I spent 3 years in bulge bracket bank covering awesome tech companies. Banking was great for me can't complain much. The culture in my group was amazing, the people I worked with were fantastic. Lots of social events, group lunch breaks and coffee chats.
But like everyone else I was trying to switch to buyside -- The Promised Land With Greener Grass!!!
The buyside...
I got a job in the middle market PE that covers pretty much all boring companies in manufacturing, healthcare and energy space. I thought it is probably fine because I would have a better lifestyle (call it work/life balance), even better people who are more human and are more respectful, better compensation, vacation and time-off policy.
I work for a Monster Firm who enslave their junior people and pretends like we are robots
Here I am 4 month later....everyday i discover something new about my firm and it leads me to conclusion that I work for a Monster Firm who enslave their junior people and pretends like we are robots.
Some unwritten rules in my company:
- You have to be the last person leaving the office. We have one crazy guy who is always in the office whether it is 8pm or 3am. You cant leave earlier than him.
- I like to workout after work... and when it came to leaving at 8pm to go to the gym I was told that I should switch to a gym that is opened 24/7 so I can go later at night
- One day I asked to leave early...early I mean 7pm lol...I was told I cant...so I missed the commitment.
Ahh yes here it is an awesome vacation and time-off policies:
- I discovered that admin staff has better time off policies than the investment team
- Investment team gets only 15 days of time-off...NO SICK Days and NO Personal DAYS!
- I was told by HR that if you are not in the office it is a vacation...So Funeral = Vacation, Visiting Sick Family Member=Vacation, if you are dying and not in the office = it is still a vacation.
- Even thou- gh we get the vacation HR said "You can take it, but no one takes it here". How cool it is!
Comp/benefits vs hours worked and stress
This is all leads to the debate about the overall compensation/benefits vs hours worked and stress you bear.
The comp is below the street for middle market space. 401k is minimal, only matched after 1 year worked and horrible vesting schedule. Insurance not great. Life policy coverage is 420k...are you serious! 15 days - I think this what you get working at a car factory. The standard in all banks is 15 days, 10 sick days and 6 personal days that can be used at your own discretion. Overall this comp package sounds more like 9 to 8 job but not a 80h+ a week.
Frustration
I feel extremely frustrated because headhunter and during the interview process I was told how great it is to work here and how great the lifestyle is. It turns out to be a prison. If you die probably no one even will notice it.
I have no problem working hard. I worked pretty much from 8am till 12am including weekends since I started. Occasionally getting out at 8pm or 9pm. It is an absolute nonsense when company micromanages you and tells you what to do with you life.
Have anyone else experienced something like that or can draw some similarities? Would love to here your experience!
This happens to everyone at some point in their career. Not all places are good to work, and it's not easy to see that from the outside. What you do in that situation is you buckle down, do a good job while you're there, and then recruit elsewhere.
This has nothing to do with the "promised land of private equity". WTF does that even mean? This is finance. You're going to be working long hours, there's going to be a ton of bullshit to deal with, and you're going to inevitably work with some assholes with massive egos. You deal with it because the pay is good. PE isn't some incredible space to work, it's a job. People just want to get into it because the work is interesting and the pay is good.
Shouldn't have switched jobs from banking if you were so happy with the people and culture. Pay - it's widely known that unless you're at a select few upper MMs / MFs, you'll likely be taking a pay cut compared to your banking associate peers. Sounds like you should have just done more diligence on the place by talking to others, and given serious thought to whether leaving your firm was the right move.
I feel like I should have stayed as I had an option like this. In terms of diligence -- during my final rounds and during the overall interview process, everyone bragged about "how great is the culture, it is not a typical fund...people respect each other...we do have a work/life balance, no one ever works on weekends, everyone takes vacations and blah blah blah..." They were saying all this great things but unfortunately it is a complete lie. Another associate in my team was caught up in the same situation where they said all the right things but now he literally works 24/7. At some two years ago I heard they lost all associates and a few VPs... now I get why. Who wants to work in a place like that.
In a similar position. Not going to lie it seems the more people try to sell you on the firm and how great it is the worse it actually is on the job. Just something to think about going forward about how hard people sell you on a position.
Best of luck to you
Prestige, bragging rights, and the illusion of power. I wish I was joking.
Hi TradeGreek thanks for your reply. Here is some answers to your questions.
Can I ask how many offers for different funds did you get? I had a few other offers in a middle market space, but accepted here because I was attracted by the hours and work/.life balance plus they are operationally focused fund. Is this a relatively new firm? They have been around since 2005 but it seems like they started hiring associated in 2010. The fund is growing so they hire more AA these days. What is the carry like? No carry at all. It starts only at VP level and you need to wait for a new fund to be raised. You knew the pay going in so why did you take such a cut / what implications did you think this reflected? I knew it would be a pay cut but the expectation was that I work much less. It will sound crazy but I literally worked less in IB than here since all these BB banks have junior banker policies in place now. I would assume less working hours? Yeap you are right. How big is the investment team? the team is around 13 people (4 partners, 1 principal, 4 VPs and 4 AAs) Are you planning on doing an MBA? I don't know. I only see value in these if I decide to switch careers completely.
Honestly I have nothing against working long hours here and there when it is rally needed. What is really frustrating is that this company tracks every single hour that you are out of the office. I don't understand why I have to request half a day off to go to doctor when I work so many hours and in first place this job made me sick. This is literally absurd.
The headhunter is BellCast. When I spoke to them they were telling me all the positive things about the company. Do you think I should share feedback with them?
Start looking for another job. You get paid in PE with carry which locks you in. Don’t get locked in.
And honestly, just take time off. As in send an email and don’t ask. Place sounds like it blows.
Hi LateralMoneky - when you get into IB everyone starts talking about PE in the first month of the job. Everyone (including headhunters) talks about how interesting is the work, the pay is better and the lifestyle is awesome. ME PE seemed to be a perfect option for me. More interesting work combined with better lifestyle. Whoever you talk to usually says ME is much better than IB and MF. I accepted the role because I was looking for better hours. That is a priority for me. Life is too short to spend time working for some complete assholes who has no respect to people. Of course other reasons were is to learn more about investing, get more involvement with the companies --- so all these should be more interesting than just putting high level pitch materials and spreading comps. Yes the work is slightly more interesting but it is not sophisticated and ends up to be same bullshit. I am lucky to close first deal in my first 4 month at this firm. Surely I learned quite a bit but it is not a rocket science.
Also it is an absolute nonsense when the entire firm thinks that performance of the fund is correlated to the number of hours employees work and the number of time-off they take. This is NUTS!!! That type of culture lowers the moral and won't have success in the long run. One of my colleagues who has been here for a year now said:" This really depressing because they said all the right things. But since I joined I worked all weekends, all holidays, no time off... The partner who I work with won't even been bothered if I get hit by a truck...he ll easily find someone else to update his model."
It sounds like you're running up against two types of problems: structural and personal.
Structurally, private equity isn't for the faint of heart. It's a demanding industry.
All of what I just wrote is eminently knowable, though. It's not new, people don't hide it because it can't be hidden. You're going to work no less than 70 hours a week anywhere. 80+ is a norm at a lot of the super institutionalized (read: megafund) shops.
The tradeoff you're making is that you're getting paid today in an intangible element (uncommon experience) that's useful to you tomorrow. You work really hard now so that you can work easier later.
If you make it five more years, your job has a sourcing component - you're reading, thinking, and talking to people to develop your own investment thesis, then you're schmoozing to find things to buy.
I can't tell you private equity will ever be easy. It isn't, unless you can hack your way into a family office role or some kind of situation where you're running things on your own (search fund, SPV, consultant, etc.). Even in the latter situation, you may cut your actual work down to 30 hours a week, but you have inordinate mental stress because the buck stops with you.
Personally, it sounds like you're approaching this with a slightly immature perspective.
I do not mean this as a personal attack, please take this as a dispassionate third-party assessment of your overall approach here. You present as mildly entitled and mildly nebbish.
Let's unpack both of these.
Entitled because you think 15 days of time off is bad. I am pretty surprised to hear that banks are at 15+10+6 these days; that's 31(!) weekdays at complete discretion. If that's true, I could take six work weeks off in a year? That's wild.
Maybe banks are happy to offer that because of the raft of bad PR and unkind news coverage from a few years back (2014-2016) regarding poor work-life balance at the junior level. It is somewhat defensible given how little the entire analyst talent pool contributes to the overall cost basis of the division. It's easy and cheap enough to expand the analyst classes by 20%.
I can guarantee you no investment management firm would ever take that approach. Two weeks is the standard. That's 10 days (if it's spelled out in the policy as weekdays, 14 if written as calendar days). Everyone junior tends to take a two-weeker every year, plus play it by ear around the holidays as to whether it's possible to work remote the week around Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Why? Two simple reasons.
Nebbish because you haven't taken any steps to manage the situation directly.
When you get a weekend email that says "Let's talk NOW. Where are you?", you call that person and talk about what they want to discuss. If you don't reach them, email back and say "I just tried you, I'm available again at X:00 on 212.abc.defg" with an availability no more than a couple hours out.
If you want to exercise, do it first thing in the morning or immediately when you get home at night. If someone hires you as a junior resource, they expect to be able to hand things to you at their convenience. It's inconvenient to find you out the door at 7:00 for 90 minutes when they want to spend 15 minutes walking you through something before heading to a dinner they have to be at.
Does it suck? Absolutely. Is that the thing you do in your 20s in private equity? Yes, that's the role you signed up for.
The point I'm trying to make is that you (i) make reasonable sacrifices (working part of every weekend, getting up early to exercise or developing a fitness regimen where 40 minutes gets you what you need [and thus you can cram it in at lunchtime, for instance]) and (ii) manage expectations internally.
If something is unreasonable, ask about it. "Is this something that needs to be done immediately? When would you like to have it to review?" Three times out of four, someone simply wants to talk to you right away, they don't want the work right away.
That segues into a larger point. This is a perception game. They want to feel that you're heavily invested, that this matters to you a lot. You asking to leave at 7pm is identifiably dumb because it tells everyone on the team that you aren't heavily invested.
It's actually pretty doable to make work easy on yourself by acting like you're the hardest worker in the room without actually being the hardest worker in the room. What's better is if you're both, but you don't seem to have that mindset.
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I'm writing this not as a guy who spent 15 years earning partner at a giant shop, but as a guy who figured out how the sausage gets made, that he didn't love that flavor profile, and eventually, how to skip a few rungs on the ladder by taking very unconventional steps.
My point is that you can make life a lot easier on yourself by taking pains to understand the system you're operating in. With that knowledge, you can choose whether you want to optimize yourself for that system ... or find a system elsewhere that's more optimized for what you are already.
Now, since a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, let's talk about what you can do here. Two steps:
Start to 'manage up':
You need to figure out how to push back on what's unreasonable. To do that successfully, your mandatory first step is to crush what is reasonable. Most of what you complained about sounds like stuff that just comes with the territory. If you want a big-boy private equity job, it isn't going to be a bed of roses.
12-hour days is the norm. Weekend work will vary depending on what shop you're at, but expect to spend 4-6 each weekend day reading or handling email. This is your 70 hour threshold: (12 * 5) + (5 * 2).
Some downtime where you wish you could walk off the desk, go for coffee with buddies, read personal material on your computer, hit the gym, or anything else you could get away with during what sounds like an incredibly cushy analyst stint but now have to stay butt-in-seat for is also the norm. They pay you to be there. I don't know other $300k office jobs that don't have this. (Senior software engineering management at FAANG maybe.)
For the unreasonable stuff, play the political game the best you can. Cite other projects you're on, get the real deadline (not the made-up one), make your own calendar events to block space out, reply to emails strategically ... all the normal stuff.
Find a way to move:
Some of what you've described doesn't sound like a healthy culture. If they had an entire set of juniors walk out the door, something foul is afoot. If they're truly micromanaging (i.e. dictating not just what your work is but how you actually get it done on an hour-to-hour basis), that's not right. If it's that extreme of a facetime culture and you aren't exaggerating, we'd all agree with you that it's not a good place to be.
So exfil gracefully. You can do this (even in the midst of an associate stint) with a really similar mechanism to how you got this job: headhunters.
Get your resume shipshape, highlight your deal experience, ask for warm intros (e.g. your analyst classmates who used SG or CPI or Oxbridge instead of Bellcast), and be very articulate with a 'why' in your first coffee chats.
Your 'why' is best if its born out of experience. For instance, "At my current fund we focus on middle market companies in mature industries like manufacturing and energy. I enjoyed my time in banking covering faster-moving companies in the technology industry, and while I've enjoyed my first investing role and confirmed that this is the career path I'm best suited for, I'd love to marry the two by taking a seat investing in private technology businesses."
This implicitly states that you're not loving your current role but does it very gracefully. You aren't badmouthing anyone. You're saying that you want something else more, not that you don't want what you have now.
I say this because much of what you've shared here borders on whiny, and if anyone got a hint of that, be they a recruiter or someone on the deal team at a prospective employer, your chances immediately fall to zero.
You won't be able to move without a year of experience, so reach out to headhunters at about the 9-month mark in your current role. If I'm reading your post correctly, that puts you with about five months to go.
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Good luck. Unfortunately it sounds like you had the 'new' analyst experience (which I've heard a lot of guys my age talk about disparagingly), so when you heard of "greener grass" you thought it'd be even easier in your new role. It wasn't, and to top it off, it was actually a place tougher than the norm. I recognize that from your post and am sorry you've had a rough time.
You should recognize, however, that it isn't supposedly "greener" because it's easier, but because it can be a more engaging career path for certain types of people.
If you're someone who loves results-based success rather than process-based success, for instance, investing is dramatically more satisfying than banking. You're an investor, not an advisor.
Plus, over time, you get a tremendous level of ownership over what you work on. If you don't like the deal, you don't spend any time on it (at the Principal / Partner level). You don't have that luxury in banking.
Factors like these are why people refer to it as the 'promised land'. It's quality of life because of the type of things you do, not the volume of things you do. You get no real volume improvement relative to banking, you just get a caliber improvement.
Again, good luck.
Very well written post, but this is not a good mentality and I hope to never fall into this way of thinking. Appreciate what you’re trying to convey, but you’ve presented a lot of dehumanizing perspectives that make me believe you did not develop any real leadership qualities over your 15 years of becoming a partner.
I’m sorry, but you seem to be detached from the people who work for (or with) you. I also have the sense that this post you’ve written was a way to rationalize your own work life and possibly the way you treat your juniors. I’ll give you credit for some topics (managing up, and generally how to function in a professional setting), but your general view of “junior” staff I quite demoralizing.
I truly hope this post was written by an Associate who is merely role playing as a PE Partner for this website.
I think your reading comprehension isn't excellent here.
I said I didn't spend 15 years becoming a partner. It was an attempt to indicate that I'm not in my 50s and thus not a jaded old guy talking shit on a "Millennial" frustrated with a challenging work environment.
Please help me understand where what I wrote was dehumanizing. I've always understood the literary definition of that word to mean 'the removal of human qualities' and the legal definition to be 'the alienation of rights'. I can certainly tell you that wasn't my intent, perhaps my execution sucked.
Have you ever heard of Jocko Willink or read his book Extreme Ownership? I loved it the minute I came across it, it was one of those cool moments where you find someone's taken the time to write down something you already believe and practice.
I didn't have the easiest childhood. I didn't skate into Harvard, enjoy Ivy League OCR, and begin a career with ease. The way I overcame socioeconomic and personal challenges was by accepting that the system was the way it was and it fell to me to figure out how to succeed within it if I decided I wanted to participate in it at all.
Nowhere did I say this guy is a bad person. I went the opposite route and took care to avoid saying that he is entitled, but rather that he presents like it. I built on that to offer candid and experience-based suggestions on how he can mitigate what sounds like an admittedly toxic environment.
I've never been one to rationalize. I went into the industry knowing exactly what I was signing up for because I invested energy in learning about it beforehand. When I encountered a situation I felt failed my standards (summer analyst at one of the 'elite' groups), I changed firms (analyst at another 'elite' group).
Each bad experience I had as a subordinate shaped my idea of leadership. I'm imperfect, and I'll be the first to tell you that. That admission is borne out of this concept of ownership, and my first comment was a stab at sharing how similar principles can help you overcome adversity.
I treat people with respect. I'm fortunate today for the luxury of having true friends work with me where the ongoing strength of our longstanding personal relationships meant that over the years they asked if I was willing to bring them on board. Knowing them as friends first is the greatest impetus behind how careful I am treating them as colleagues.
It took me some time to digest your post and prevent myself from emotional response. But here are some thoughts.
**"private equity isn't for the faint of heart. It's a demanding industry." Not sure what you are referring to here. Is it the long hours? Dealing with complete assholes all the time? Mentally demanding job? I can agree with the first two. So far I don't see that PE requires an elite skill set. Sure those guys at the top are smart and educated but there are millions of people like that. Their investments succeed in part not because there are genius but because they have money to hire different specialists and advisory groups to do the work for them. PE is not a rocket science and it always impresses me how PE guys elevate it.
**"in my day' mentality" This is just absolutely retarded. If you claim to be smart, you should be smart to recognize that today is a different time and new generation has a different mentality. Technology helps us be more efficient, internet makes us more connected... I literally don't need to sit on my ass all day in the office waiting for you to go home because you are some old school guy who hates his wife and children and gets only satisfaction from work (thats just creepy). As long as you are responsive and work gets done it shouldn't matter where are you.
**''80+ is a norm" Megafunds sure. The problem is that a lot of HH market lower and MM shops as a sweet spot - investing experience + balanced life. But in reality it could be worse than mega fund because you have literally no one to cover for you.
Now let's switch to "my immature perspective". **'Entitled" 15 days is really bad when you work 24/7 including the weekends. The banks do give you 15 days off, sick days and personal days and I took them all with zero issues. Employers don't recognize a concept of "burn out". How much you can work like that? I have been put on a deal and it has been really busy. All I do is wake up, go straight to work, go sleep after midnight at best and wake up again. Some of you were saying that I should go to the gym in the morning not after 7pm. But how you can possible do that when you get 5-6h of sleep and you literally get squeezed like a lemon during the day. If you are a human this is not possible.
**"Nebbish" I do try to mange up. But it is not working. HR told me that we expect you to be connected and working no matter what. How the heck you can manage it?
**"It's inconvenient to find you out the door at 7:00 for 90 minutes when they want to spend 15 minutes walking you through something before heading to a dinner they have to be at." This 15min of walk through means I am not going home that night. Thats why sometimes it is better to just leave before they come with some other useless analysis. You said "they have to be at the dinner". What about us juniors? Do they think we don't have a life? No dinners? No dates? This is absolutely barbaric to think this way. You pay me money to do the work but it doesn't mean I become you 24/7 slave.