What exactly are “sweatshop” hours? Does this mean 7 days a week, 5-6 days past midnight? Or is it worse, semi-regular all nighters, no protected weekend day?
I work for an EB frequently called a sweatshop and wanted to see what others in “sweaty” groups work.
my hours are about as follows:
Sunday - Thursday 8/9am - 1/2am
Friday - 9pm
Saturday - supposedly protected but often a half day
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No cap, id say your hours are pretty typical in banking and not really sweatshop level.
I’m at another sweaty group within a sweat EB and everyone’s hours here and significantly worse than what you described. Personally have not had less than a full days work at all in the last 3 months. Getting to bed before 2am seems like a luxury. I’m an associate too.
Wow, given I’m running on fumes can’t even imagine how your group gets by. Hopefully the people are decent to work with despite the hours. This is the only saving grace of mine
I think thats a little extreme to generalize. I have friends in EB and their numbers are not like that, at least not consistently.
yeah, your group isn't sweaty, it's indentured labor at this point.
Doing some quick math…checks out to over 100 per week…oof, sounds sweaty to me.
My summer in a sweaty group
Monday-Thursday: 8/9am - 2/3am
Friday: 8/9am - 7/8pm
Saturday: usually off
Sunday: 10am - 8pm
The Saturday off is massive, really helps for regenerating. Wish all groups respected it.
Lol you have a full Saturday off and think your team is sweaty?
I know plenty of banks and teams where saturdays are half days and sundays you grind until 2/3 AM
Usually for summers the protected Saturdays are actually protected since they’re paid by the hour - have to get an official exception to work
Lots of banks have protected Saturdays, generally which is tracked (for VPs and Ds) and affects comp at year end
It's generally viewed that if your deal team is working on a Saturday, the VP fucked up by not budgeting time well during the week (again - generally is the key word here - I get that sometimes working on Saturday's can't be avoided because a client ask came in on Friday at 4PM or something market-related happened that's outside the deal teams' control, but I digress)
Also - the total number of hours to do something (and total number of turns and stacks of comments to turn) doesn't go anywhere.
It's just that time that would generally be allocated to working on Saturday get's done during the week (so M-Th goes from 9AM - 12PM to 9AM - 2AM or 10AM - 3AM) or it get's pushed to Sunday (which sucks dick going into the work week with a 2AM Sunday, esp if you know it's going to get worse before it gets better)
I would think that your group is in the higher end of hours, but not sweatshop level. I worked in a sweaty group this summer. The second half of the summer, they gave us more responsibility and the hours were almost what the full-time analysts were working (definitely more relaxed on Saturdays). From what I gathered, the hours were pretty consistently around the 110 level, but they could get worse (120+) if multiple deals were hitting hard. I got lucky and didn't have to pull an all-nighter, but the analysts definitely did. I would say that my last few weeks probably looked something like this:
Monday-Thursday: 9am - 4am
Friday: 9am - 8pm
Saturday: 12pm - 5pm
Sunday: 12pm - 1am
Total: 105 Hours.
4am every night? What does that look like, are you grinding the whole time or just looking out for requests until then?
4am most consistently. A few times 1-2am, but also a few times later. I don't think I got off before 12:30 on a weekday after the second or third week. I would say most days I didn't wait for work past dinner because I would finish up on one project and already have work for another project waiting.
The 4AM nights start going away (or become less frequent) as you get better at the job and as you start to perform specific processes more than one time.
E.g. - you're going through your first live M&A buyside advisory process, so you're up til 4AM a week straight getting the FF correct + precedents, trading comps, DCF, and all the other standard shit we do on this job during the course of a live deal.
Your first time you're going to probably fuck a lot of things up, not know what needs to tie to what, and, more importantly, what is going on in the model and your model outputs so that everything is correct/ties (protip: FACTSET TEXT LINKS ARE YOUR FRIEND)
Your next go around, you know exactly what the MD wants to see and when he wants to see it. As you get better at this job, you begin to think like your senior bankers (e.g. if a football field is all over the place) and know when to flag things like this to them to avoid those 4AM nights.
It also lights a fire under your ass because you remember how painful it was doing this the first time and you do just about everything in your power to avoid it, lol
That's because you were a useless intern that doesn't know how to work efficiently. More than 2 consecutive 4AM nights means you don't know how to do work, which is expected from an intern. But don't confuse this to be what the job looks like when you are full-time and know how to process tasks.
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Since I lateraled, I had two weeks over 100 hours and every other week I have 80+ hours (including Saturday work). The other weeks are 65-80 hours. What type of bank and group are you in? If you consistently work until 4am, you are either severely understaffed or your staffer/deal teams are inefficient. Are you planning to stay there long term?
Some groups have deal flow, buddy
Im sorry you think working consistently until 4am means you have a deal flow not that there is mismanagement or understaffing.
It is understandable if it is once a month or if there is a deadline but not all the time, it basically means you need more people - has nothing to do with deal flow.
This is so cringy haha
Might just be a case of the blind-leading-the-blind --> e.g. OP is staffed up with new associates + new or incompetent VP (or maybe the VP just doesn't give a shit, that's a possibility to)
Could also just be the case of an MD who got sent a deck for comments the previous night at 3AM and doesn't even open the PDF until 6PM the following night. Those types of guys will fuck your world up reeeeeeeeeeeeal quick
How are the sweatshops like GS TMT or MOE LA doing hours wise and what's the breakdown like?
Not hours but know an A1 who went 8+ weeks without having a weekend day off at Moelis LA
Can someone in a “sweaty group” give a general outline of your hours in a day? Just trying to get a sense how many deals/what type of work is causing you to work till 4 am daily.
My typical day. I work in a decently sweaty group but nothing like the stuff mentioned above.
7:30- wake up/get dressed/cook breakfast/pack snacks and gym bag
8- Leave for the office
815- get to the office. Start workout.
845- Finish workout. Shower/get changed.
9- Show up at desk. Check email/address any urgent matters/Read main industry websites for updates
1030- Address less important stuff. Resolve comments from seniors and get started on work for new deals
1230- Grab lunch
1- Finish lunch. Continue turning comments and working on less pressing materials
4- Meetings with deal teams/MDs about new deals and significant updates about existing deals
5- Respond to less pressing emails/finish up comments to give off to MDs before they have dinner
630- Dinner
7- finish up comments on all projects/meet with other analysts on deals that are staffed with multiple analysts/meet with associates and VPs about what exactly they want in regards to deliverables/help out any other analysts that are getting crushed with slides and other simple work
130- Go home
2- Go to sleep
How does ~5 hours of sleep 5 nights a week serve your energy / focus for workouts and work? Is it sustainable or sucks but you have no choice.
do you do have any sleep/energy/health tips that you follow to address that?
Guaranteed everyone here who says they actually work 100+ hours consistently is just a lying loser
U think people are exaggerrating even for the sweatier groups? Ones like MOE LA, GS TMT, FTP Tech, EVR Energy, JEF Energy etc.?
No - I know at-least one of the two of EVR / JEF Energy is not exaggerated.
Barring a few exceptions here or there, working 100+ hours regularly just doesn't do it. Even at 80+ hours analysts and associates get grumpy to the point of giving their staffers the cold shoulder.
People, loitering about at the office between 8-11pm just to make it seem like you are busy is not quite the same as working 80+ hours with intensity on closing something. Yes, there are occasions where people go working 80+ (sorry, I just won't be typing 100+ here after having experienced life at a few different shops) but those are not 24/7 365. You normally see two main busy periods in M&A: Jan / Feb to Jun / Jul, and Sep to Nov. The first one is normally busier and where teams often get crushed. Summer can get quieter as people go on holidays at different points. Things normally pick up between Sep and remain busy until Nov end.
This still happening with you guys? I feel like, post-WFH, anybody trying to be a facetime hardo just....disappeared. Hard to find anybody in the office during the week after 6 nowadays unless a deal team is actually printing a book that night (which is becoming a rarer and rarer occurrence with covid heating up again)
Dude that's what I'm saying.There's a good deal of loitering in IB, perhaps not during a deal sprint but a large portion of the time. There are also down weeks/months where deals slow down tremendously. The idea of 80+ focused hours week in and week out is the biggest fallacy in IB for the majority of analysts, especially as you learn to push back and become more efficient (if you don't do this, then that's ones prerogative but there's no Medal of Honor that goes with it).
There is a weird trait with bankers that I've observed where they think pretending they work all the time is some way to gain social capital. This is what happens when analysts put working at a bank on a pedestal, make it their biggest achievement and tie it to their personal identity.
I get it, there are some absurd groups out there and Godspeed to those people. But if you find yourself plugged in for 100 hours all the time, you either suck at your job, need to set better boundaries, or both.
tell me you’ve never worked at a sweatshop without telling me you’ve never worked at a sweatshop.
Man I always feel bad when I read these things.
Are there any senior associate / vp / junior directors like me who somehow never had insane hours?
Like one all nighter a month max. A few weeks with lots of work, but then also a few weeks with no live deals, but still managed to get normal Street pay?
Work at a sweatshop EBs in one of their sweatiest offices. and had one of those weeks a couple of weeks ago and here's how it went.
Monday to Thursday - 9 am to 3 am. A bit more and a bit less here and there
Friday - Was supposed to be done by 7-8 but at the end had to make changes and update stuff till 4 am
Saturday - 11 am to around 10 pm
Sunday - 2 pm to 7 pm
However, this is very very rare to go get this much. Usually it is around 10-2 on weekdays with 4 am on one of these days, 10-9 on Fridays and a combined 7-15 hours of work on the weekend.
Damn man, glad this week is over for you. Does your firm have protected Saturdays? How are those generally for you?
How high intensity are your days? Do you have time to take a quick nap or gym during lulls?
I think it really is more of a function of staffings, particularly at a junior level
But, currently at a sweaty group at a boutique known for being sweaty, and would say that hours are like:
Sunday noon - 3am
Monday - Thurs 9/9:30am - 3/5am
Fri 10am - 12/2am
Saturday, depends, try to get away with maybe 5 - 7 hours of work at some point during the day/evening
Seriously? This is terrible. Really bad
I just can’t imagine consistently working 100+ hours. That is fuckin lie. I think for most top group in my firm which is a solid MM only work 70-75 hour on average with 90hour week occasionally when there’s multiple live deals. In reality you’re probably doing 65 hours of real work if you minus the time for poor internet connection and useless calls with your senior banker. Otherwise the team is poorly staffed, sudden increase in deal flow and maybe you’re just shit analyst / associate.
It’s a top of street industry group analysts are overwhelmed so we’re hiring. Basically all live deals makes it worse
Maybe the team needs to lower its bar, obviously there's not a lot of Ivy graduate with IB experience waiting in line to fill the spots.
As many have mentioned on this site, the work often "ebbs and flows", but the "sweatiest" bank I worked for had us working 7 days a week until 2-3am, with the occasional all-nighter. We lost 4 analysts in a 2-month period which only made things worse, as the remaining analysts were already at capacity. This went on for another month before I left the bank, along with two other analysts, at which point senior management stepped in and tried to make a change. The main cause for the hours was actually not live deal work, but a combination of pitching, and mid-level bankers (VPs/Directors) who felt it was their duty to make sure we were working to our breaking point. Terrible culture, and an unsustainable business model, compounded with below market comp.
For the record, at GS hours are nowhere near this bad. In 1st yr, you’re probably looking at 70% of your weeks 75-90 hours (with protected Saturday mostly honored), 20% 50-75 hours, 10% 90+. 2nd year is better.
Doesn’t really matter which group, if anything industrials/nat resources are worse and tmt ny and consumer/hc are a little better.
What about TMT SF notoriously a sweatshop? Can’t be that light
Any hours insight for Credit Suisse
Not sure how deal flow is across groups rn but my coverage group in NY is fucking dead. Had a lot of people leave. Like very low deal flow
EB/MM/BB?
Sweaty intern hours (IB M&A) consisted of 6:30am calls and working until 4am the night before, 6 days a week. Luckily, that was only for 3 weeks out of the summer. Once those two deals closed and the major pitches finished, I logged off by 10-11pm and logged on by 8am.
My MD hated the fact that our hours were so bad and worked to change it, but it’s hard to do that with an anal group head, especially when all your associates and multiple analysts leave before the interns start.
Sweaty is relative and largely contingent on the philosophy of the bosses. I’d be willing to work brutal hours on occasion if it makes a genuine difference. My friend at an MF developed an acute cardiac disease from a lack of sleep (averaged 2-3 hours a night over 5 months). Sure, he got a major retention bonus ($200K I think?) but at what cost? I’d argue they didn’t comp him enough considering the long-term damage of the hours he worked.
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