Damn, It Feels Good To Be a Banker
Page 7
But on one occasion, I heard some other Bankers whispering about how she was a “token” and only got hired because of “affirmative action.” I knew that this was not true, and it infuriated me. Natalie was just like a handful of other people who had insta-ins to the firm—her dad was connected. So one day, in a voice loud enough that everyone including Natalie could hear, I stood up at my desk and announced: “Guys. Natalie isn’t here because of affirmative action. She is here because her dad is an MD in the Chicago office.”
She never thanked me for clearing that up, but I’m sure she was grateful.
The mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently wrote a book on what he calls the “black swan theory.” There used to be a common conception that all swans were white, and people used the phrase “black swan” for something that could not exist. In the seventeenth century, however, a black swan was discovered in Australia, and as such, Taleb uses the black swan to describe a “large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations.”
Like the swans we are, there was once a common conception that all Bankers were white. People used the phrase black Banker to describe something that could not exist. No one had even imagined a “yellow Banker” or a “brown Banker.” Turns out we are even more diverse than swans, and far more striking.
For those unconvinced, just open up any Bank or financial institution’s Web site, and you will see numerous pages dedicated to this very subject. And not only is diversity one of our core values—we have the pamphlets to prove it.
Unrelated topic: Chang—if you’re reading, we’re valuing a couple doctor’s-mask companies and could really use your personal expertise to help us decide if this is a market we should jump into. So yeah, any qualitative info beyond the financials would be great.
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INSIDER INFO WITH NAIM
Dear Mom / Dad,
Sorry I couldn’t make it home this weekend, I got pulled in at the last minute to go speak with a potential client. We might be doing a deal with some record label, “Def Jam,” and another MD decided at the last second it was imperative that I attend. Turns out they focus a lot on hip-hop (which you know I hate) so I wasn’t too familiar with the company and had to get up to speed really quickly. I’m still in the Healthcare group, but I got to do almost all of the presenting, which is great experience.
Otherwise, things are going well. Everyone is really nice, and I’m learning a lot. There are a few other Harvard guys here, so we’re up to all our old antics on the weekends.
I’ll try to make it home next weekend, but I also just got pulled in to work on another pitch. “FUBU,” I think the company’s name is? Anyway, I hope they do medical devices—that’s what I’ve been eager to learn more about.
Talk to you soon,
Naim
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COMMENTS FROM leveragedsellout.com
This seems like a good place to post about a personal pet peeve from my own life.
Here’s a little bit about my background: went to an Ivy League school, Bulge-Bracket Bank, then a buyout fund where I was promoted to a partner-track position. Oh yeah, I’m also an Asian American who likes to go pick up dinner in order to get some fresh air.
STOP CONFUSING ME WITH THE CHINESE DELIVERY GUY!!!!
I can’t begin to tell you how many times this has happened in my career. Just because I’m Asian and I’m carrying a plastic grocery bag through the lobby doesn’t mean I’m your fucking delivery guy.
One evening, I was stopped THREE fucking times within a span of twenty-five feet—(1) outside the revolving door, (2) in front of the security desk, (3) in the elevator bank—and asked (1) “Excuse me, are you from…” (2) “Wait, where are you going? I ordered sushi.” (3) “Hi, my name is…”
So if you see an Asian guy with a plastic grocery bag walking through the lobby but dressed in business casual with a BlackBerry clipped to his belt, use some common sense. The Chinese delivery place around the corner didn’t start issuing BlackBerries to their delivery people and aren’t requiring them to dress business casual so that they can “fit in better.”
POSTED BY ANONYMOUS, MARCH 10, 5:10 P.M.
All comments are real and unedited.
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FACT #9
Holla back, office!
Support Staff
THERE’S NOTHING QUITE like meeting a random, fellow Banker in a social setting. An instant sense of camaraderie takes over, and the conversation quickly turns to familiar jokes, playful elitism, and a thinly veiled discussion of recent deals. It’s like meeting an American in a foreign country and being able to freely bitch about how stupid and backward all the natives are, only you get to do it from the comfort of your homeland, and the “natives” are people who don’t work in finance.
Sometimes, however, this feeling will be misplaced. I once met a guy who said he “worked at JPMorgan.” Okay, kinda sweet, I thought. I’ve heard of that. We chatted in loose terms about the industry and discussed a few trends. But when we got into specifics, his knowledge markedly plateaued.
It was weird. Inspecting him a bit closer, I noticed he had gotten really nervous. His Amstel Light trembled ever so slightly in his hand, sweat beaded up around his temples, and he was treating girls with a strange level of respect, bordering on gratitude. Something was off.
Holla back, office!
As I examined him further, a creeping, rhythmic voice got steadily louder in the back of my mind. We played the name game to see if we knew any of the same people—we didn’t. As my suspicion heightened, he let a comment slip about getting off work “late” that night, at 7:30 p.m. The voice in my mind instantaneously went from inaudible to nearly bursting my eardrums. “Going going, back back, office office,” Tupac boomed, and it all made sense.
I would have spotted it sooner, but he was particularly gifted in his posing. Once it clicked, though, I realized that the dude had “Back Office” written all over him.
In business, the Back Office is any group that isn’t actively contributing to the core business of the firm. The Back Office is the support staff—the fluffers whose only purpose is to prepare and assist the real Bankers in the spotlight.
While it varies based on the company, the Back Office generally constitutes departments like Information Technology (IT), Accounting, and Human Resources. They take care of the tasks no one thinks about, and their employees are forgotten and neglected. Every group of friends has a Back Office guy—he’s the one who calls and sets up the party but never gets any girls.
Art School (Word Processing/Production)
Word Processing and Production are the parts of the Back Office that Investment Bankers have to interact with the most (Traders and others, not really), as aesthetics are a vital part of any deal. Pitch books, presentations, and other work products must be both accurate and meet the Bank’s strict style guidelines because the people who read them, like illiterate four-year-olds, tend to respond to things that are “pretty.”
I’ve become quite friendly with a couple people in WP and Graphics. They’re a total departure from the kinds of people I usually deal with, but someone is there, on call, 24/7, and we end up interacting a lot. Once given a task, they’ll burrow away somewhere and complete it in perfect solitude. Tania, my WP girl from Queens, can take any Excel chart, sketch, or scribble on the inside of a match book and make it presentable. We might have to iterate on it a few hundred times, but we’ve got a comfortable level of “don’t flip out on me, and I won’t flip out on you”–ness going on.
Production (Graphics) then prints, binds, and sends out the documents. Special paper, spiral/comb binding—they make the book reports every child dreams of being able to create. Production at Bulge-Bracket Banks makes Apple’s packaging look like one of the brown bags that the Back Office folks bring their lunch to work in.
The guys in WP and Graphics aren’t the type to pose as Bankers; they’re aloof and too cool in tha
t “I don’t care about money, prestige, power, or happiness” art school kind of way.
The Nest
Banking has its own Hens—Human Resources (HR) and assistants.
HR chicks, who, in some cleverly devised Banker pun, represent most of a Bank’s “talent,” actually recruit and help hire new talent. They’re generally well put together, friendly, and chipper young women. They don’t deal with money; rather, they manage “human capital,” interviewing and courting new Bankers into the firm.*
Assistants are generally unattractive older women, but I met a cute, young one once, and the buzz I’ve generated around her has made her peers seem more intriguing. Expectations for this position include: absorbing verbal abuse, incorrectly scheduling appointments, and failing to not say something stupid when answering the phone.
A couple times a year, there will be a firm-wide event where the Back Office and the Front Office will socialize together. The dynamic is undoubtedly weird. It feels wrong, like a financial model with gross profit margin greater than 100 percent. In this case, a first-year Analyst didn’t accidentally add revenues and costs, but we are still mistakenly forced together.
The Hens, however, are able to capitalize on these situations, as they’re the closest thing to a real woman one can find within a Bank. They still possess that fresh, woman scent that female Bankers lose after their first fifteen minutes at work, and they leverage this to flirt with any and all Bankers. Hens don’t particularly envy or despise Bankers; instead, they’ve opted to try to sleep with them.
Law Review
All Banks have their own in-house legal teams whose role is primarily to deal with compliance and other issues related directly to the Bank. Even more Back Officey, however, are the corporate law firms that Banks hire to conduct the legal diligence and transactional gruntwork for deals. Banks have allowed these law firms to create their own little companies and have gone as far as to help propagate an air of exclusivity within the group (some even call themselves “Big Law” firms). This is really all just smoke and mirrors to keep the poor lawyers quiet and writing memos while first-year Banking Analysts scream at them for not knowing how to multiply single-digit numbers or use the correct typeface. Transactional law does need to occur for a deal to go through, but in the scheme of things, they’re not the product, they’re quality assurance.
The saddest part about corporate lawyers, who I collectively and individually refer to as “Matlock,” is that they generally work just as many hours as the Bankers they support, but they get compensated far less.
Lawyers use the phrase term of art when referring to a subject specific term or legalese. Bankers have our own “term of art” for lawyers: retarded.
Happiness = Compensation * Sex Life
The Clearing(whore)house
I borrowed this vulgar moniker from my roommate Jon who, as a Trader, has had to deal with them. Clearinghouses also have a slightly more favorable name: “custodians.”
Apparently, Clearinghouses are third parties or internal groups that ensure that the trades that Banks or Hedge Funds execute reconcile with what actually processes in the market. Essentially, Clearingwhores are given a massive stack of papers, and their job is to make sure that the two sets of numbers on them are identical. Page after page, they just keep going, making sure there are no discrepancies.
Sometimes, when Jon and I are bored, we’ll play “Clearinghouse.” The game consists of one of us making two columns of identical numbers, and the other pretending to figure out whether they’re the same or not. I hit Jon with a particularly difficult one the other day:
He played the part of the Clearingwhore to a tee, mulling it over for an hour, scratching his head, perplexed, and then finally giving up. For the Clearingwhores reading—they are indeed the same. Write that down.
One would think that this process could get automated, which only reinforces the popular conception that Banks are kind, philanthropic entities concerned with maintaining America’s domestic workforce.
I asked a Trader friend if he’d ever talked to someone at a Clearinghouse. He said that he had. “What did you say to him?” I asked. He told me he spoke a total of eight words: “I make the money. You just count it.”
IT
“You fucking stupid Banker guy. I went to IIT Ahmedabad and got my master’s degree in Computer Engineering and now this is what I am doing! I am ten thousand times smarter than you. You are eating my head, mule! American Dream and my foot! Jersey City sucks worse than the ghettos of Bihar. Just wait until I get into the Business Side of Banking, sister-fucker. Then you’ll see!”
That’s what the online translator gave me when I sent in a recording of what my IT guy was muttering under his breath while reinstalling Windows on my computer.
American Dream? I believe that would be me.
I suspect the Back Office is even bigger than I realize. I met a guy once who was a runner, for example, and his job was to run around on the Trading floor physically delivering orders (he even wore runners!). And most of what is technically the Middle Office (Risk Management, Compliance) could probably also be called the Back Office.
It may exist under a massive Banker shadow, but there are numerous benefits to working in the Back Office. They get Front Office–quality health and dental and a higher salary than anyone in their respective jobs at other places. Secretaries rip six figures consistently on good years. Most important, of course, Back Office Bankers have that indescribable pleasure of getting to tell people that they “work on Wall Street,” which must still feel amazing, even if delivered unconvincingly.
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COMMENTS FROM leveragedsellout.com
First of all, whenever someone in HR starts saying things like “divide,” you should probably stop listening to them.
POSTED BY MONKEY, NOV 16, 12:40 P.M.
Has it occurred to you that you are every bit the bitch for carlysle that the schoolteachers are to you? You can fake it, kid, but you are still just a wannabe with an expense account.
POSTED BY ROGER, JULY 30, 4:24 P.M.
I think we all know that Roger is the biggest rainmaker in the Compliance department at Wells Fargo Securities.
POSTED BY ANONYMOUS, JULY 30, 5:24 P.M.
All comments are real and unedited.
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CASE STUDY: THE STATE SCHOOLER
This comes from Alex, a Penn State student whose experience speaks for all his XYU/XSU Banking brethren.
Yeah, no kidding—it’s pretty tough being a state school kid in Banking. When people at work ask me where I went to school, I can literally see their eyes go blank when I say the word State—it’s like I’ve uttered a racial slur or said something so appalling that the only way their brains can handle it is to substitute my voice with white noise. As their eyes refocus, they’ll usually ask, “Oh…UPenn?” I’ll lower my head and tell them, “No…Penn State.” And then, fantastically uncomfortable, they’ll eke out something like: “Oh, wow. Musta been a really fun experience…great football team.” We’ll linger for a moment in an awkward pause, and then I officially cease to exist to them.
It wasn’t easy getting to where I am today. I took a ton of finance classes in undergrad to prove my dedication to the field, and when I started my job at a Bulge-Bracket Investment Bank (which was a reach), I thought that the coursework we did would give me an added edge. I figured I’d be a super-Banker of sorts, bursting out of the gates and impressing everyone with my tangible, value-add skills. And I did, I really did! For a moment, the State School kid knew more than everyone! But, sadly, this lasted only three days before those smartass Princeton and Harvard guys mastered everything it had taken me four years to learn. Argh! Dudes were better than me by week two.
You see, in Banking, your school is one of those things that boosts you up or, in my case, haunts you for the rest of your life. I’ll never forget trying to interview at Hedge Funds. During a final-round interview, a forty-five-year-old, accomplished man in f
inance welcomed me into his regal office, and we sat down. He pulled my résumé from his file and looked it over. I could see him do a double-take when he saw Penn State University written in bold letters. It didn’t matter that it had Honors Program, 4.0/4.0 GPA, and Phi Beta Kappa written underneath it, he seemed genuinely perplexed.
He turned the paper over, as if the name of a better school might be written on the back. Then he shook it; maybe the whole sheet would turn blank like an Etch A Sketch, and we could start again from scratch. It didn’t. Unsatisfied, he furrowed his brow, looked at me apologetically, and said, candidly, “I’m sorry, I don’t interview for the administrative positions.”
Story of my motherfucking life.
PERFORMANCE REVIEW #2
1. A Williams College alumnus is spotted on Wall Street. His occupation is a six-letter word starting with B and ending with R. What is he?
The Correct Answer
2. A Banker Girl will tell you she is going to switch careers and move into fashion.
a. Sometimes
b. Always
c. Never
The Correct Answer
3. Wall Street _____ diversity.
a. scowls at
b. does not know the definition of
c. embraces
d. fakes
e. mocks
The Correct Answer
4. You receive an e-mail from a headhunter. You: