Goldman Sachs interns and junior bankers only required to work until 12

And are not permitted to return before 7 AM . Jesus Christ 

Why the hell is that mental?

I am sure dozens of us here have done 8am until at least 5pm the next day plenty of times.    That’s just normal in corporate. 

Even in my most recent job, 7am until around midnight was fairly standard.  When I lived outside of London on the weekends, like far outside, I was getting a 5:30am train to get into work for a team meeting at 8am every Monday and wouldn’t get to my hotel until at least 10pm most weeks.

Then up for a 7/7:30 start usually.  Worse if I had video conferences with west coast Americans because I wouldn’t finish until about 2-3am.

This is entirely normal.

 

My old flatmate is a banker and it was quite normal for me to e-mail him every few days to ask if he was still alive as I hadn't seen him at all as he'd get home after I was asleep and go back to work before I got up.

"This is entirely normal".

No, this is not normal or healthy by any metric when view led from outside of BigLaw and Citeh finance bubble Tecco, but I appreciate it may appear to be so while you're still linked with that world.

Tec, what on earth are you on about? It is far from normal on any construction. You do realise this is at least 6 days a week at least. I knew in days not so long gone by GS interns and analysts were doing 9-3 AT LEAST monday to friday 9-2 on saturday and 9-12 on Sunday.

It's not normal or sustainable, or healthy mentally or physically 

Anyone thinking it's normal has Stockholm syndrome 

the longest I've ever spent in the office was 13 hours and I thought I might die 

Christ, my very first completion meeting began at 3pm and didn’t finish until 5 or so the next day.  That wasn’t a big law firm either.

Actually I did bugger all hours when I was in biglaw compared to those around me, but I know the numbers they were racking up and they were easily what I said.  

Private equity hours were monster mind you, but like I said, that’s just the norm.

And I’m not linked with any kind of job any more, I just chill out most days and try to decide what’s for supper by lunchtime.

Sadly that is true.  It’s not intended to be impressive, more just highlighting that the hours GS dudes are doing are not in any way unusual within finance/corporate world.

Nope. Your whole contribution here is just to “gloat” about staying in a hotel during the week because for some reason you think that will impress people. 

Ebitda - not just the juniors in PE, everyone worked stupid hours tbf.  European managing directors and below.  

Worst were the senior investment managers who wanted director level, I swear one of them lived in the office.

Oh and Hollie, agreed it isn't remotely admirable.

 

@ tec private equity hours are not monstorus , unless you are very junior at Blackstone et al. Save for on closing/completion, and that takes place when ever it does be it 6pm, or 3 AM. Agreed

That my boy is why I got out commercial property and property finance because there's no amount of money that compensates for not being able to do the things you enjoy or see the people you like spending time with.

I don't think I've ever worked in the office past 7 o'clock in my life. Nowadays I tend to push off no later then 4.30 as a rule. Which is why I'll never be rich, I guess. Why people subject themselves to this stress is beyond me.

I don't doubt it is "normal", in some circles. 

I was just calling attention to the fact that it is massively prejudicial to every aspect of one's health and wellbeing (bank balance aside). 

Ergo, not normal.

 

ducks midnight at least, mad yes, I agree.

 

Tec, completion meetings happen rarely so it is hardly the norm as you describe, I am talking about 9-12 at least 6/7 days a week

I don’t disagree that very long hours are normal in corpfin and transactional legal work.   

The hours cited here seem to me to be medically impossible for more than very short periods.  You would die.  

For that reason I smell a rat.  

It is hard work - we all know this. There is no need to exaggerate.  

It’s also spectacularly useless and unproductive, but that’s a different debate.  

Dal, your opinion is an entirely sensible and reasonable one.But remeber  Moritz Erhardt who was an intern at BAML, who worked 72 hours, before collapsing and dying in the shower. It was that which brought in the new "short" working hours and protected saturdays where interns and junior ibankers were not meant to work saturdays..

No Tex, 100 plus hours a week , week in and out are not doable week in and out. Just how many 100 hour weeks have you done weeke in and out , consecutively or near consecutively.

No Tex, 100 plus hours a week , week in and out are not doable week in and out. Just how many 100 hour weeks have you done weeke in and out , consecutively or near consecutively.

What I’ve never understood is why clients would want their lawyers to be so sleep deprived, when a mistake on a crucial document could be catastrophically expensive.

Even with this new ‘enlightened’ rule the most sleep you would get (allowing for an hour each way dressing/washing/eating and commute to the office) would be 5 hours. 

Not good.

What I don't understand is why these firms don't just employ more people. I understand the increased overheads would eat into their profits, but only in a small way. It's just greed, I suppose.

My BIL stayed with us when he was 19 doing his summer internship at the squid.  He went to work on the thursday of the august bank holiday and returned on the Monday afternoon

Doggers desist!  If you carry on like this, Tecco won't say that he worked in "biglaw" again, and this diet coke will have to go down my gullet rather than be ejected all over my keyboard via my nostrils

I am so swamped I logged on last night at home and worked to 11 pm and I am so knackered now I can barely concentrate. I am unconvinced this is an effective long term working style 

I’m not discussing with you what any of my roles were as you get really stalkery and it concerned me last time.

But no I was not just doing BD stuff (everyone is expected to do that).

You have to remember that although junior bankers are at work 8.30 to midnight most days they spend from 8.30 to mid-afternoon sitting around chatting doing naff all and then about 4.30 someone senior drops some urgent task on them that requires them to stay into the night.  So although they're at work for 100 hours a week they're only concentrating for 40 hours or so like the rest of us.

I worked for a lawyer who had a similar management approach and the final straw was doing naff all for most of one week before having an urgent task dumped on me on Friday afternoon that required me to stay until the small hours of Saturday morning.  He'd been sitting on said task for several days and that was why it had become so urgent and he could have given it to me on the Wednesday and could have had it done during normal working hours. 

There is alot of truth in what sails says, especially in IB where it is  the norm. I would question as to whether said people spend from 8-4 doing nothing, they are mostly likely to be working on revision 80 of a pitch book. But as you say MD's in Banks love giving you stuff at 4.00 like a pitchbook to do  as he is pitching tomorrow mid-day and you find he/she has sat on it for a week or more.

 

Another annoying thing I found was having prepared sad pitch book, and asked how the pitch went, you are told" We withdrew from it" Not even the courtesy to tell you. Big 4 M&A is not as bad .

The one seat I did in corporate as a trainee put me off because of exactly what SS has just described.

The guy who supervised me was: come in around 9:30, get coffee and breakfast, go to the gym, have lunch with someone, do a few emails, talk about triathlons or his kids or whatever, perk up around 4pm and then make us both work until somewhere between 10pm and 2am.

I couldn't Adam and fooking Eve it to be honest.

Ebitda - please take the hint and don’t discuss what you believe my roles to have been.  Rof history has been purged, no need to reopen some of that.  I do not wish to discuss it further.

Ebit I've definitely done the old bust a gut finishing a powerpoint only to be told "oh that meeting was cancelled and we forgot to tell you".  I don't understand how the thought process works whereby a meeting is cancelled and you don't think to tell the other people involved.

I somehow managed to avoid any all nighters when I worked in Big Law but I was often stuck in the office until midnight and had to be in by 7.00am the following day. There wasn't any messing about at the gym or chatting - it was just constant slog, churning out documents. Anyone who disturbed me to chat on those days could just feck off.

It is no way to live and you have no control over your own life. That's why I left pp.

Yes of course but I’d rather folks didn’t talk about things if I have yet to disclose my career on the current iteration of these boards.  Not for the Rof regulars but for the casually viewing public.

Thing is, it shouldn’t matter really, I’ll never work again in my life, but I don’t like other people sharing my data.

Penises, mugs and martyrs do those hours.

- it does not make you rich (start your own business if you want to be rich)

- it does not give you status (only with fellow penises)

- it is not healthy

- it does not make you happy

NEXT!

It didn’t make me rich.

It gave me no status.

It certainly didn’t make me healthy.

It massively made me unhappy.

In short, tricky is right, BUT, it is nonetheless considered the norm and expected of you in certain roles and industries.

ps. I have lost my glasses again :( Halp!

Partner I used to work for said that if you couldn't finish by 7 (maybe with the odd exception in case of trial prep), you weren't cut out to do the job. That was in PP.

Certain 'industries' are laughing and wringing their hands that they can still find mugs to shovel their shit. People should stop doing that. I'm hoping next generations will be smarter.

Yeah there’s loads of that sort of comment but  it just doesn’t work when you need to deliver super high quality work with very little notice.

I admit that i had to be taken aside and told that while the core work I was doing was great, the presentation quality of it (this is for internal work mind you) wasn’t anywhere near what was expected.

Used to spend hours on the work itself and then almost as long making it look pretty.  Mad but true.

Tecco - not sure why you are a tad touchy about whether or not you worked in BD over 10 years ago, yet regale us and interweb with lusty stories of your current life with various paramours...?

I suppose it’s because it’s me that is choosing what I disclose or don’t as opposed to someone else typing something about me that they believe to be true which is available for all the world to see.

Its almost certainly a control issue. 

Tricky - Private Equity run really lean because no one wants to share the carry.  The smaller teams outsource anything major but internal stuff you have to do yourself.  We only had 1.5 IT guys ffs and definitely no art department like I was used to.

Err tec, you seem to be conflating two thins here . Yes PE funds are tight with carry and most of it vests with Partners and Directors perhaps, with the reminder of what is left being shared between Investment Directors/Managers/Senior Associates.

 

But making documents pretty and such can be done by your team EA/PA which is the norm if you are busy doing other stuff. When you talk about smaller teams outsourcing major stuff what do you mean? Things like commercial/financial/legal DD etc?

I never understood the fascination in corporate finance with making stuff look pretty and putting in charts that were of no real relevance but showed that you could do some crazy shit with Powerpoint.  Surely if something is being pitched to me I'm interested in the substance and not the way the hand out looks.

*shakes head* just stop talking to me lol.  I don’t mean that unkindly but we have obviously worked in very different environments so while some things may be relevant for you they may not be relevant for me.

Yes Ebit when I worked in corp fin I was twice seconded to small PE outfits to assist with DD and writing papers for their investment committees on big property deals where they didn't have the resources to do it themselves.  It was hideous as it involved long hours stuck in a boardroom in someone else's office.

8-7pm is fairly standard here. There are a few sad sacks who seem to like staying later and don't seem to be able countenance going home, watching telly and not ordering dinner through deliveroo etc. even when we're not that busy. This I don't understand.

To clarify: I don’t doubt that you may have worked for PE houses.  But your utter ignorance of how much work has to be done by an individual leads me to presume you haven’t worked at a Private Equity house.

  1. I didn’t freak out 
  2. I wasn’t talking about EAs getting carry, if you actually took the time to read my remarks I was referring to art teams and suchlike - which require senior appointments in order to work.
  3. I actually know of a receptionist who got into a co-invest and did very well indeed so the opportunities are there.
  4. Smeg off, this is just turning into another “let’s have a bash at Tecco” thread and for no legitimate reason this time.