I’d have to agree with this. My brother’s a mechanical engineer and probably puts in 80+ hrs. I don’t know any lawyers, but from what I’ve seen/heard they do the same. Doctors frequently work crazy hours like that. I’m from a farm background, and my dad rarely did less than 12 hrs/7 days. I worked in the oilpatch for a few years before school and even there, anything less than 12 hr days was unheard of. I’m not sure where this stigma has come from that high finance is the only profession to work long hours, because it’s far form the truth. I’d say of the jobs pulling in 100k+, more of them require long hours than don’t.
50-60 hours/week is significantly higher than average. Many “six figure” jobs probably fall in this category. 80 hours is pushing it. I don’t even know any people in finance who do that, except maybe IB analysts. The same for doctors and lawyers. When you are a new junior law firm associate or if you are doing your residency, then yeah, you will be a slave. But if you’re 40 years old, I doubt that you will be willing to accept such a lack of work/life balance.
Take this data, for instance. 60 hours seems like the upper limit.
http://www.medfriends.org/specialty_hours_worked.htm
Who are these engineers that you guys say are working 80 hours a week? How old are they? Maybe you can do that for a few years, but it doesn’t seem sustainable.
My cousin (mid 30s) works in a development team at Apple and he tells me 80 plus hours is the norm there for engineers. I have college buddies that are engineers in different fields and 60 hours seems to be the norm with them.
You’re right, but the sweet spot is finding something that pays extremely well for the amount of effort required. The Apple job sounds like a disaster unless he got a huge slug of options. Pretty much any engineering job is a disaster unless you luck out and work for a facebook pre-IPO. If not, you are looking at extreme hours for cost of living wage increases and limited career trajectory. All of my engineering friends who are now 30 and bought a house feel trapped and miserable.
Investment banking is also a disaster. There is basically no way to pencil out working 20 hours a day for the amount of money they make unless you do it for a couple of years and then have exit options. It is a zombie existence and the work is extremely boring.
My main point was that the amount of reward is probably not going to be linear to the effort and sacrifices required in finance in today’s environment. And further, after you reach some basic level of wealth, there is really no point in continuing to strive for wealth itself. I do not think that wealth beyond a basic level significantly improves your life (if you doubled your net worth overnight would that make you happy on a long-term basis? Probably not, although the option value is nice).
There is a pretty convincing argument to be made that you could have a better quality of life if you settled for “good enough” by your own definition, worked 40-50 hours a week, and focused on enjoyable non-career stuff during your remaining time. In order to REALLY do finance or anything else, you have to love it. Most people trying to get into the field probably THINK they love it, but few people really actually love it or even know what it is about. The only way to justify the sacrifices beyond the achievement of some basic level of wealth is to have the rare gift of loving finance more than anything, or to have a personality defect in which you either 1) have a compulsive need to win (the market is high stakes competitive learning), or 2) have a disdain for “regular life” (in a general sense) that causes you to focus on finance as your niche.
You can argue specific one off derivations of the above, but I think you would find that most really successful financiers fall into one of those two groups or both. There are too many interesting things in life to do for that not to be the case – if you obsessively dedicate to one thing, there has to be a reason for that give the extremely wide variety of other compelling options. I have yet to meet anyone successful in this field who really does this for the money and loves money in the absolute sense. Those people get weeded out quickly because the sacrifices are too high and there are easier ways to make money.
If you doubt any of this, I would encourage you to look into the attrition rate in finance. It is very high between 30-35, and a lot of people don’t make the cut even after breaking into the field, either leaving voluntarily or getting pushed out because they don’t have what it takes.
Either your cousin is exaggerating or he is being fucked by Apple. There is no way 80 hours is normal. I have heard no such stories from Silicon Valley engineers - and I know many of them. Maybe leading up to a project, but not regularly. Your college buddies appear to be closer to the norm.
I’ve never known my cousin to be a BSer and maybe it’s only the engineers in his area. But he worked at Intel before Apple and also worked crazy hours. He is a little bit of an overachiever though, EE masters from Stanford and 3.9 GPA in EE for his undergrad degree.
Sounds like he may be putting in those hours, but isn’t required/expected to lol
What did you do before you passed L1??
I was a rodeo clown in Venezuela
same
Well, my first real ongoing and finance work opportunity as a practitioner came from a guy who graduated a year after me in college. He and I didn’t really interact much in college, but we had several friends in common, and we recognized each others’ names. His hedge fund collapsed from redemptions in the aftermath of 2009 and he wanted to rebuild. I had the advantage of 1) being cheap compared to the people he had to let go, and 2) having enough of a connection that he knew a) I was basically smart, and b) I could learn whatever else I needed to help him on his rebuilding.
It helps that our personalities balance each other out somewhat: he comes across more as the street-smart gunslinger trader who isn’t afraid to pull the trigger on an idea, whereas I’m the more systematic and conservative type that makes sure he selects his targets well and remembers the big picture. Different clients want a different feel out of their managers, so together we can try playing up whichever mode the client seems to prefer.
Interestingly, he first wanted me because he saw my writing elsewhere and knew I could write, and he needed someone to generate ideas and write up a mixture of my own and his ideas for clients and prospective investors. Then he discovered that I could build and test trading systems, and I started doing that too. A lot of my CFA stuff has been really valuable here, and his preferred style is global macro, which is a good fit for me.
To be honest, it still hasn’t been terribly lucrative, because the post-2008 environment is just really difficult for asset gathering, but I like the substance of what I do a lot, and it’s given me the experience to be marketable in a way that I wasn’t before.
Networked like a mad man. I was a career switcher and was fortunate to land a job exactly a month after the stock market bottomed in 2009.
And humble 
Are you still at the same firm? What kind of shop is it, is it an RIA or an LP?
It was an LP, then got bought out by an RIA so that we could take advantage of their better compliance platform.
I’m still there, but must admit that the new chiefs sometimes get me thinking about moving. Unfortunately, GTAA and macro is a fairly niche field, so opportunities don’t pop up that often, and of course the jobs market sucks in general (in case anyone hadn’t noticed). So I do my best to do good work, but perhaps am not so motivated to give them my very best stuff without better payoff expectations.
I finished a MS in Financial Engineering and applied to jobs on both my UG and Graduate schools’ job boards aggressively (this was in 2009) until I landed something at a small firm. The pay’s a joke for the industry but it’s understandable since they don’t have that many assets under management. And from what I gathered from former employees, many left for greener pastures once they got their CFA charters when they got the qualifying experience.
It’s who you know more than what you know.