Crushed by pandemic workloads, Wall Street’s youngest want more money and better conditions. But mostly more money. jenwieczner reports
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Jeenah Moon/The New York Times/Redux When Goldman Sachs sent its analysts home at the beginning of the pandemic, they figured their jobs would stay largely the same: the same 80-hour weeks, the same urgent but menial tasks, the same imagined riches a few years down the line. And they figured they could rely on the essential sustenance Goldman had always provided: Seamless.
In May 2020, a group of TMT analysts polled each other on various measures of work-related misery and presented their findings to an indifferent senior banker on a Zoom call; on another occasion, they tried to convey to a partner how hard it was to find time to buy groceries. “When I was an analyst, I used to eat ramen noodles,” the partner told them. “Just microwave some ramen — you should be fine.
In the middle and higher echelons of Goldman, the analysts’ plight received little sympathy. Randy Habeeb was working as a trader in the bank’s New York office when the PowerPoint leaked. “To be honest with you, I was actually really pissed,” he told me. “It’s kind of like an unwritten code that you just don’t talk about it. You kind of just man up and do it.
For many new investment bankers, the deal they struck for their first two years out of college is looking like an increasingly out-of-the-money trade. “Banking used to be this golden ticket,” said a former Wall Street associate. “It’s still a really good job, but if you can get Google, Apple, Netflix, Snap — those are better jobs.” His wife, he noted, earns more money for fewer hours at a tech giant.
Decades of junior-staffer abuse can’t be unlearned in a year, especially when the industry self-selects for the ruthless. When one Citi analyst informed a superior by email that he’d caught COVID and was heading to the hospital, the VP replied and gave him a new assignment. “No time off. He was like, ‘Oh, thanks for letting me know. I actually have a staffing for you.’” Another analyst griped on Citi’s internal messaging system: “I hate this job, I hate this bank, I want to jump out the window.
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