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Career Resources
VP's still take a lot of time committment. The same if not more than analysts. The difference being, they're doing business, not necessarily work. If you're gone for 3 days on a road trip pitching clients, that is 72 hours of "work". Plus the time you'll spend in the office. Whereas analysts will spend 80-100 hours in the office doing modeling and what have you.
How about disregarding travel and counting only the time the VP walks in the morning until when he leaves in the evening/night?
and later (11PM-midnight) when things are really busy or have an important meeting
The place I worked as a summer VPs stayed till about 6pm - 7pm unless something crazy was going down. Where I work now VPs stay 9-11pm. So in conclusion I would say the later one is probably more likely, but its highly variable.
ah yes, being in my early thirties / starting to start a family and being in the office until 11 PM every night. yummy...
a 2 year analyst experience is one thing, but i gotta say i just don't understand career bankers.
with VPs is they can't switch to PE/HF b/c those hires normally come at analyst level where labor costs are cheaper. If they move into corporate, they will take huge pay cut with better hours. It's hard to change your lifestyle and live on 150k when you've been making 500k. Therefore, VPs are kind of in a no-man's land and stick around. My VP is always bitching about hours and how he's never home with his 2 year old child. He's been in the job for 6 years and looks like he's aged 15 years according to him. Although he likes his job, the only reason he deals with hours is b/c he gets paid well and doesn't have many other options with similar compnesation.
Tell him he needs to quit his bitching and sack up. You can tell him I said it, too.
Not true. They can switch to buyside position, and are very valuable, in fact. They know their industry and the players pretty well.
Tell him he needs to stop buying crack with that 500k+ salary, save it for a couple years and then find a corporate 150k job where he'll still live like royalty and won't have to commute 2 hours every day (assuming he's already in the burbs).
The career bankers have no excuse to complain about being away from the family; they have options, and your VP is simply choosing his Porche and $3 million home over his kid...
Therapy will fix that. Haha
Tell him he can become a mule transporting drugs between Mexico and Texas, compensation is similar to banking and hours are fairly light.
i dont think the question is how many hours how many VPs actually make it to MD? and lets say you are VP for like 8 years and cant make it to MD, what are some opportunities that do not require that big of a pay cut while having okay lifestyle
There will be no 8th year as a VP. It's usually around 3-4. Up or out.
The guys with families typically leave earlier say 8-10PM (and even earlier than that sometimes).
Some of the guys without families are just insane, workaholics. You don't want to get staffed with them if possible.
I think the major plus (in addition to more traveling and less modelling work) is they work a lot fewer weekends where I am. They might call in from home, but they are only in the office when shit is hitting the fan.
VP, SVP, DIrector, MD hours? (Originally Posted: 01/05/2010)
Hey,
Search function didn't return anything.
Are the hours as miserable at the VP, SVP, Director, and MD levels?
read vault
There is info on this already posted, just look at anything about work life balance.
At VP, you work about the same as an associate to slightly less. You will not have anyone drive by staff you at the VP level or above and you can always choose to do things from home late if they aren't important.
SVP/Director tends to be a hybrid between VP and MD. Basically, if you are good then you are just running deals and making it rain, if you aren't then you are more in the weeds.
At the MD level the hours are whatever you want, however you will have to travel a ton to meet with clients. Your time away from home is usually the same as if you were in the office, you just get to be in nice hotels and (if you have status) in first class on a plane.
didn't search lifestyle, I searched hours. My mistake.
HOURS for Associates, VPs, MDs? (Originally Posted: 01/02/2008)
Hi everyone--
The topic of hours for analysts has been discussed ad nauseum on this forum, but I can't seem to find much information about how much people farther up in the hierarchy work.
That said, can anybody familiar with the topic tell me what the hours would be like for associates, VPs, and MDs? Also, how consistent are the hours?
Thanks-
One of the most important considerations if you want to survive your analyst/associate tenure is to 'interview' your senior bankers to ensure that they are emotionally stable and, if possible, have families (and balance).
A single senior banker with a work-aholic mentality will make your life miserable...particularly if they suffer from underlying emotional problems (ie: the reason they are single in the first place).
I've worked with single, emotionally unstable, unhappy senior bankers in the past...it sucks.
I'm a B-school applicant looking to get into banking, so take this with a grain of salt, but what I've heard is that the for the first 6-18 months (depending somewhat on group/bank) of being an associate you will work analyst hours (i.e. 90+ per week). During that time, it might taper down a little bit, mostly due to simply being better at getting your own work done and better at delegating to analysts (efficiency gains). As you get to your 2nd and 3rd year of Associateship, I've heard you can expect 80 hours pretty consistently — i.e. you are staying until 1 AM once or twice a week instead of staying until 3-5 AM four nights a week. Of course, you still don't know which days you will be stuck at the office until 1 AM. As you move up further into VP and MD ranks, your work becomes increasingly client facing, which means that the bulk of your work literally cannot be done in the middle of the night (clients are asleep), so you tend to pare down to ~10-12 hour days during the week, although oftentimes that work is in another city, so expect lots of travel. If you have other things to work on at night or over the weekend you can typically do it from home; no one is watching MDs for "face-time" in the office. I'm told that you never really get below about 60 hours a week, but the higher up you are the more control you will have over your own schedule.
1st year/stub associate - +5 to +10 analyst hours. Assuming you weren't an analyst before you went to b-school you will be in the office more than the analysts your are working with. You will have no idea what you are doing and will slow down the entire process. Everyone will think you are worthless for the first 6 months. You have absolutely no control over your schedule.
2nd / 3rd year associate - -0 to -10 analyst hours. You probably have some idea of what you are doing at this point, efficiency gains will kick in and you can get shit done. That being said you will be on more projects then your analysts, so you will have more hot items at once. You have a little control over your schedule.
Last year as an associate/1st year VP - -10 to -20 analyst hours. True efficiency gains, projects under your control, other associates doing work under you. At this point you set timetables and manage both above and below you. At this point unless something is really under crunch time you will no longer be ordering seamless at the office. An efficient person will have a lot of control.
VP-SVP-MD - Its all up to you, you are managing client relationships, meetings etc. If you like to be in the office you can, likewise you can make everything a call you can take from your couch in your absurdly sized house in NJ or CT.
To what AltESV said, cut and dried hours are not the way to think about it at any level. If you read the posts around here, you will see that is the case. One group you might be in everynight to 1am as an ass or an analyst. Another group you will be out every night at 10pm. Think in terms of how much those around/below you will be working and the control you have over your life.
PowerMonkey, not to sidetrack this conversation, but do many higher ups (VPs, MDs) live outside NY, like in NJ or CT like you said?
Most top guys either own apartments in the city or live in Fairfield/Westchester County. Most of our guys live in the Greenwich/Rye area.
So the general consensus is that after being an analyst and 1st year associate you pretty much can return to a normal work/life balance?
PowerMonkey - That's very helpful detail and mostly confirms what I had heard. I like the notion of thinking +/- analyst hours, since, as you mentioned, it's all relative.
RNR1811 - That depends how you define normal. From what I've heard you never really get below 60 hours a week (at least not if you are doing your job right), and as you get higher up you will tend to travel more. I'd say that as you get higher up work/life balance exists, but it still isn't ever normal.
A line you should only ever use with higher-ups you've got a fantastic relationship with: "So, I hear you've got some kids. Do they know what you look like yet?" But then again, that's kinda the corporate world nowadays at anything higher than grunt level.
You will work A LOT. That's probably the only guarantee anyone can make.
"We are lawyers! We sue people! Occasionally, we get aggressive and garnish wages, but WE DO NOT ABDUCT!" -Boston Legal-
People live all over the place, generally people move outside the city when they have families. So, you may have 60 year old MDs without kids living in Chelsea, you may also have sub-30 associates with a wife and kids living in NJ. With kids people live in NJ, CT, LI, and other places, generally the city sucks with kids. I know very few people at any level who live outside the city if they don't have a family (I knew one chick who lived in Greenwich with some friends, but that was the only one).
With regards to a normal life, you will never have a normal life in banking. It trends more towards normal the higher up you get. At junior levels, you work way too much with little control over your life. At senior levels, you travel a bunch and have conference calls all the time. It's never normal, it just gets better and pays you a boat load as you move up.
Well, if you invest well and can retire at 45-55 with all the money in the world, I think it's worth it.
So how many VPs actually make it to MD?
A single, anal, workaholic VP can be a effin' nightmare, sometimes I felt like the guy was coming up with extra shit just to ruin my night/weekend.
I worked with a VP over the summer who was married and had a kid (pretty young). However, this did not seem to affect him at all, as this guy was absolutely insane - he would actually be excited about the prospect of working an all-nighter.
I hated being staffed with him because he was such a workhaholic dick, but I have to say, this guy knew his shit and I probably learned the most during the times I was with him.
everyone is a farking VP in the bank, don't give a shiz about them.
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