Whether they could is debatable given that many of them are aggressively trying to raise capital, even if it means laying off workers to cut costs.
They could always, you know, stop paying million-dollar salaries to people with no skills other than office politics. I know this sounds radical, but it would free up some of the money.
Most bankers I knew were much more upset about losing their week-end beer fridge or a $5 reduction in their daily meal allowance than they were about putting in a few more hours.
I'm not talking about "a few more". I'm talking about the difference between 40-50 (sustainable, safe, sane) and 80-120.
In most companies, a 5:00 pm work drop with 6 hours of work due next morning would be taken as a sign of dysfunctional process. It might happen occasionally, such as during a production crisis, but it wouldn't be an everyday event. Bankers like to hire naive college kids because they don't know their rights and don't know that these kinds of late-day work drops are a textbook example of bad process.
they want all the experience they can get so they have a gilded resume at the end of it.
You and I both know that the "experience" most analysts are getting isn't very useful or interesting-- not enough to merit working 100+ hours per week. Checking pitchbooks at 1:30 am? Downloading 600 corporate logos? Do you really think people learn much doing this kind of grunt work that a high-schooler could do?
They just want the name on the resume and the automatic acceptance at a top business school, because for whatever reason B-schools still believe people actually get something useful about being an investment bank's peon for two years.
They could always, you know, stop paying million-dollar salaries to people with no skills other than office politics. I know this sounds radical, but it would free up some of the money.
Most bankers I knew were much more upset about losing their week-end beer fridge or a $5 reduction in their daily meal allowance than they were about putting in a few more hours.
I'm not talking about "a few more". I'm talking about the difference between 40-50 (sustainable, safe, sane) and 80-120.
In most companies, a 5:00 pm work drop with 6 hours of work due next morning would be taken as a sign of dysfunctional process. It might happen occasionally, such as during a production crisis, but it wouldn't be an everyday event. Bankers like to hire naive college kids because they don't know their rights and don't know that these kinds of late-day work drops are a textbook example of bad process.
they want all the experience they can get so they have a gilded resume at the end of it.
You and I both know that the "experience" most analysts are getting isn't very useful or interesting-- not enough to merit working 100+ hours per week. Checking pitchbooks at 1:30 am? Downloading 600 corporate logos? Do you really think people learn much doing this kind of grunt work that a high-schooler could do?
They just want the name on the resume and the automatic acceptance at a top business school, because for whatever reason B-schools still believe people actually get something useful about being an investment bank's peon for two years.