ACTUAL WLB at PE??

Everyone seems to broadly say PE has better hours (excluding mega funds) than IB. Would like to know the extent this is true, specifically for growth equity.

could someone describe hours for a good and bad week, and how often they have each week? Downtime? 
 

Pretty burnt out from banking and unsure if the hours will be better at pe, so trying to figure it out. Thanks.

 
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So I wasn't in your standard PE firm - worked at a family office in an allocator role but did a mix of LP investing / co-invest / secondaries / occasional direct deals. I don't know any other LPs / allocators that work even close to these types of hours on a regular basis, whether it be at a foundation, endowment, pension, family office, or what have you. It was ridiculous because people join these roles for a better lifestyle at the tradeoff of comp, so I was basically getting the worst of both worlds - lower pay as an allocator but still working the hours as if I was at a buyouts shop.

  • When I joined: Avg'd ~60
  • After new group head took over: Avg'd 75-80
  • During COVID under new group head: Regularly 80-100+; worst week less than 30 hours of sleep, so yeah, shit sucked. Wasn't unusual to have multiple strings of 2-4am nights in a row

Also it would be one thing if all these hours worked were because it was all tied to deal-related stuff. Unfortunately there was so much wasted BS shit and gaslighting where you were told to do something and then ignored, then months later a favored team member brought over from the old firm "took lead" on the project as if all that work you first did never existed in the first place. So many self-promoting deliverables too that only served to make the new group head look good, with barely any credit given (if it was given at all) to the people who actually did the work.

Before this guy joined I thought this would be a firm that I could potentially be at for the rest of my career and I was genuinely happy (you can see how the tone in my old posts changed over time). Alas, things change. What also didn't help is that over time a bunch of people quit (wow, what a surprise) and then hiring wasn't prioritized at all because "it was our fault we weren't stepping up" despite already working way more and underwriting far more deals than ever before.

 

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