Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks Move to Startups
Some of the best and brightest of Wall Street's young investment bankers are bailing out of their high-paying, prestigious jobs at big financial institutions. Many are setting up their own businesses, especially in technology. While there are no precise statistics on the trend, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the number of employees aged 25 to 34 in the New York metropolitan area in finance and insurance fell to 109,187 as of the second quarter of 2013, down 19 percent from the second quarter of 2007.
At elite universities, fewer MBA and finance candidates are willing to even consider a life of missed weddings, busted romances and deep-into-the-night deal negotiations. The percentage of Harvard Business School graduates entering investment banking, sales or trading dropped to 5 percent last year from 12 percent in 2006, while those entering technology almost tripled to 18 percent during that period. At the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, the percentage of MBAs entering investment banking dropped to 13.3 percent last year from 26 percent in 2006, while those entering tech more than doubled to 11.1 percent.
(Score: 5, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 12 2014, @09:59AM
Maybe all these bright young hotshots off starting their own financial businesses before they can get too far mired in the poisonous culture of banking will lead to a rash of small, agile, ethical[1], innovative and competitive businesses that will disrupt the market and force the entrenched dinosaurs of the industry to actually serve the interests of their customers (us) or wither and die.
Or maybe said dinosaurs will use their massive power and influence to absorb and/ or crush any fledgling competitors before they can become a threat.
Or perhaps we'll just discover a host of new and interesting ways to be screwed over by asstunnels in expensive suits.
[1] Well, you know, it's bankers we're talking about. A switch from eating factory to free-range babies would be an improvement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Monday May 12 2014, @10:35AM
When increasing the taxes on bonuses in the financial sector was even whispered about, the banks jumped all over the story claiming that any kind of taxation aimed specifically at their employee compensation packages would result in their workforce leaving the country for somewhere without those taxes. Perhaps their true intention was to keep blinding those same employees with redonkulous paychecks so they didn't realise how badly they were being treated and leave anyway. Oh, I was wrong... to use the word "perhaps".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bucc5062 on Monday May 12 2014, @11:17AM
If I understand this, after having set up a mentality of screwing people over, demanding they give up their lives for money, stealing money from other people, said assholes now realize that maybe having a life is just a little bit better?
Yeah, I don't believe that.
More realistic, the MBA programs at major colleges will continue to produce business drones who's purpose is to not see a benefit of long term thinking and planning, consider balanced worklife an option not a requirement, to maintain their nihilistic egos, and continue the program of maximize for me, minimize for everyone else, while finding different ways to fuck over people in this country.
Maybe a little jaded, but when I look around...naaaa, not that much.
(any takers that those who work for the "enlightened" will enjoy 60+ hour work weeks, fighting to get a fair wage and discovering that in the end realizing they just got used. Abusers create abusers).
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday May 12 2014, @11:55AM
Well, trying to screw some VC instead of a whole country may not be that bad. .com bust is near).
After a while, the VC will stop chasing mega-unicorns which go busted (so far, I only remember FB, Twitter, Zinga, Veeva hitting the "true gold" on IPOs, what with the rest?). I don't think that moment is very far, anyway sooner or later it will happen; when it happens the "young former bankers entrepreneurs-to-be" will come back to 90h/week.
(if those startups popup on the stockmarket before mature enough, time to switch to conservative investments: the repeat of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Monday May 12 2014, @11:43AM
"Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks"
So those young geniuses are moving into startups, food service, and small businesses, all of which are well known for part time hours, LOL. Well, looking for wisdom from youth is often fruitless, but I didn't expect it to be that bad...
A long time ago when I was a kid I thought about being a MD or JD, fairly stereotypical, I know. I found out the noobs are supposed to work 36 hour shifts and all that kind of idiocy. "Well, that sounds idiotic to have all that responsibility while being totally sleep deprived and burned out and I'm too responsible to do something that stupid, can I find a position in the field where I don't have to work 100+ hours a week at least when starting out?" "No you gotta do it" "Um, no I don't, I don't have to be a MD or JD". Its kind of like tech, you can find plenty of 90+ hour/wk positions, which are entirely staffed by people who can't find better hours. The difference from tech is I can find a 40 hr week because I'm very good at what I do, but there is no 40 hr option for JD or MD, at all. Too bad. Apparently banking is the same way. I never really understood fools, and still don't.
I did ops for a decade, which is a different sort of burnout. I was on the clock 24x7 and got paged during my wedding (on silent, but still...). The difference is in ops we only spent about 30-something hours a week physically at work (comp time, you know, "engineering 5 o'clock" is "2:30 wall time") and while we were physically there we F-ed off about 80% of the time, yes I really only worked about one day per week, while in the building, long term. They probably did average about 40 hrs a week outta us, just mostly at 3am or weekends or whatever random time, and when we actually worked, we had to work very hard even if it was 2am or an unusual 16+ hour shift. I was eternally annoyed that my 40 hours a week of actual work had very little to do with the 40 hours a week I was scheduled to be at work or the 30-something hours I was actually physically present. I did tons of work at home either sleepy or drunk, which I always found hilarious because they'd burn me at the stake if I was in that condition at work, thankfully the employer had the decency not to complain about my slurred voice as long as I didn't talk directly to the customers. So you page me while I'm at my best friend's bachelor party at 1am, what exactly do you expect you're going to hear in the background, don't like hearing it, then don't call. Don't want a sleepy drunk kid programming your routers, well, then don't expect a 23 year old kid to work 24x7 including 5 minutes after bar time. Ironically they only hire kids for that kind of work, not settled down guys like me, despite the odds of me being drunk at 1am at a strip club two cities to the east are now approximately zero. The burnout from ops becomes much like the rat exposed to electric shocks, constant anxiety never knowing when a bolt of lightning will hit you and always being under fire 24x7x365, so I don't really miss ops at all, which is too bad because I was extremely good at it. I enjoyed the work, and other more civilized conditions I might have stayed in ops. But it sure is nice now a days to be a flextime programmer/admin and when I close down at the end of the day, I'm done till I get back to work, other than couple times a year total emergency phone calls.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 12 2014, @12:00PM
Hah, try a medical residency. I would celebrate if I had had a whole 78 hours of sleep per week...
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 12 2014, @01:14PM
> I would celebrate if I had had a whole 78 hours of sleep per week...
78/7 == 11 and a bit hours sleep per night. I'd be pretty happy with that too.
Or maybe sleep deprivation is screwing with your maths..?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Monday May 12 2014, @06:01PM
yeah, your number is off a bit, but the whole medical residency "you must be available for 48 hours straight [reduced relatively recently I believe to only 24 hours], and then treat whomever comes through the door with minimal supervision" just seems like a train wreck, mainly to give hospitals cheap labor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 12 2014, @12:42PM
Perhaps it is a sign that the young "best and brightest financial minds" see that the grass isn't necessarily greener when pursuing the brass ring, or perhaps it could be generational. The Millennials are marked with the stigma of feelings of entitlement coupled with a lack of desire to put in the effort ("I deserve the best, but it should be given to me because it should be obvious I'm a special talent"). LOL, who knows? Maybe it boils down to the fact that their parents aren't willing to put in the 90 hours for them!
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 12 2014, @01:55PM
Bankers produce no value in the world. Zero. They don't know how to do anything but kill their souls a little bit more each day to muster up the requisite enthusiasm in the obligatory "Good morning, Sir!" to the boss they hate. And that's assuming they start off in banking as something less than pure evil sociopaths. That's a big assumption, but I try to give the benefit of the doubt. So, after a few years doing that, when they are completely acculturated to the massive crime and fraud for which we all know and love them, they want to bring that to startups? To do what? They have no skills. Their grasp on basic math is even slight, because that's for the quants who never leave the server rooms to deal with.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 12 2014, @03:30PM
"Bankers produce no value in the world."
In the west you're more or less correct. The Moslems do not often get much right in my opinion, but they do have a much better, more civilized, more humane, more culturally and philosophically advanced banking system than ours. Google for "Islamic Banking" or maybe "Sharia compliant finance". The wikipedia article isn't too bad. Its not quite enough to convert me, but I do admire their work quite a bit in this field.
There will always be a net positive to society by outsourcing "storing stuff for people in a highly secured vault", and providing a decentralized currency conversion market, and running what boils down to an outsourced payment collection / letter of credit system, and issuing what boils down to tightly controlled private currency for special purposes, and what boils down to an outsourced accounting department (sorta). The fact that in the west the folks who should be doing something useful have nearly abandoned their useful responsibilities in favor of what boils down to TBTF organized crime, doesn't mean the whole class of work is a totally hopeless case. Only hopeless in the west.
Mark my words, reserve currency status doesn't last forever, and after the next collapse (which is due, looking at history) the world economic banking system is going to be, or be based on, Islamic banking.
I'm no great fan of some of their other ideas, but when they get something right, I admit it.
The current batch of crooks in Manhattan and London are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 12 2014, @05:56PM
Thank you for the suggestion. I will read up on that. It seems to me that when even the Pope is calling out modern capitalism as a massive failure then a large correction can't be far behind. What form that takes remains to be seen, but I would not like to be one of those bankers when the correction comes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bootsy on Monday May 12 2014, @05:11PM
I think Banking just got way too big, both in terms of "value" and percentage of the economy but also in crazy ways like have a credit derivative market 6 times bigger than the underlying assets.
This sounds like a healthy rebalancing where clever people actually go into the real economy and do something else.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 12 2014, @05:51PM
Amen to that!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by jcm on Monday May 12 2014, @05:54PM
In fact, "brilliant" students are more interested in copying Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg and Page/Brin.
Compare that to Buffett and Soros, who were from an older generation.
It became difficult to make a lot of money from banking, so greedy students realize quickly that they can make more money with startups.
They know that they'll work 90-hour weeks and may fail but these risks are more exciting.
Technology is seen as the new Eldorado, where people can earn tons of money with only an idea.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by strattitarius on Monday May 12 2014, @08:31PM
I worked around 55-60 hours a week for a while. That was in 5 days, so I was putting in 11-12 hours per day. I can't imagine doing it, and doing it well for the other two days a week. Sometimes I think it is just a big dick-wagging contest to say "I put in 90 hours", when they really put in 70.
If they are being pushed too hard, but making $200-$300k per year, couldn't the banks just pay half that and expect a regular 40 hours? That's still a dern good salary for most people (maybe not NYC).
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Monday May 12 2014, @09:30PM
That's doable for a time.
Years with the right biology and perhaps a little amphetamine habit.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Monday May 12 2014, @09:28PM
So we have investment bankers exchanging one 90 hour a week job for another, and the reasoning is that they get to work less? I don't buy it. It would make just as much sense, if you transposed the two jobs and had successful start up founders entering the investment banking industry because they wanted to work less.
I think rather we have yet another group of people who made a lot of money and now want to do what they want to do rather than investment banking for a few more decades.