn’t interesting or exciting to you, then stay put. The marginal difference in comp (other than outlier carry situations) is likely minimal. The biggest lifestyle difference though is that PE will have incrementally more predictable hours.
I was in similar position in a great team and even when i got the offer, i was almost awake at night deciding whether to take it. And I thought “I can do banking for longer, I can stand the hours, maybe this isn’t the perfect shop bla bla”. I took the offer anyway in the end
I moved to PE a few months ago and let me tell you
By NO means any shop is perfect and the industry as a whole doesn’t have the rosiest outlook (and in banking you can just not care given it’s a service job), I also preferred the banking environment and team significantly more (I think the average age in PE is higher and people are more serious and actually doing their job vs complaining to the rest of the team)
BUT
I don’t regret it a single day. Overall my quality of life is so much better. I completely forgot what it meant to consistently get 7-8h of sleep both for my day to day work brain but also for my personal life on the weekend. I have so much more energy to do everything I want to do. I am getting back my memory which 3y of sleep deprivation erased. The work is also so much more interesting. You don’t realize how much of a stupid job banking is until you leave - 99% of bankers really only spend their lives thinking about comps and correlations. The amount of time wasted on BS is just insane
From my personal experience, I would recommend you leave. Whatever I want to do after I am learning 10x more than by staying in banking
Helpful, much appreciated. I guess all the prep i know i will need to do while doing banking hours is also causing me to procrastinate - knowing i could just do my current job, get promoted, and have somewhat of a social life. But i guess short term sacrifices
I get you. It sucked and drained me to prep while doing banking hours. But though times never last - tough people do. You don’t want to stay in your current job out of inertia, not when it’s a job that takes all of your life
Think about whether you want to leave or not and make the sacrifice if so, it’s worth it
If you love banking it’s a different story
Good POV, I echo the sentiment on learning and interesting work, but I will caution you that I get 4-5 hours of sleep a night (about 3 last night) with stress through the roof pretty much as soon as i wake up until I go to bed, paling in comparison to the stress that you get as a banking analyst (which looking back is largely all low-stakes inconsequential stuff but when you're fresh out of college you can't delineate). Variation of experiences in PE are much wider than in banking and very firm dependent.
Agree with this
Way more important to pick a good firm culturally. Do a lot of diligence, If you already know you’re joining a sweatshop with bad culture, then maybe make sure you fully think it through
The analyst years are structured, right? Say AN1 AN2 AN3, each year you’re more or less guaranteed a promotion automatically.
I joined my firm at ASO2, does it work the same? Will I automatically get pushed to ASO3 next year?
(Forgive the stupid question, I came from outside the industry and still see myself as an outsider)
I actually wouldn't go so far as to say that if you want to be an "investor" you should definitely go to PE. The reality is that a VERY large portion of your time in PE ends up being spent on asset management. You should try to get as much of a perspective on that side of things as you can to try and gauge if you would like it.
The pace in PE is also very different. Above is right that hours are more predictable, but the pace is also slower and energy is lower. Just something else to consider.
I will say, yes I get more sleep in PE (outside of deal sprints which are much worse than banking sprints), but I’m actually more tired at the end of the day because I was not on autopilot and had to think a lot more, unlike in banking. That may be different in banking as you move up of course but just wanted to bring that up.
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