<story><title>Young Goldman Sachs bankers ask for 80-hour week cap</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56452494</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>totalZero</author><text>Several people in this thread are trying to find a reason for these practices, but at the end of the day it&amp;#x27;s just abuse. I started my career in an analyst program at a different investment bank several years ago. People pile their work onto you and your boss doesn&amp;#x27;t do anything about it because he doesn&amp;#x27;t want to piss them off. And they abuse you when they have a bad day. In my first three weeks of work, I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to &amp;quot;show me who is boss,&amp;quot; occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like &amp;quot;I own your soul&amp;quot; to me while I was working.&lt;p&gt;Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept it. I saw my boss&amp;#x27;s boss get publicly humiliated by his boss&amp;#x27;s boss a couple times. Difference is, the junior guys don&amp;#x27;t have anyone to whom they can pass off work that rolls down to them, so they just end up doing the work of several others on their team. They&amp;#x27;re the backstop.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no profit-oriented reason for the culture, just like there&amp;#x27;s no good reason for prison abuse. It simply manifests due to the nature of bullying in a hierarchical culture that rewards imbalanced personalities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jplr8922</author><text>When I was a junior in the financial industry, I worked in small trading shops where stone-age behaviors was the norm. I had a boss who wanted me to join him at a strip club. Another one did drink on lunchtime before trading in the afternoon. I once had a manager who wanted to discuss the number of women he had sex with during happy hours. I&amp;#x27;ve seen sport bets with big numbers simply to impress the colleagues. I could go on and on. They all had this toxic kind of &amp;#x27;&amp;#x27;work hard play hard&amp;#x27;&amp;#x27; mentality, where work hard = do everything I tell you and play hard = some toxic way to deal with the stress.&lt;p&gt;This kind of &amp;#x27;&amp;#x27;hockey team leadership&amp;#x27;&amp;#x27; works well when all players have the same hard skills and backgrounds, but quickly crumble if the team size gets higher and more diverse. Its easy to fake group cohesion if all members are the same douchebag.</text></comment>
<story><title>Young Goldman Sachs bankers ask for 80-hour week cap</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56452494</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>totalZero</author><text>Several people in this thread are trying to find a reason for these practices, but at the end of the day it&amp;#x27;s just abuse. I started my career in an analyst program at a different investment bank several years ago. People pile their work onto you and your boss doesn&amp;#x27;t do anything about it because he doesn&amp;#x27;t want to piss them off. And they abuse you when they have a bad day. In my first three weeks of work, I had one guy threaten to punch me in the face for looking at him. Another guy was worse...he smashed his phone on the desk about two feet from my face to &amp;quot;show me who is boss,&amp;quot; occasionally got physical with me, and would routinely say stuff like &amp;quot;I own your soul&amp;quot; to me while I was working.&lt;p&gt;Sad part is, the abuse happens to everyone so you start to accept it. I saw my boss&amp;#x27;s boss get publicly humiliated by his boss&amp;#x27;s boss a couple times. Difference is, the junior guys don&amp;#x27;t have anyone to whom they can pass off work that rolls down to them, so they just end up doing the work of several others on their team. They&amp;#x27;re the backstop.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no profit-oriented reason for the culture, just like there&amp;#x27;s no good reason for prison abuse. It simply manifests due to the nature of bullying in a hierarchical culture that rewards imbalanced personalities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>macNchz</author><text>Yeah my roommate right after college worked at a major investment bank and the “culture” struck me as purely abusive hazing...he worked 6-7 days a week and was out of the apartment before 8am and home after midnight most days. The working environment he described sounded godawful...cruel for the sake of being cruel. Assignments delivered at midnight and due at 7am. People using the strict hierarchy to make junior people suffer. Young people with serious stress-induced health problems. Heavy drinking on the occasional night off to dull the pain.</text></comment>