Goldman Sachs’ Analysts Want Their Lives Back

Before its destruction in the 9/11 attack, the Lehman Brothers building at Three World Trade Center had a critical feature: a mega-large atrium the diameter of a competitive racetrack. Calming down a hopping mad spouse who showed up at the turnstiles on a late Saturday night, after being stood up for two hours at a restaurant, had a name: “the walk-and-talk.” The contrite banker would descend sixteen floors and walk around the atrium, explaining and apologizing until, the situation diffused, why, it was time to go right back up to work.

I know this because back in the late nineties I dated a Lehman analyst, who dutifully spent every waking hour in the office. The walk-and-talk left me disgruntled. My Machiavellian strategy? I interviewed for, and got a job as, a junior banker in his own department, guaranteeing 24/7 cohabitation. I consequently acquired his wretched lifestyle, barely sleeping, working through weekends, eating meals at my desk, ghosting friends and disregarding basic standards of hygiene. It seemed a capital idea at the time.

There were a lot of us, young humanoids receiving the wisdom of senior bankers some 100 hours a week. It was rather social – a nerdy capitalist version of the Hare Krishna sect minus the colorful garb. There was some glamour in ordering out from pricey Manhattan restaurants and coming home in a fancy black limo, or making free hour-long calls from the office at 3 A.M. to my befuddled family in France. Major gloating could be had by breaking records in monthly all-nighters. It got worse when I transferred to the small Lehman outpost in downtown Los Angeles. I was the lone analyst living in the office, where only pizza joints delivered and from where I drove myself home, once causing a minor crash after falling asleep at the wheel. My analyst stint lasted, under various degrees of despondency, three years. I moved on to business school and a hedge fund career.

So, when thirty years later I read the “Working Conditions Survey” manifesto from a group of Goldman Sachs GS analysts, complaining of working over 95 hours a week and sleeping 5 per night, it was a familiar story. My first thought was, Tough it up, kids. I may even have sent an unfunny Twitter. Empathy does not come naturally to a retired hedge fund manager. Neither does social media. But here’s my attempt.

Granted, many industries subject newcomers to grueling working hours and conditions – ask any aspiring talent agent, junior medical resident, new Silicon Valley coder, or first-year corporate lawyer.

Also, future Masters of the Universe, as haute financiers are wont to be called, should be exceptionally motivated, driven, and hardworking. Some pruning is required. When I recruited hedge fund analysts, the investment banking program on a resume guaranteed the endurance required for the hardship of the job: not long hours, but losing money. A trade gone wrong can take a physical and mental toll similar to, or actually causing, many sleepless nights. The analyst boot camp does weed out fair weather Wall Streeters. But would it be as effective with a 60-hour week? I think so.

A great deal of time was spent on trivial financial pageantry. I sweated on fat marketing presentations handed down by the associate, who reported to the vice president, who heard the pitch from the managing director. The slides were endlessly revised, loaded with redundant models, unrealistic scenarios, prettied up with useless logos and graphs, beefed up with interminable credentials and league tables. A pitch book could take an entire night and receive, as a final verdict, the managing director’s wrath, “Who asked you to use Cambria 13?” Prompting the complete redo of the pitch, mere hours before a meeting, in a mad scramble to please the top dog. Then, after ceremoniously distributing their glossy, spiral-bound opus at the start of the client meeting, senior bankers routinely broke the ice with “Let’s set the formal presentation aside, shall we?” Why, we sure could because its content was verbose and the formatting accoutrements pointless. A banker’s crutch. Of course, the occasional interesting deal and meeting would occur; these were mostly a blur in the life of a processing automaton. Was the experience a fast-track learning process? Yes, but the same result could be obtained with less hours and more showers.

Because punishing hours in investment banking mostly stem from insecurity and power trips at the top rather than true emergencies, they become the end rather than the mean. Brute-force face time becomes a value. Violating personal lives becomes a culture. Freshly promoted bankers, lest they appear soft on their juniors, carry on the behavior up the seniority ladder.

The real tragedy with investment banking hours is not that they are too long; it is that they are unnecessary.