So I worked at FT Partners for two years as an investment banking analyst from July ‘21 - June ‘23. Per firm policy, we had to log our hours per week and I, naturally, decided to track my hours religiously in an Excel spreadsheet.
Oh, and how are these hours honest? I wanted this to be my best guess of how many hours I actually spent working — so time spent eating, messing around in the bullpen, or doomscrolling if things were slow is omitted. Point being, I’m not trying to inflate my hours.
Anyway, here you go.
“Dude, our bank is so sweaty.” - Every guy in IB
Ok first — can we appreciate that trendline? As a first year, I averaged 72 hours per week. As a second year, this dropped to 57 hours.
There is this weird obsession with talking about the hours you work in finance. Like it’s a badge of honor to have no hobbies outside of going to bars on the weekends. And finance guys love to throw around terms like “in the trenches” or “sweatshop” as if you’re not sitting in Lululemon ABC pants drinking a LaCroix.
The truth is the hours occasionally suck. My worst 7-day rolling sum was 115 hours worked — that objectively sucks. That is an average of nearly 16.5 hours worked per day, every day for an entire week. Believe me, I looked horrible. But that deck looked exceptional 🤌🤌🤌
And while the trend is lovely, my second month on the desk averaged 93 hours per week for the entire month. Jokes aside — this was September 2021 and we were working entirely remote; it was probably the worst my mental health has ever been and we saw multiple people from my starting analyst class quit that month.
Circling-back, double-clicking, and getting into the weeds.
Not all days are built the same. As a first year, Sundays were the new Mondays. On the other hand, Saturdays were almost always chill. 55% of Saturdays I didn’t work an hour, and I only had to work >8 hours on a Saturday 6 times over my two years.
Monday to Thursday was about the same workload. Friday was a bit lighter.
And that beautiful first to second year decrease is prominently displayed here as well.