How is this job legal?
I’m genuinely curious about the legality of this job and how it’s possible for an employer to routinely require 100+ hour work weeks with no consequence (in theory, they could ask you to work perpetually). Hourly employees have substantial protections, do truly none of them carry over to ‘exempt’ full-time workers?
We’ve all seen the article of the centerview analyst suing because she wasn’t able to sleep 9 hours per night, not to mention what happened to the Green Beret (along with multiple interns dying over the past decade). Do district attorneys simply not care?
Despite it being a federal holiday celebrating the end of slavery, I will be burning a significant amount of midnight oil on a struggling deal that will probably die within 3 months. I think my MD would personally sacrifice me at the alter if it meant closing a single minimum fee deal for him. Has America truly gone through centuries of labor laws just to allow this to happen? Not sure if any lawyers frequent this site, but I’m curious how so many European countries have a plethora of protections while we have so few.
Everyone who decides to do this job knows what to expect it’s regularly spoken about and even in my super day for IB my MD mentioned the incredible work load and sleepless nights. You can’t walk into an industry knowing that and getting 200k a year straight out of undergrad and then complain when this happens. If you don’t like it you can go to WM or CB
Agree. MD asked me this same question in my superday. I’m 22, right out of undergrad, and make good money. No complaints.
Nice try on the 200K but it’s 150. People love to inflate numbers on WSO. A lot of industries are paying 100-110 all in and work you significantly less — weekends free, not working til midnight like every night, chill Fridays, etc.
you’re being underpaid
$110k base plus $80k bonus
But why does the job do the long time!?
Old lady
You are not looking at this correctly imo
Freedom of contract is a bedrock legal principle in any non-failed state. People are generally allowed to trade labor for money pursuant to legally enforceable contracts.
If Person X and Firm Y want to strike a deal, who the fuck are you (bystander Z) or the government to stop them absent a genuinely compelling reason?
This isn't slavery or prostitution. These are ivy league graduates with innumerable options, not helpless illegal immigrants. If banking sucks (and it does), take your elite degree and do something else. Why does this feel like a good issue for government intervention? Every dollar and minute spent on this instead of actual poverty would be an abomination imo
This same argument could be used for child labor, indentured servitude, unpaid work experience, etc. Every outlawed labor practice has, at one point or another, been "Person X and Firm Y wanting to strike a deal." Of course people know what they're getting into when they're signing up for these opportunities. But just because they're consensual does not directly mean that they are healthy or just business practices.
My argument or the strawman you're responding to? Can minors make "legally enforceable contracts"? Didn't I mention "genuinely compelling" exceptions?
You're comparing 23 year old Princeton grads in 2024 with 11 year old 19th century sweatshop workers and I'm the unreasonable one lol?
You can't just hide behind the idea that they "have other options." Regulation is put in place in spite of consent because it is deemed necessary for the health and wellbeing of the worker. Just because they're Princeton grads and not McDonalds workers doesn't make this null. Numerous analysts have died because of these working conditions. That is the genuine compelling reason.
And yes, before labor laws, minors were considered able-bodied workers with the full capacity to work and receive payment.
I'll use another example. Minimum wage. If we were to go by your assertion that any legally enforceable labor contract justifies horrible working conditions only because they are consensual, then minimum wage would have no reason to exist. If both parties agree to pennies on the hour, shouldn't they have the right to work? No, because that amount of money is deemed unjust by the US Government and regulators.
(1) Yes. Minors can make "legally enforceable contracts." You are conflating the ability of minors to disaffirm a contract once they turn of age and the ability of the minor to enter into a contract as a minor.
(2) What is the standard you use for "genuine compelling exceptions?" (Internal quotations omitted).
This is part of the reason why i think it stinks that people can post Anon without usernames on this site. Idiots making arguments like this and thinking they hold water.
Nobody is arguing that working 80-100 hour weeks till the early morning IS healthy. It's just something you choose to do and get renumerated very well for. Hence, why would the government care or need to intervene.
I also think in this day and age - I see junior bankers taking sick days when overrun. Which wasn't the case a couple of years ago. Employers have no power to sack you for claiming mental health and sitting out of a deal execution for a week on those grounds. So there are protections in place.....
Except IB job postings and offer letters reference a 40 hour work week M-F. Why is that not enforced?
That isn’t true…
I just can’t see a scenario where the general public or legal system show any compassion towards bankers in general.
you knew what you signed up for…
You could say the same of child labor 200 years ago. My point is from a legal perspective, our contracts are created around a 40 hr work week which isn’t enforced at all (actually you would likely be fired if you only worked 40 hrs a week). Obviously this job is mentally and physically damaging, so how are there no protections vs. European workers or other jobs?
If you work at any legitimate bank and you are a FO banker, your contract is not structured as a 40 hour work week. You are not an hourly employee.
You are, however, an at will employee. Just find a different job.
Sorry, you’re not an eight year old textile worker in the 1800s.
You have the option between working in corporate development for say 100-150k a year and work < 60 hours a week or you can work in IB for 200k a year and work 90+ hours a week. Skillset at the analyst level is ultimately very similar.
Either are reasonable options and there are pros and cons to both, but you can't choose the job that pays you more in exchange for working more hours, and then complain about having to work long hours. It's like expecting to get paid for overtime but then refusing to work overtime.
Exactly. If you don't create more value than your salary, the job wouldn't exist
Just don't do it if you don't want to do it. There is no need to take the yoke of social justice and dismantle the banking industry - just don't participate.
Yeah, it's super fucking shitty and it's an absolute travesty young people with families and their whole lives ahead of them died due to piss poor management. Those MDs should be reprimanded / sanctioned / whatever, BUT they won't be because they produce for the bank. Until you produce revenue, you are a cost center and cost centers are replaceable or cuttable. The producers don't get incentivized to have a team that likes them (although research typically shows that drives better results anyway), they are incentivized to generate for the bank. Until you have a DEI-style upheaval and important shareholders foregoing profit so analysts can get some sleep, nothing is changing.
We're in the air conditioned offices of the premier city in the world, making more in a year than a West Virginian coal miner will see in a lifetime.
What does any DA have to gain?
Who is going to sympathize with the witnesses - bankers get shit on by the entire world for being tone deaf douchebags.
What is the outcome - you're capped at 50 hours a week but now you make what everyone else makes? Does that sound better to you?
Grow a set and build in some boundaries. If that's not feasible where you are, then leave. If you can't do either, then suck it up.
That's the way the world is, none of the senior guys are going to care because they have to produce so they can feed their families (and for some maintain their 5 luxury homes, litany of alimony payments and golf clubs).
You guys really need to appreciate what you're getting into when you join this career - it's not fun, your health takes a toll, and you need to be extremely lucky to succeed. It's definitely not models and bottles, you have to work hard.
So people can die but too bad because senior bankers made revenue and live in 5 luxury homes in the process? Screw that, I know multiple people who have developed permanent heart conditions from this job and have likely shortened their lifespan in the process. This isn’t because of some weakness from an individual, this is highly predictable and almost completely preventable. Compared to a decade or two ago the mental productivity of employees is higher than ever (thanks to technology), turnover is higher than ever, the number of people complaining about severe mental strain is higher than ever, and pay has consistently decreased.
Saying to grow a set and build some boundaries is tone deaf compared to the point of the post. Legal restrictions are put in place to help the typical person because in certain fields the risk of injury is high and predictable. The risk in banking is different, but still highly predictable and significant. There is zero reason I should spend 20 hours a day working on 10-year old technology across tasks that I could genuinely automate if given sufficient resources.
I hope people look back years from now to realize these conditions are proof of insanity.
Buddy - if you took 30 seconds to look at some of my posts, I did develop a serious health issue and the only way I stopped it from becoming worse was by establishing boundaries.
If you want to be a martyr, be my guest. If you want to take control of your life, do so.
If mental productivity is higher due to technology (which I agree with), then you should expect fewer people doing the job and doing it for longer hours.
The increased productivity allows the best performers to do more work per hour, so more of the work shifts to them.
That makes the best performers more valuable per hour, so they command more pay per hour.
And now that they make more per hour, they're willing to do longer hours. End result: fewer people, higher pay, longer hours.
The responses to this thread are the reason no change has been made. Just a bunch of corporate bots programmed to believe sacrificing all their time, values, and morals is normal.
Bingo - people have become so brainwashed to feeding into the capitalist cog where they actively defend throwing their life away in the name of increasing shareholder profit. And the best is the second you try to engage with their argument using some ethical / philosophical framework to actually have an intellectual conversation you get hit with the "stop being a SJW".
You misunderstand the comments then. They aren't doing it in the name of shareholder profit. They are doing it to make more compensation for themselves relative to what else is available in the open market, no?
Says the guy who made the same decision as everyone else.
Again being aware of moral and philosophical implications are not mutually exclusive with doing an action. In fact intellectual honesty would suggest that (myself included) you can still accept that you compromised your morals/ethics and still do the job. Its reality and its hard to accept but admitting it and staying intellectually honest is a start.
How do all of you gen-z reddit weirdos keep finding WSO?
We are WSO now, boomer!
Jk, lol. This made me laugh — not because you’re wrong, but because I remember when I discovered WSO back in high school and the VPs back then were saying the same thing…crazy how old this makes me feel
The short answer is "exempt" full-time workers, who have at-will employment agreements, have very little protections.
You can think of it kind of like the difference between debt and equity. Shareholders have a ton of statutorily required rights. The law requires a lot more of companies as it relates to their shareholders. But for debt, unless you are in the zone of bankruptcy, pretty much every right the debtholders have is because they actively negotiated for it and got it put into the docs. "Exempt" full-time workers are basically debtholders. Outside of very specific situations, the only real rights such employees have are what they are able to put into their employment agreement.
And IB analysts/associates have functionally no power to get anything of note into the agreements. There are functionally no Leon Blacks of the world.
So, you are making 200k right out of undergrad and you didn't once think "Man, maybe I'm gonna have to work like crazy if I'm getting paid 3x the average grad salary"
You signed up to this fully knowing the hours will be rough. I can assure you that there are probably ten thousand other people who would love to be in your spot in a heartbeat and not complain a bit.
A prime example of first-world problems.
well said
I love how the dudes calling others corporate drones/cogs are IB analysts themselves. Same clowns who pushed for a BofA strike and yet never missed a second of work. "You guys need to fight for change! No no no, not me . . you! You guys!"
Almost as big of clowns as a guy LARPing as a finance professional on a forum focused on banking
You weren't entirely clear that this is directed at me, but seems clear enough. What's the problem
The only reason you're being paid whatever A2s make these days and not $50k is your ability to do semi mundane tasks that require some thought over extremely long hours. It's not for your financial acumen, it's not for your ability to advise clients, its not because of whatever generic investment club you were in at your school. It's because you will sit overnight checking EBITDA adjustments, refreshing market slides and massaging league tables for a paycheck significantly higher than what the average person makes.
The reality is you and every single of us who came up as juniors are not special. We are not unique. We didn't break in out of school with some unique specialized skillset. You might feel otherwise, but the reality check is that you are just a footnote in the opex line. As was I and everyone else as juniors. You could be gone tomorrow and that footnote doesn't change and the world moves on. People will fight to fill any of our chairs and they will be filled while they're still warm.
You know why Europeans have that quality of life? Because the people chose it. And that shit ain't free, they make less. It's a privilege they pay for.
Call me a corporate stooge, cuck, "the problem", whatever. At least I live in reality. You think your salary/bonuses come out of thin air? That clients can't actually call 10 other firms to do the same thing? Y'all can't even manage your staffers to get a weekend and you think pulling fees is so easy.
u are absolutely correct, but i wonder...is it worth it?
there's a whole universe out there...so much we don't know, so much to learn, so much to explore...and some of the brightest kids in the world are wasting away in an office, fixing powerpoint presentations. two kids will never know their father because he was worked to death and for what. so UMB Heartland could buy another bank, and Bank of America could get their 8 figure fee. not a week later a 25 year old trader at the same company dies to a heart attack...and it's business as usual at BAML.
u have more experience than me, know infinitely more than me about investment banking, but from the outside looking in i see an industry that takes away the only part of life worth living.
Asking the right questions. What you should ask yourself is it worth it TO YOU?
The work can be rewarding when you move up, the pay is way more than what the average person makes and the opportunities to learn, the people you mix with, very little else gets you that kind of exposure and opportunity. The payoff is you pay with your time and a lot of personal sacrifice.
You are basically worthless fresh out of school right. You are only being paid what you're being paid because you theoretically are able to learn fast + load up on raw hours to get reps in.
It isn’t illegal. Overtime rules apply to employees below a certain annual earnings level. Typical analysts are well above that.
I don’t think the system is great, but employees have a general idea of the pay and work before they are hired. No one is being forced to stay in these positions. Workers always have the option of quitting.
Unless the management determines change required, I don’t think you’ll see much difference. If they did make it so there are more workers and less overall work, I think bonuses would be very small.
I mean no attack or harm towards OP, but I genuinely think a huge chunk of WSO users should step out of their ivory towers and see how average people, who have average jobs, live their lives. We are getting paid 150k+ out of college to do what virtually any person can. YOU signed the contract and you knew the rough hours you would work. You thought you were getting 200k as a 23-year-old for working 50 hours? Virtually every good thing has a catch to it, and here, you actually do have to work for it.
A lot of people need to see how the other side of the population lives. My dad used to work IB-like hours (doing low-skill labor like washing dishes in the morning and delivering pizzas in the night till 2-3 am) to not even make 20% of an AN1 all-in-comp nowadays, and there are a lot of people like that who work like dogs to barely be able to put some food on the table. Nothing in life is going to come without hard work or sacrifice, and you are in a career that will serve you and your family well financially for the rest of your lives.
Again - I'm not glazing corporate culture. My point is just that we are privileged, as much as a lot here deny it.
You couldn't be more spot on here.
While I fully agree, reading posts like this makes me wonder whether the US is really a developed country, and not a mega version of a gulf state with a massive GDP per capita but a tough quality of life for everyone who isn’t in the oligarchy.
In Western Europe, you can work 40-hours each week, and, while you make less, you don’t have to worry about healthcare, transportation, or your children’s university. On net, you’re not meaningfully poorer…and the grind is much less. Sure, there’s a lower ceiling (for the minority of people who will hit it), but it isn’t like there aren’t European billionaires…and part of me does think that living in Denmark or Norway really is “having your cake and eating it too.”
Personally I have the best of both worlds… working in Europe (almost never work after midnight / 5 weeks of holidays / August no one is working) and investing all my money in the S&P500… US guys: please keep working hard haha, keep pushing the S&so higher while I enjoy some white wine in the south of France. Just monkey shit me to feel better 😘
Remember back in 2019 how common it was for hard work to cause people in their 20s and 30s to drop dead with heart issues? Pepperidge farms doesn't
Have you thought about, I don't know, not working in IB?
And where should one work? I don’t mind having such a huge comp, but I would love to be in a interesting/vibrant environment and actually learn things.
No one is addressing the actual question.
There is a difference in labor laws on exempt (typically salaried, professions) vs non-exempt employees (hourly workers). Exempt employees are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which among other things regulates hours and overtime pay. For exempt employees these regulations do not apply and you can work as many hours without overtime pay as needed.
Exactly this. That’s how I understand this to work as well, but what’s to stop an employer from asking you to work perpetually until death? As I see it there’s basically zero protections between that point, so does the law only care when an employee dies? Multiple people have died from this job but I have seen zero change in my day to day. I’m surprised similar regulations like OSHA haven’t been implemented / enforced in any way.
It isn’t a forced issue. You can quit the job. No one has to work a job they don’t want to.
A boss can’t force you to work 168 straight hours. You can quit and request unemployment from the state. You can say you were constructively fired by having unreasonable and unrelated demands put on you and they would give you payment almost all the time.
Although the schedule sucks, it should not be a surprise. I am not saying it should stay that way, I am saying it seems crazy people are so surprised it sucks.
I think if you get a better work life balance you are going to see it balanced out on your bonus.
Quit, there are many more corporate jobs out there that will ask you to be mediocre and pay you to be mediocre. You can talk to coworkers about your kids and take long coffee breaks and then get to your van pool at 4:30pm. Why are you in this role?
Equating hours worked with outcome is one of the worst fallacies of this industry
It’s not about equating in this instance. This is client service with short fuse. This is all well established, you want a shot at an extra 0 at the end of your net worth figure, this is a more direct path to do it faster. I’m not saying it’s good, but this isn’t changing. There are other paths if you want WLB, banking and big law for ex. are not those paths.
Just commenting here even if it’s completely unrelated:
Does anyone know why can’t I start my own discussion? (Have done it just once and now an error pops when I try to do it)
there are no union bankers to go on strikes to reduce the hours like at Walmart
otherwise the Government doesn't care
You can literally become a multimillionaire by being an EMPLOYEE and not taking any risk of starting a business and managing any significant problems. You do what u r told and if u are good at it you will make multiple millions (and you will have these millions like 40 years before you die, its not like you work this hours until you are 70).
AND, you can leave whenever you want if u decide that WLB is more important to you than money. If you decide to do this, its very possible (not guaranteed) that you will get a position that is better than your friends that started in more “chill” jobs (many people in this forum telling stories of being at a company for 10+ years, and then when a VP position opens up in the company and instead of promoting them they hire an IB/PE professional much younger than them).
Basically the dream. In my home country 95% of people work 12/14 hour work days or have 2/3 jobs just to survive, and MAYBE make enough to take family on a 3 hour road trip to the beach for a week in christmas. Don’t blame you for not understanding but sometimes its good to put things into perspective.
It's more surprising that banks don't just hire more people and pay them a bit less.
not really. Large part of the value is getting people up to speed quickly to become valuable. Two people working half the time for half the pay is not nearly as valuable as one person who has (and will) work the full time for the full pay - that's how helpful the experience is
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