who do they manage? or what is meant by "capital-M managers"? If they're managing junior PMs(or product management folks with a lowlier title, analysts, etc?) wouldn't that mean you have non capital-M people "doing product management" if not officially PMs?
KCL was Informatics and it was broadly classed w/ maths/'natural sciences' when I was there 10 years ago - according to a younger colleague they have since rebranded to CS.
she's 4'8 - that's not like an extreme left end of the curve dwarf height on a global scale, is it?
NBA centers are all 7 feet tall which precludes most people from being NBA centers, but there's a whole world and somehow they manage to fill the jobs.
It seems most GOATs are eventually supplanted because things that are unfathomable become table stakes, think like triple axels in figure skating. Forever is a really long time.
PT says interesting and thoughtful stuff. A thing I dislike about much of his coverage, including in this piece, is how much is surface level ad hom of various people who have talked to him, or supported him, or he has supported, e.g. in this article moldbug "far right blogger" or rubin "mainstay of intellectual dark web" etc, which don't really engage with what these people are saying, or with the fact that a 2 party electoral system tends to put everyone left/right of center on the same side.
Even getting outed by a tabloid, which is viewed in the LGBT community as a deeply uncool thing, especially 20 years ago, is framed as unsympathetic for PT - he is a meanie for being motivated to stick up for a revenge porn victim based on this tabloid's later behavior.
I liked zero to one and I enjoyed reading this pasted together google doc[1] of things he's said, which I think are largely from his Tyler Cowen mercatus center interview[2].
Given the current GOP, becoming a "thielist" progress oriented thoughtful party would certainly be an upgrade, right? Build the future, be less stagnant, etc?
this was how things worked before supermarkets in general - you'd ask the general store clerk for x units of y good, think the deli counter or auto parts store model.
They check cargo holds and do random bag checks - as of the mid 2000s due to the "war on terrah" but maybe that went out of fashion in the past decade. Large denomination bills are designed to be easily scanned externally since they contain metal strips in the bill design.
maybe the implication is that it is surprising he would be cracking whipped cream chargers vs. using his billionaire concierge connections to get a tank(crooked dentist, whatever).
Would look classier than 10000 little chargers in piles -- nitrous addicts can consume a staggering quantity of little pods, basically back to back constantly every 15 seconds for hours. It is reportedly very 'moreish', as the brits would say.
Previous articles about his death mentioned that he also had portable nitrous tanks that he'd use on walks outdoors in Park City and in other situations where he couldn't go through individual whip-its. His being tethered to the tank was one of the things that motivated Jewel to write the letter.
this is false. First year associate all in is slightly sub 300, but compare to similarly type A hoop jumping prestige chasing programmers in NYC(or SF) it's a bad deal - plus taxes, CoL, etc. Analyst is low 100 as someone said below.
At least analysts can bail to the buy side and have a +EV path out.
London folks have it way worse too, I hear. Same jobs, 60% of comp, London isn't cheaper than NY.
I hear, anecdotally(n<10) that things are very bad at analyst/associate levels at BB banks right now. They send surveys around about how much people are working(what they are actually writing down and reporting, though hours aren't actually billed anymore) and people are averaging 90-95 with >100 spike bad weeks.
What I hear is that revenue is at record levels, deal flow is so high they can't keep things staffed and are pulling in junior bankers from lower tier shops. Bonuses were reportedly bad(in spite of record revenue) because of the 'optics of bankers getting big bonuses during covid' which sort of breaks the bargain of working 90-100 hours a week.
I'm shocked at the attrition I've heard of. For being such a high barrier to entry club(MBA, lots of 'networking', a hazing summer analyst/associateism, etc) people are bailing in crazy numbers. I am aware of a group(an incredibly high performing group, tons of deals, tons of S-1s that hit HN this year) where 80% of 2nd year associates have already left(since the cohort started).
Everyone knows that "bankers work a lot" but even among a friend group of MBB consultants, medical residents, buy side folks, etc -- the bankers have it the worst, and the comp is not really better unless you stick it out a long time.
Are they actually doing quality work in that time? What would happen if they just plain stopped after, say, 60 hours? Would the banks actually lose money?
I suppose they'll always find a new batch of people willing to imagine that they're getting a taste of billion-dollar deals and retire early. People undergo hazing because there are lots of people who want to be in the club. You may not be able to profit off the numbers, but you can at least have a perverse fun, if that's your thing.
But somehow, I'd have thought that a bank with "Come work 45 hour weeks with us for the same amount of money" would attract smart people and use their brain power to make more money.
I am not a banker and so some of my terms might be wrong, also some of my views are probably wrong, but here's my lay understanding of the work for front office IB folks in groups that do deal advisory(so not sales & trading or 'desks' or backoffice things) -- any industry group like "Natural Resources" or "Tech"(which are financially generalist i.e. they do all sorts of deals for X type of company) or specialist deal thing like M&A or LevFin(which are industry generalist -- they do one type of deal for all kinds of companies).
A large majority of the work that these people are staffed on is either time sensitive proposal work, preparing to pitch Acme Widgets on why Our Bank should Lead Their Deal(which bankers call 'bake offs'), or actual live deals(if your bank won the work). So if you are a junior, a lot of it is event driven, you respond to emails, edit requests(of decks, the model, etc), you are available for the client(which is usually CEO, CFO, etc) basically all the time. These things run a lot leaner than I expected, like, the group involved in orchestrating the prepping of a a filing(basically project managing dependencies with legal etc) is not tons of people, and only a few of them "own" the various big moving pieces. The work is not complex in the sense that cutting edge engineering might be(it isn't quant stuff), it is fairly simple mathematically(in the same way as accounting), but the skills of a banker are more attention to detail, dealing with clients, enduring a lot of suffering, formatting decks, etc.
Additionally -- these systems aren't that sophisticated(in a Software Maturity sense, they are obviously sophisticated financial tools), models are xslx workbooks that are sent around or uploaded to shared file systems, etc. (Aside: if someone could build github for bankers...) I am told the work is hard to split because one person is DRI for model, etc, and they just own it through the process. It is pretty shocking/cool(or scary?) how few people and how junior they are underlying "Big Deals" e.g. major IPOs. A lot of times you'll have like, an associate(1-3 years out of an MBA, usually no banking before) + an analyst(1-2 years out of undergrad) largely running a deal with the supervision of someone higher up, a VP or ED, and then a Managing Director(the banking equiv of "partner" though most of the banks aren't actually partnerships anymore) who is the 'face' and won the deal and communicates at a high level with the clients. Obviously they fan out to specialized back office depts that do stuff like underwriting, risk, legalese(securities are after all contracts), etc.
I've heard from some people in PE at big funds that are known to run super lean(like, 3 people running a big deal) that they do it on purpose as a philosophical choice to make more money(bigger pie, fewer slices), but the big banks are not afaik like that.
I think traditionally junior bankers spent a ton of time waiting in the office for someone to drop something on them late at night, which covid has improved because everyone can live their life at home if they are waiting -- but the market is so hot that people are just staffed on more deals and deals are staffed with fewer people.
These people do get a lot of experience really fast, and they do get a pedigree that lets them get hired at better opportunities(either money wise or balance wise or both), but it sucks hard and the banks don't really try to hide it e.g. the "Protected Weekend" where you are supposed to _really_ get a weekend off once a month is a pretty new thing.
The other thing that sort of shocks me to hear is that even if you stick it out and make MD, it still sucks. You make a lot more money, but you are still on calls at 11pm on weekends all the time.
Matt Levine has a more eloquent response to this in today's money stuff.
"The point of being an investment-banking analyst is to develop, through endless miserable repetition, a muscle memory for certain core skills. One of those skills — surely the least useful, but also the most salient — is formatting presentations. The other ones are, like, building financial models, talking confidently in meetings after limited hasty prep, etc., basic building-block skills of financial analysis that will serve former investment bankers well in a variety of future jobs. (Mostly private equity but still.) The presentation-formatting thing is totally dumb, but it is an easily legible signal, a brown M&M test of investment banking preparation. If you just automatically and instinctively build a properly formatted PowerPoint deck for everything,[2] people will trust you to build a leveraged buyout model or run due diligence on an acquisition. I’m sorry these analysts are sad and planning to leave Goldman, but at least they will leave with marketable skills."
What I don't get is if they need 80 man hours of work per worker unit at current staffing levels why don't they just employ more workers? Seems more like culture and hazing than actual productivity. And no, I don't believe that banking is so complicated that supply of qualified labour is the limiting factor.
That said what is it that these entry level bankers actually do for 100 hours a week?
