What was the most toxic investment banking environment that you have experienced?
For me, there's a senior analyst that always requests "favor" from me to help him out on something that is not urgent and yet, must deliver to him ASAP. Be it searching for data that is not available nor research reports that he won't be used. He doesn't want people to disturb him during weekends but he always likes to message for "favor" during weekends evening, sometimes even midnight. How do you deal with toxic people like this?
With that dick specifically? He's a fucking Analyst. Ignore him.
I did hate having to car shit to MDs' homes in New Jersey after marathon crank sessions. Situations where they were leaving at 9AM for client meetings, had comments until midnight, and then you got the books off to printing at 1AM. Books printed and bound at 3AM, in a car at 3:30AM, drop off at MD front door at 5AM. That was the worst.
Then we introduced courier services and you just had to set an alarm for the estimated delivery time to make sure shit actually got there. Wonderful.
Sounds terrible. How nice were the houses of the MDs?
this is the worst task ever. fact.
So nerve wracking too because you have to rely on the driver and his competence.
MD thought he was the smartest guy in the world (most MDs do). He would frequently ask me for vague research for calls that he had in ~2 hours.
"Find potential buyers for XYX segment and find potential buyside opportunities for them."
Would get mad at quality of buyside opps found because they weren't actionable enough (didn't like my thesis for why it could be potentially for sale), ignored the potential buyers (he was allergic to complementing anyone). Probably the worst personality i've worked with at this point. Frequently belittled people's intelligence despite giving "direction" in wonky run on sentences and streams of thought as opposed to clearly explaining what he wanted
Frequently had people transfer/leave within ~1 year of working for his team. God i hated that guy.
He sure sounds like an idiot. Who promoted him to MD ???
are we working for the same guy????
I think we work for the same guy (or at least I do right now lol)
Currently in a living nightmare of a group. No such thing as protected Saturday - passive aggression to the max in all emails and expectations to be turning things 24/7 even on weekends. I would get emails on Saturday morning asking for the latest draft of a random side deck we're creating for the client. Second year analysts are treated like VPs / Directors on shitty deals. As someone who is currently working with these analysts, they are terrible managers and do not know how to mentor people at all. They only care about getting their work done and leaving, throwing you under the bus to deal with the MD when he asks why something is not done yet.
I'm currently acting like a VP on two deals and it's just terrible. The amount of work that needs to get done for the shittiest deal pales in comparison to the multi-billion dollar deals that I am working on. SEniors are never appreciative of your work and many times, will never end up sending the deck to the client. You are expected to know exaclty what seniors want as they will reprimand you for not knowing everything in the industry though you are just an analylst.
I hate my current bank and looking to lateral ASAP just like most of my class right now. People have literally left the bank saying they have never worked for a bank taht terrible in their lives. Everyone in my bank has expressed in some form or another the desire to leave except for the seniors as they do not do any deal gathering , only execution.
AGC Partners?
Lol deadass I replied that to him before even seeing your reply. Seems like they've really build a brand haha
No
AGC?
No, my bank is more prestigious than AGC but I'm sure that AGC isn't as bad.
Bud you just asked in a few threads awhile ago if it was normal to not have much work / not finding anything productive to do during WFH. How do you go about have barely any work to working like a dog?
Since you are the FT Partners troll, i'm surprised you aren't mentioning them in this thread as they are actually relevant. Had friends who have interned there who decided not to go back fulltime bc they were treated like absolute horseshit. Worked out tho cuz they ended up getting into EB roles for fulltime.
,.
Thank you, Richard. I hope you stop copying me
I too, hope you find peace.
Was at this regional middle market boutique doing an unpaid internship couple years ago. Prior to the internship, the MD gathered the intern class to eat at a mid tier local restaurant, started talking about IB and what an amazing head-start we have. He then started bragging about how many millions he made last year, all the while not even paying us minimum wage, but he had the balls to make us do facetime for the internship. The work itself is complete bullshit too. Us interns were not trusted to do any actual work like modeling or even marketing materials. We were just note taking and cap-iq search bots. The "valuable experience" we gain, according to the MD, is that during spare time on the job (75% of the time) we can look at CIM notes and models analyst created, then put those "experiences" on the resume. Heard that regional office shut down not long ago, what a joke.
Was this an actual MM boutique? What does this even mean? I'm assuming you're not talking about HH or Harris Williams? Probably more ilke Keybanc or Crescent Capitulo Fartners?
Sean Kelly from Cappello?
Why are you calling this woman out?
I feel that many seniors are actually quite annoying/incompetent/try hard to impress... Tbh they are just so f**king annoying not knowing how useless the crap they come up with..
Also, most seniors don't value your time vs efficiency. Sometimes they can give you a 5 minute guidance and you can kick start the stuff with do it quick and easy. However, they will just give you one or two lines in email and tell you to f**k off and DIY. You will then spend hours thinking how to approach the shit and getting it wrong in the end, wasting everybody's time. It could be because he/she is incompetent and trying to leverage you to do the thinking (he/she could also take hours to think through it as I have met seniors with horrible market knowledge as well) or just doesn't care your experience/learning/efficiency/time.
I am now at an MM PE fund. I was at a notorious BB IBD team with junior attrition rate >40%a year (most just cannot stand it and leave finance instead of exiting to HF/PE). Things above happened a lot but only till I move to MM PE I know things can be worse.
In my current job, we have Zoom happy hours (and company/senior does not sponsor delivery for the happy hours). 8am conference calls due to WFH, Calling names to check whether you are AFKing during calls (which you have little involvement). Occasional 10pm Friday assignment that is due by Saturday noon or Saturday morning work due by afternoon. I couldn't believe my hours are more unpredictable.
It is not really due to the job nature itself but rather everyone tries hard to impress their seniors and want to over deliver ASAP. I had several stuff that were simple request (just one or two charts for senior management as quick reference). But it can evolved into a 13 pages deck just because everyone is trying too hard. Literally the senior's feedback for the deck was: "Where are the charts I asked" after we spent days working on it.
We also have endless amount of benchmarking, calls with management/IB/expert network just to "keep ourselves updated". The amount of calls and note taking are too excessive to a degree that we actually know what we are going to hear anyway but we are spending 1/3 of the time to do "dictation" in order to keep ourselves updated.
I feel like I wanna cry right now. everything you described is happening to m
Same
This shit really needs to be highlighted more about how stupid PE is. It's not some heaven with more WLB and cooler work. It's a shitshow that is even worse than banking in some cases.
AFKing?
Oh you are an intern so you don't know. AFK means Away from Keyboard
Ever played vide games onlien?
Assfucking
1.MDs emailing asking for things “asap” all the fucking time. even when they know you are working on another asap project for them. MDs asking for models pitch and research with two days notice 2. crazy ass MD that I spent over a week staying late night to work on a crazy long pitch for. I email her 2am the draft and she calls me in 9:30 to yell at me for a small thing (she turns out to be in wrong in the end) 3. people who are too busy to give you guidance and leave you for hours to figure out things on your own and you end up re doing everything once they take a look 4. working all fucking week so late so I get to take weekend off, then associate leaves to go to his wife and tells me to come on weekend to start on extra pages
One of the MDs (from another group) was appallingly rude to me one time. Then, I started to give him the cold shoulder and the evil eye. We don’t talk to each other anymore.
Your bonus will be bottom bucket. I suggest you resolve this ASAP
I won’t kneel down to that MD....ever.
The most fucked up was an associate that had a personal vendetta against one of the analysts. It wasn't even performance related, just something about the analyst poked at his insecurities and he made it his mission to derail his career. Everything from ridiculous (false) deadlines to verbal abuse and bad official feedback. Completely threw off the analyst's career -- got bottom bucket bonus, couldn't get senior guys to vouch for him for PE recruiting, couldn't even get to stay on for a third year. Thankfully he eventually got an offer at a MM PE fund and he's now very happy there but it was among the most toxic things I've ever seen.
As for the associate, the other analysts realized what he was doing and tried to give it back to him. The associate ended up getting riffed at the end of his third year, right before his VP promotion came up. Haven't bothered checking in on what he's up to, but I hope he's poor and unhappy.
Thats fucked. Tbh associates are in such a weird spot in terms of the "hierarchy"
They think they are the best cuz they survived their analyst years and want to take revenge on those who defy them.
Have met a few like that for sure. Know an associate at my firm who is one of the longest tenured at the bank because everyone leaves all of the time. She thinks she's on top of the world and runs the bank, sending firm-wide emails and even telling Directors how to do things properly. Everyone loves her though so oh well.
Yeah seriously fcked. Dealt with something kind of similar. From pretty much first interaction w this person was clear they were out to get me. Has chilled since given less work between us. Why do some ppl do this?
Capstone Headwaters during my analyst years (name dropping to save someone from falling for the “great culture” crap they like to tout in interviews). Top down effect of having incompetent people in senior positions. “VP’s” with 2 years of IB experience who were promoted because they sucked slightly less than everyone else and/or the company was embarrassed to have a 35 year old associate. Or associates who didn’t know how to model. The result was huge egos to hide insecurities, VP’s creating extra/unnecessary work to impress MD’s who knew they were incompetent, backstabbing at the analyst/associate level. Women on the team were treated horribly (a few left after a couple months) when there was really no diversity to begin with. Elitism from kids who went to shit schools. The list goes on. You would think these no name boutiques would make up for the relatively crappy pay and deal experience with a better work environment. Not at all, lesson learned. Glad I was able to dig myself out of that shit hole.
Dude, it's not like these places are competing with BBs or EBs lol. They are objectively in worse positions than them so they have their own issues to deal with and amenities for their emplooyees. It's like saying you join a 10-man start-up and pout aobut how there are no shuttles directly to your home or gourmet chefs like Google.
Which office? Ex intern here and had a laugh at how accurate your assessment is.
I worked for an MD at a LMM bank who would give analysts zero direction on a project yet berate them if the deliverable was not exactly what he envisioned. He would never show any appreciation for work and because the VP/Associate structure was so thin, analysts would take on a lot of responsibility for him but had almost no direction / mentorship. Oh and the total comp for 1st years was well below market.
Left after a few months to lateral to a better bank and just appreciated the fact that I was treated like a human being and not an output machine. From what I hear from other analysts that work in his group is that after I left so abruptly he got a lot better attitude-wise. Not sure if it was the fact that the firm had enough of analyst turnover or if he felt bad for how he treated us.
Is this me...
Banking is pretty toxic in general anyway.
Sometimes I'll see comments from my MD that say "This page is totally wrong. Please fix it." Then you spend 3 hours rechecking all of the numbers and making sure the commentary lines up with the analysis, only to realize that you had a double tap / some other meaningless typo in footnote 7 and all of the content was right
On 3 separate occasions, I've had to print out and then handbind every single document in a data room and deliver to my MD's house over a weekend/holiday because my MD doesn't know how to use Adobe PDF. Each time, I'm fully aware that he's going to throw them out as soon as he realizes that i've dropped a 50+ pound accordion folder on his front step
When putting together pitchbooks, I regularly get yelled at for not included relevant creds/tombstones for certain sub-sectors even though its my fault that we've never closed a deal in those sub-sectors so we have no tombstones that are directly relevant
One time one of my MDs took a week long trip to Japan and I changed my sleep schedule to be on Japan time so I could turn any comments she had on the deck in real time throughout her day. Time zones are a junior bankers' worse enemy
It was my sophomore IB internship at a boutique. The MD was just really mean. He'd straight up tell me how shitty my models were and would say things like "maybe IB just isn't for you" in a super passive aggressive tone.
I ended up at a BB now for junior year at a highly regarded group and received a return. My BB internship actually felt like a learning experience with a supportive environment vs the sophomore one.
Would I do it again? Absolutely. It totally sucked, and I barely learned a thing, but it was a huge boost to my application to have "Investment Banking Summer Analyst."
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