Sad and unappreciated:
Junior investment bankers to Wall Street: Take this job and shove it.
While young bankers said they enjoy their jobs, most are dissatisfied with pay and hope to leave the field, with almost 60 percent saying they want to work in private equity, according to a survey released yesterday by headhunting firm Capstone Partnership.
“It’s been a rough couple of years for them,” Rik Kopelan, managing partner at New York-based Capstone, said in a phone interview. “Fewer and fewer plan on making it a career, because they’re working these long hours and not getting paid as well as they were.”
One investment banker who participated in the survey described a breach of the “tacit understanding” that he or she would be well compensated. Considering “the sacrifice I make in my personal life (100-hour work weeks, canceled vacations, etc.), this business has to be more rewarding,” the person said, according to Capstone.
That banker isn’t alone. Of about 2,000 associates and vice presidents in their first three years, 67 percent identified “disappointment with compensation” as one of the biggest reasons to leave the field. Almost the same percentage described their jobs as “satisfactory,” according to Kopelan.
More than 80 percent said they don’t believe that their compensation is mainly predicated on performance. Instead, Kopelan said, young investment bankers worry that it’s “based on the profitability of the firm, based on how powerful the group heads were, based on capricious things.”
Last year, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, Wall Street paid out $20.8 billion in cash bonuses, instead of the $22.5 billion a year earlier.
Hey! Remember this?
We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”
Yeah. That’s great. Now can I have some ketchup for my fries, MBA boy?




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Because we all know what MBA stands for, don’t we?
Moneygrubbing
Bogus
Academic
Wall Street assholes. Redundant, I know.
I guess you want us to be super desperate for the Bassets when they come. After a diet of douchebags (Teblow and Bankers and Paul Ryan, OH MY!), we’ll need the mellowing site of ‘da boyz!
Seriously, will they also do plumbing repair jobs and put my hubby out of work? Unclogging toilets and drains is something I’d like a picture of, asscrack and all!
Audjsc
Awww… poor widdle bankers. And yet, in spite of it all, they still don’t fucking get it, do they: “almost 60 percent saying they want to work in private equity.” In other words: they still want to get paid extravagantly for providing nothing of value to the world around them while sucking the life force out of their fellow human beings. I don’t care how many hours you put in in front of your trading screen, scumbag: at best it’s meaningless, at worst it means less money for me and the people I care about.
Which part of “job” do they not get? Very soon — once Emperor Perry has finally pushed us over the edge — the only work that’ll be valued will be old fashioned “doing shit” — like putting food on the table. Private equity? Hedge funds? Good luck with that once we all go Galt courtesy of Fail & Co. being in charge of too much for too long.
Can we start building the B Ark for these guys?
The Very Important People may be very important to themselves, but when it comes to very important people to society in general, I’ll put my money on garbage collectors. As one who has experienced a sanitation workers’ strike close up and personal, I mean that sincerely.
Wasn’t it Andy Kaufman, who once a week, would go do a real job (bussing tables, mowing lawns, trash collection, etc.) to remind himself that “comedy” and “Hollywood” were really not that important?
I am sorry but the joke is on you. The Tourettes Boy is right: Wall Street will take your job one way or the other and there is nothing you can do about it.
Not until everyone wises up and finds a way to stop paying investment management ‘fees’ on their mutual funds and crap.
The genie is out of the bottle: the trillions of dollars of Assets under management generate billions of dollars of revenue from ‘fees’ and much of that goes to the guys lucky enough to con somebody into hiring them as a ‘portfolio manager’.
All the Tourette boys want to be the one to punch that lottery ticket: in fact, it is just like the NBA – without the transparency of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The ones lucky enough to hit the Private equity funds will collect millions while the ones who miss out will bitch for the rest of their life that the other guy was a talentless fool.
Who knew that taking a wall st job meant working stupid hours for assholes who’ll pay you as little as they can get away with. Do they not teach capitalism at business school?
How is MBA-Boy going to spend 100 hours per week teaching children anything when no parent not named Sarah Palin would ever allow him anywhere near their children?
I like that idea. The little Randian bastard with his “we’re smarter than that” rant should be forced to work a real job just for a day before he goes on about how grateful we all should be that he stays on Wall Street milking us dry rather than come on down and show us how it’s really done. I mean, really: I want to see him handle a nail gun, move a box, or provide a genuine service to real people for a change… and laugh while he fails miserably.
No, actually, I think you are incapable of teaching 3rd graders OR doing landscaping. Also, too — obviously — of properly using the English language. Asshole.
Uh-oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. I think 300SDL is on his way to complain about my sordid and poisonous burden of prejudice and hate toward others.
The day I see Wall Street pisswhistles lining up to pick vegetables in Georgia, is the day I might start to contemplate a Galtian backlash.
Until then, go bitch about your 100 hour a week, six digit income job to somebody who gives a flying fuck.
“Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping?
Actually, yes. I’m surprised some of the rich guys I have done work for make it out the door with their shoes on the right feet and properly tied. They usually have a neatly organized spot somewhere with cheap tools carefully arranged and never used. The tasks they also ask me to take care of when I install a theater room or wine room are about two steps in difficulty beneath changing a light bulb.
These over-indulged sh*ts played silly buggers with my money, and now they’re whining that they don’t get paid enough?? Puh-leeze.
Call the waaaahmbulance for these narcissitic sociopaths. If they’re so dissatisfied with their Wall St jobs, then let ‘em all get a *real* job for a change. I won’t hold my breath….
It’s a cute trick the banking CEOs play. You could pay three individuals $80k / year to work 40 hours weeks. Or you can pay one individual $200k / year to work 100 hour weeks. But hey, look at all that money, amirite?! You’re really coming out ahead. Just keep your social life restricted to late-night booze under the desk and high class call girls during your 8 hour weekend, and you can brag to all your non-existent friends about how awesome your non-existent life is.
Then, if you get super lucky, maybe one day some high mucky muck will croak right when you’re at the top of your game, and you can make partner. Then you can functionally retire at age 35 and live your life in a board room with a bottle of aged scotch and a Rolodex of trophy wives. Then maybe people will finally acknowledge how successful you are. :-p
Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders
Why, yes, that’s exactly what I think, Sparky. In fact I think you’re incapable of lasting more than 90 minutes in a room with a class of third graders just reading them Charlotte’s Web, let alone “teaching” them anything. Do it for a day, by which I mean a week, by which I mean a month, and film it all, and then we’ll talk.
I think that dude would be excellent at teaching 3rd graders — how to whine
DOUCHEBAG: Evan, you piece of shit, how much is seven plus six?
EVAN: Um…
DOUCHEBAG: Not ‘um’! There is no ‘um.’ Either you know it, or you don’t. For fuck’s sake, don’t waste my time. Jason, how much is seven plus six.
JASON: Uh, thirteen?
DOUCHEBAG: Bingo. Okay, what do we put here?
JASON: Uh, thirteen?
DOUCHEBAG: Is this the thirteens column?
JASON: No–
DOUCHBAG: Ruth, Rachel, whatever your name is–
RALLAH: My NAME is Rallah.
DOUCHBAG: Rollo, Rollover, I don’t give a fuck. Just tell me, what column is this?
RALLAH: The ones column.
JASON: You said a bad word.
DOUCHBAG: You’re fucking A I said a bad word. And I’m gonna say some more bad words unless you retards concentrate. I don’t have to be here, you know…
Ya forgot all the late-night blow that these f*cks indulge themselves in partly just to frickin stay awake… which is probably at least partly why the whole system crashed ‘n burned… not that *I* would know what blow is like, of course, but one hears about vast delusions of granduer & and an over-inflated sense of well-being, etc. Just saying…
Hope to be around when these rich assholes start looking over their shoulders to and see an American version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang……gaining on them.
90 minutes?
You overestimate their ability, good sir. I’d lay odds within 30 minutes they’d be diving out the window or running down the hall screaming their fool heads off. And that’s in a “good school” with “good” kids in the suburbs, not a rural or inner-city one where half the kids in the class are homeless, living in domestic violence shelters, or going hungry.
I only mention it but I am now thoroughly in love with thingwarbler (see comments 4 and 11) and Bogie (at 5). And I’d like to see those bank pansies ass mother fuckers run a press, make some damn plates or impose an 8 up bcard sheet from the submitted Word docs for ten hours a day and for way less dough than what they’re stealing now! Fucking toad farts.
Wonderful indeed. Mr. Peepers channels David Mamet.
More than 80 percent said they don’t believe that their compensation is mainly predicated on performance. Instead…based on capricious things.”
Welcome to reality, bitch. This is working life for most people thanks to the rapacious, short-term-looting culture that Wall Street inflicts upon this country.
I think Master of the Puniverse will find that “hypercompetitive sociopath dickhead” isn’t all that valuable a job skill in most workplaces outside Lower Manhattan.
Better yet, he should begin his day of real work by reading his little essay, about what a carnivore he is, to assembled co-workers on the loading dock.
Well, I feel their pain. ‘Young investment bankers worry that it’s “based on the profitability of the firm, based on how powerful the group heads were, based on capricious things’. I know that one. Capricious things like the finance industry gutting the world’s economy. And profitability of the firm! I hate that! What about me? After three years– okay, in my first three years– what about me!
If this loser pulls out this malarkey out in real life, I expect he’ll soon get a hands-on demonstration of the clue x 4, ideally accompanied with the classic phrase “I smite thee with the magic sword Cluebringer!”
Except this time we keep the sanitary workers so we don’t die from germs from unsanitized telephones or some such.
Hell, let’s make them servers at a typical sports bar restaurant. How many of these clowns could take all the orders for a table of two without screwing up at least three things? And watching them handle a party of twelve would be most entertaining.
Love it, love it, love it!