How is Jefferies SF Tech?

TLDR - Terrible culture and management at Jefferies Tech IB in the San Francisco office. 

*To start, very high turnover among analysts/associates as a result of the toxic culture. The SF office is constantly going through changes because of inability to retain and keep people creating workflow issues for transferring projects. Endless pitching and very few deals are won from a pitch to win ratio and significantly impacts junior morale (the constant losing of IPO pitches and M&A bake offs is appalling, primarily with the software team). You will quickly realize these "managing directors" look good on paper, but lose credibility when you see the volume of pitches lost. Take a hint, the market and client are telling them something of who they want to work with. 

*Several VP/SVP (software and internet teams) will make you iterate endlessly on a bake-off deck and create numerous versions of the same slides and make them as "graphical" as possible to create a "story" that ends up being a picture book and only to find out they lost the mandate to another Bulge Bracket bank. There is one specific software SVP that constantly changes his mind with slide creates and will iterate until the last hour before a pitch. There are VPs on a call or email chain that feel the need to voice their opinion only to make the analysts/associate have to make an entire new section of slides (Thx for voicing your opinion and insight, now we have to address your comment that made you feel like you contributed to the discussion, which creates more work and takes us further away from finishing the deck and makes us stay up even later in the night for very little yield). Even have a specific example where juniors were working around the clock with a one week turn around before the pitch and the MD's end up losing the pitch and don't even bother saying anything to the junior team. Have some humility and admit you lost to another bank and don't keep analysts or associates in the blind. 

*The staffer is terrible and repeatedly will assign new deals and projects to analysts/associates who are clearly overworked and overstaffed and only to the capable analysts and associates, while the analysts/associates that are liabilities and slower to learn new things get assigned easy profile books. Staffer also plays favorites based on face time and who they are friends with outside of work and intentionally will staff people on a Thursday/Friday before the weekend. Have fun with the 3pm Friday staffing. 

*Incompetent head of the group and review process for bonuses that favors those that brown nosed, not based on performance or those that actually worked and closed on deals that generated fees for the firm. The amount of gossiping even at the VP/Director level is surprising. There was also talk about VP/Directors that even had an email chain talking behind juniors’ backs. Low room for growth, again due to the politics and @$$ kissing required, but also because mentorship and professional development is close to non-existent. 

*The clawbacks are known here on this forum and is another red flag. Search on WSO, but if you make a certain amount in total comp even for analysts or associates and you leave to a competitor or engage in "competitive activity" (most often if you try to lateral to another bank), the legal team will come after you to clawback any comp (that you well-earned after endless nights of working on their BS pitches) even after you have left the firm.