The Woes of Wall Street: Why Young Bankers Are So Miserable

The pay is good. Everything else is bad. Kevin Roose Feb 19 2014, 10:00 AM ET

Over a few beers after work one spring evening, two junior Goldman Sachs employees started contemplating the best ways to kill themselves. “If the goal is, like, how do I inflict maximum psychological damage, then I think just going up to your desk and blowing your brains out in the middle of the day would be the best,” said Jeremy Miller-Reed, 23. “Nah,” said Samson White, 22. “You know what would happen? All the other analysts would get an e-mail from the associates saying, ‘Can you guys clean this up?’ And then everyone would go back to work.”

Jeremy and Samson—I’ve changed their names to protect their anonymity—were first-year analysts at Goldman. They’d arrived from their Ivy League campuses less than a year before, fresh-faced and idealistic. Jeremy had gotten placed in commodities, and Samson had made a home in the firm’s mortgage division. Good friends since their summer internships the year before, they’d been excited, at first, to join the ranks and get to work making money. But quickly, their enthusiasm had been buried underneath massive piles of work, grueling hours, and unforgiving bosses. In one particularly bleak moment, they’d started calling Goldman’s downtown headquarters “Azkaban,” after the prison in the Harry Potter series where inmates’ souls are sucked from their bodies.

For my new book, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits, I spent three years shadowing eight young Wall Street workers, including Jeremy and Samson. Given the rollicking depictions of finance life we see in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, and the fact that these jobs are extremely well-paid—first-year investment bankers make anywhere from $90,000 to $140,000, including year-end bonuses—you might think that my eight banker informants were living the good life. But in three years, hardly an interview went by without a young banker confessing his or her struggles with depression and health problems, expressing a desire to quit, or simply complaining about how working in finance was ruining the pleasures of normal life.

Why are young bankers so uniformly miserable? After spending many, many hours in their company, I think at least three factors explain why Wall Street is a singularly unpleasant place for young people to work.
1. The Hours...
2. Money...
3. Purpose...

More at: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-woes-of-wall-street-why-young-bankers-are-so-miserable/283927/