PSA - This Website is Run by Interns and Prospective Candidates

This is just a PSA after reading thread after thread of horribly wrong information. This website undeniably has some amazing resources and knowledge available—especially the stuff pinned up as resources, but the posts can be really bad. Anonymous posting can be great—heck I’m doing it right now, but if you are going to really accept a statement or view on the industry please for the love of god pm usernames or ask for in-person calls with users to verify you are getting information from a reliable source. Honesty, even if someone is anonymous, ask if they will pm you for an in-person call if they said something that you found interesting. As someone who has finished an analyst stint, I see arguments and highly rated posts every time I check this website advocating information certainly untrue based on my work experience. Things like kids arguing where banks are positioned, what their specialties are, what matters in recruitment for banks, how transactions work, how recruiting/ exits work, and more, all have consensus on this website that if you read it from the perspective of someone who has actually done the job you are like, “yeah, that’s not true” Even worse, I’ve interviewed and had coffee chats/ discussions with prospective candidates that have confidently regurgitated incorrect information from this website on my bank and it’s lost them opportunities because of how confidently incorrect they are.

There’s some extent that more experienced users can assist to prevent bad information from being spread or provide insightful comments, but sadly the voting system can often make incorrect statements, but widely viewed as correct by prospects and interns, get the most visibility and appear as correct due to having the most people behind it. I don’t know from a numbers standpoint, but I would assume you maybe have 10% of posters that have worked in IB full-time based on comments, threads, and upvoting I see.

This is a rant, but it’s really bad viewing some of these threads as someone who once also was a lost undergrad and I worry when I see kids making career decisions based on seeing posts likely written by other kids who maybe just had their internship and want to feel accomplished about securing a return offer. You need to talk to a verified and experienced source if you want to learn about this industry. Until you’ve done buyside recruiting, you aren’t going to understand really how the process works. Until you work at a bank for a long time, you won’t understand really how the job works. Until you interview candidates, you won’t understand what banks actually look for when hiring. Perhaps most importantly, you aren’t going to understand the experience at a bank that isn’t your own. If you are a prospect or intern and want to learn about a group or a specific bank you need to call someone who has worked there full-time for at least a year. Get off this website and talking with anonymous individuals and start making real connections and discoveries. No one should lose an offer because they assert that UBS no longer has a tech group, or that jefferies only does $200m-$400m mandates, or that a certain group in an EB is a “sweatshop”. Or that a BB satellite office is a “pitch and ditch” office.