How Soon Can I Leave? - 1st Year IB Analyst

After your bonus it’s okay. Don’t leave before that cause you’ll regret it later, but after 6 months it’s okay, I know someone who left and it’s never brought up if you stay at the next place for 2 years

I know it's not the answer you are looking for, but it's going to partially depend on your experience and where you exit to. If you haven't seen a full transaction start to finish and likely been on a few others as well, you aren't really going to understand the transaction process, so what value can you really add from an M&A perspective? That said, if you are trying to exit to an unrelated field like consulting or tech, no one is going to bonk you for 8 versus 9 versus 10 months. General rule of thumb is to stay at your first job for a year and I would encourage you to try to do that, but also if you are miserable get out as soon as you can--just make sure you have another job lined up and that next job you will need to stay at for awhile, so be sure you really like it. In other words, leave whenever you want, just make sure that next job you stay at for 2 years prob.

If I were you it would depend on my current experience/ if you have gotten lucky with staffing's and have seen every part of a deal process and closed an entire deal I'd bounce. If you are leaving the industry, after 9 months people will still probably credit you with understanding that world on a very superficial level/ you won't look like you couldn't hack it if you left after 9 months and immediately started a new job. I would strongly strongly advise against quitting without having your next job lined up though. 

It's a tradeoff and only you can really make the call on how terrible your physical and mental health is declining/ if an extra month or two or three would be unrecoverable. Stay strong and keep your head up--the best is yet to come for you.

I feel your pain. I can't tell if I'm just dogshit or if WFH has made ramping up more difficult or if it is a bit of both, but definitely really struggling and also looking at LinkedIn in a free time. Hard to talk to the analysts in my class or anyone else on the team really because no one really wants to show weakness or vulnerability. 

Statistics show that those who leave their first jobs within 16 months significantly reduce their lifelong earning potential, on average.

What possible other careers are you looking at involving finance specifically? IB seems interesting but you essentially have no family life..

ibtope2020

Interested in potentially going into a strategic finance role at a tech firm

Are you working in the TMT/M&A group or trying to switch industries?

Know someone who left within 6 months with no offer in hand

I've been around long enough to see this question pop up just about every year. Believe me when I say the following distillations come from significant volume of prior discussions, reading, advice from people in the industry, personal experience in the industry, etc:

• from people who are still in finance (banking, PE, etc): "at least two years." Basically, the 80/20 of your learning and skills acquisition will be done by 2 years. As a recent grad with 6 years of work experience, your learning can be summarized as knowing how to show up to work, swipe your card, read emails, edit Powerpoints, update Excels, reply to emails, not die from 80 hour work weeks, and do all of the above without annoying people to the point they're firing you. You haven't made any money yourself, and you definitely haven't helped your employer make any money. Plus, you'll look weak if you can't handle at least a year. At one year, you're only 6 months away from your first proper bonus, so might as well stay. And then you're only 6 months from hitting the safety mark.
• from people in consulting: "as long as we know you aren't trying to switch to consulting because you're about to get fired from banking, then great, the earlier the better, because you're going to lose all your tenure if you lateral into our industry". Self-explanatory: they mainly care that you aren't a total dud. There's a secret inferiority complex consultants have with bankers, hence why they're quite receptive to lateral switches among juniors. 
• from corporates/industry: "6 months - that's like, you quit before even doing any real work, although maybe I can still afford you at this stage". There's a slower pace in established companies. 5 years of experience in a real corporate is really just one year, repeated five times. It's the same stuff. And you don't really do anything at all at first; there's so much basic bureaucracy and processes to navigate. Highly network-dependent. Probably more receptive in something like consumer retail, which works with quicker projects, or with capex-heavy industries like telecom or industrials. Oil & gas much more suspicious, as they tend to view projects as 5-20 year long efforts.
• from startups: "par for the course, um, can you help us set up our payments system, I mean you're in finance right?" this is a much more promiscuous industry. Most people rarely stay at a startup long enough to see two funding rounds, and as long as you put pots and pans together, you'll be useful. So, expectations on tenure are much lower.
• all of the above: "no matter what I've said and even if I end up hiring you, I'm going to be on the lookout to see if you're a job hopper. You better last at least two full years with me, if not three."

That said, leaving with less than a year in a job is always a move that needs to be justified - not only for your next move, but in all subsequent conversations. Depending on the underlying validity and the cogency with which you pitch it, some might buy your reasons more than others, but it's going to raise eyebrows for a long time to come. If it's your first job, well, tread even more carefully. It's assumed you've basically learned nothing and aren't really much more useful than a fresh college graduate, except you've now shown that you're willing to quit early. Again - for some people, it works out. In the long term, it almost always works out. But it'll follow you for the first 3-5 years after you do it. 

Curious to thoughts on lateraling within the bank within a year or 2? Moving from IB to trading, research or anything really. Not leaving the firm but just going to another team/role