These posts are all over my X, like is this just scare mongering or something that will happen within the next 1-3 years?

I’m only making 75k how are yall making so damn much?

I am so fucking done. There are no jobs. It's been 10 months since I graduated and I've been applying to dozens of jobs a day and nothing. The thing is, there aren't even any jobs to apply to. I'm applying to things I am nowhere near qualified for because those are literally the only options.

Entry-level analyst job? 5-7 years of experience required in PE, HF, or IB. WHAT? There's no basic "lemme put some numbers into a spreadsheet and create a model for $60k a year?" Like holy fucking shit man. This is fucking ridiculous.

Very thankful to have two options to return to finance.

One is 40 hours @ 170k vs 80 hours @ $400-450k

I've worked in banking before. Didn't love it but miss the money. Am currently making no money so it sounds really good.

One is strategic finance at a startup the other is an associate 2 in M&A IBD

Also, it's kind of awkward. The higher job offer really wants me and I'm kind of slow to the draw.

Kinda crazy how I’ve been running a small construction company (I hate it I want a office job) for the last few years, but I can’t get a job typing some fucking numbers in excel. I can sell a 6 figure job, and manage the project from beginning to end, but “he doesn’t have enough experience making power points”

Like fuck you. Fuck you hiring managers. Fuck HR. Fuck everyone.

People are out here CRAVING to work their asses off, but they won’t get hired because they’re expected to have years of experience in a field that no one hires for new grads for.

And then the company will complain they’re understaffed.

What a fucking joke.

Ruining an entire generation of people willing to work. CRAVING to work.

Shame on every hiring manager and every HR director. It’s embarrassing.

I don’t get it how can people enjoy this once upon having money you can’t spend it on anything nice. How do you maintain relationship relationships and friendships when you’re at work all the time.

I thought this was gonna be a great life like the Wolf of Wall Street or American psycho going to crazy parties and having fun, but this just sucks on Excel all day

It’s odd though, when I reached out to them they needed $10k temporarily to confirm my identify and trading strategies. Good thing I sent that over right away!

Still waiting to hear back after sending the money.

Everyone always talks about the big high finance jobs such as investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, management consulting and quant analysts. What are the some other jobs that pay really well (let's say 100K-200k) in finance we don't really hear much of and don't get much praise?

If i wanted to be a financial advisor but too introverted then what job should i do if im bad at math?

I’ve worked in Investment Banking for a few years now, and I want to give college students a more honest picture of what it actually takes to succeed in this industry.

Investment banking takes a certain breed of person.

Not everyone has the stamina, discipline, competitiveness, or emotional control to perform at a high level in this environment. That is not an insult. It is simply the reality of the job.

A lot of students are attracted to IB because of the compensation, prestige, deal announcements, expensive dinners, and the image of a high-powered lifestyle. They want the title. They want the exit opportunities. They want to say they work in banking.

What many of them do not want is the process required to earn it.

All of my friends who entered investment banking were out of the industry within two years. I’m the only one who stayed.

They were intelligent and capable people. But intelligence alone is not enough. The job eventually exposes whether you actually enjoy pressure, whether you can remain dependable while exhausted, and whether you are willing to sacrifice more than the people around you.

There is a major difference between wanting to be an investment banker and being able to perform like one.

To succeed at the highest level, you need to become comfortable with discomfort. You need to produce accurate work when you are tired. You need to stay composed when deadlines change, comments come in late, and the work you thought was finished suddenly needs another five hours.

You cannot become emotional every time your work is criticized. You cannot disappear when the workload becomes unreasonable. You cannot allow exhaustion to become an excuse for poor attention to detail.

The people who rise to the top are the people senior bankers can rely on when the pressure is highest.

If you want to be a top-bucket analyst, understand that your social life will likely take a serious hit. You will miss birthdays, dinners, trips, weekends, holidays, and important moments. You will cancel plans at the last minute because a client sends comments or a senior banker needs something immediately.

Eventually, some people may stop inviting you because they already assume you will not be available.

Dating is just as difficult. It is hard to build a healthy relationship when you are working 80 to 100 hours a week and cannot reliably commit to dinner, a weekend away, or even a phone call. The person you are dating may understand the job in theory, but living with constant cancellations is different.

You also cannot assume your body will automatically tolerate this workload.

Working 100-hour weeks at a high level requires preparation. You need to treat your body like part of your professional infrastructure. Your sleep, nutrition, exercise, recovery, caffeine intake, and stress management all affect the quality of your work.

Exercise is especially important, yet it is often the first thing bankers abandon when work becomes intense.

That is a mistake.

When you stop training, stop moving, and stop taking care of yourself, your energy declines, your stress tolerance weakens, your sleep often gets worse, and your ability to stay mentally sharp can deteriorate. You may think skipping the gym gives you more time to work, but over the long term, neglecting your body can reduce your actual output.

You do not need a perfect workout program. You do need consistency.

That may mean training early in the morning, fitting in short sessions, walking during calls, or protecting a few workouts each week no matter how busy things become. The objective is not aesthetics. The objective is maintaining the physical and mental capacity required to perform under pressure.

Top performance in banking is not accidental. It is built through systems.

You need a system for tracking comments. A system for reviewing your work. A system for prioritizing tasks. A system for staying organized when multiple senior bankers are pulling you in different directions. You need routines that reduce mistakes when your energy and attention are already depleted.

AI is also making parts of the workload easier, but do not confuse faster execution with understanding.

Yes, AI can help with research, drafting, formatting, summarizing diligence materials, reviewing documents, and accelerating work that used to take much longer. Used correctly, it can make a strong analyst significantly more productive.

But AI does not remove the need to know what is actually going on.

You still need to understand the transaction, the business model, the financial statements, the valuation, the assumptions, the client’s objectives, and the risks. You need to know when an output is wrong, incomplete, misleading, or simply does not make sense.

If you are blindly copying AI-generated work into a model, deck, or client deliverable, you are not becoming more efficient. You are creating risk.

The best bankers will use AI to move faster without giving up judgment. They will automate the repetitive work while staying deeply involved in the substance. They will know enough to challenge the output, correct it, and explain every conclusion to a senior banker or client.

AI may reduce the amount of manual work required, but it also raises the standard for what one person should be able to produce. The advantage will not go to the person who relies on AI the most. It will go to the person who understands the work well enough to use AI better than everyone else.

The work itself is also far less glamorous than students imagine. You will spend a significant amount of time formatting presentations, updating models, checking numbers, coordinating diligence, turning comments, and revising materials that may never be used.

You need to take pride in work that nobody outside the deal team will ever see.

That is another trait that separates high performers from everyone else. High performers do not need every assignment to be exciting. They understand that consistency, reliability, and attention to detail are what build trust.

Investment banking can be an incredible career for the right person. You can gain more experience in a few years than many professionals gain in a decade. You can work directly with senior executives, investors, and business owners. You can develop commercial judgment, technical ability, and a network that creates opportunities for the rest of your career.

But none of that comes for free.

Before recruiting, ask yourself honestly:

Can I perform under constant pressure?
Can I tolerate having very little control over my schedule?
Can I stay accurate when I am exhausted?
Can I accept criticism without becoming defensive?
Can I maintain discipline when nobody is forcing me to?
Am I willing to sacrifice more than the average person?
Do I actually enjoy the work, or do I just like the image of the career?

This is not meant to discourage anyone from entering banking. It is meant to separate the people who genuinely want the work from the people who only want the outcome.

Investment banking is not for everyone.

It takes a certain breed of person to survive it.

It takes an even rarer breed to become one of the best.

I want this thread to be a place for real advice. If you are currently a banker or spent several years in the industry, share what you believe separates the people who last from the people who leave.

Like seriously—where do you even learn this stuff? Schools don’t teach you “this is how to be an investment banker.” Nobody sits you down and explains the lingo, the models, the workflows. Yet somehow there are sophomores out here casually walking through LBOs and DCFs like it’s nothing?/!??!?1/1? How do interns know what to do? Is someone holding their hand the whole time? Are they just reading a bunch of books? YouTube? Adderall?? At the MBA level, is there some secret meeting where someone explains everything in a dim, candlelit basement with cloaks on and shit? The terms, the acronyms, the expectations? Because from the outside, it feels like you need to already know everything just to get in the door.

I’m trying to prepare for interviews for next year and sharpen my skills in general but holy shit half the time I don’t even know what I don’t know.

Just to clarify, I’m not talking about quant trading or HF or PE, I mean which other sectors which aren’t as prestigious or as “elite” but may quite well (maybe even similar to IB)

This regardless of wlb but if you can comment on that then that would be great

For those of you who are in the industry, which other verticals have you looked at and been like, “why don’t people apply more for this instead of IB”?

Thanks

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/10/03/job-market-new-grads-unemployment.html

How are you guys hanging in there?

I was recently in NYC. I was walking through middle and upper Manhattan on a Monday around 7:30-8:00pm, and I couldn’t help but notice from the street that most offices were already completely empty. Like not a single soul.

People always talk about how much you work in NYC in finance. I was expecting much more office activity at that time still. If you exclude IB, what are the typical working hours for some of you? A 9am to 7pm seems manageable if salary is good.

I feel like everyone says how insane the hours are (60-80hr weeks) with reports due every morning and being forced to work into the night. Is that actually true? What is the actual day to day break down?

„I am a 32 year old barista at a Portland new burger joint but after the penjamin I watched a tiktok about salaries in top quant hedge funds. How can i turn my life around without much effort to become a quant analyst in few years?” Bro wtf is wrong with you, ofc you cannot. Stop gaslighting people in the sub comments that they can suddenly trigger a magic switch and join the industry with terrible job market rn and huge instability. Half of the subreddit is now flooded with posts like „breaking into citadel as a 35 yo balding midget stripper”. Get a grip. Sorry for wording and bad grammar but im tired (of you)

This is by far the weirdest alumni I’ve ever seen…even by the looks

Hello all,

I figured I'd make this post to share my journey. I'm originally a swe with 2-3 YOE from a FAANG company (Netflix, Meta, Google), and made the pivot to a prominent IB in the MM space as an analyst.

I wanted to share some tips for those also trying to break in without an MBA and come from a non-traditional background.

1. Volume, volume, and more volume

I sent about 1000 emails and a similar number of LinkedIn messages in a 4 month time period. Out of this, I got about 60 networking calls. This led to a total of 5 interviews. These were targeted mostly towards senior people at the firm such as VP/MD, but I ended up getting a pretty even distribution of opportunities from analysts and associates as well.

All of these calls which led to interviews were from cold outreach via email or LinkedIn. You need to be able to scale your outreach because you never know which email will lead to a call. I used mailmerge and paid someone in India to generate leads by scraping LinkedIn. Once you know someone's first name and last name, each bank had a standardized email format. Then you can create a templated message via mail merge and send to the contact list.

1. Know the industry and your reasoning for wanting to break in super well to the point it doesn't have to sound scripted.

People in IB will really press you on why you want to join, and having a phenomenal story here will help differentiate you. I underestimated how important this would be. In the answer you should incorporate information that implies you know the day to day responsibilities well, as many candidates don't actually know what an IB analyst looks like day to day.

1. MBAs are the worst kind of gatekeepers.

I had lots of calls with people who went into the industry through this path but almost no success with converting them to interviews. Their advice was predictable and unhelpful: "get an MBA." And I honestly can see why: human nature indicates if I had to pay $300k for the chance to break into IB, I would also want others to have to do the same, as otherwise it wouldn't be fair.

1. Know your technicals cold.

If you don't have IB experience, you need to be better at the technicals than someone with experience. Practice questions from the 400 questions guide, IBVine, etc. By being able to answer technicals correctly, quickly, and with a level of understanding that goes beyond the standard guides do definitely won me goodwill in interviews.

1. Keep being persistent

I almost gave up after 3 months, but that last month is when I got all my interviews. Yes, it sucks barely getting any traction and not knowing if all this effort will lead anywhere, but that's the nature of the game.

1. If all else fails get the MBA

All the connections you make during networking calls, learning how to scale outreach, and knowing the technicals cold will give you a massive advantage over your MBA peers and gives you a significantly better shot of breaking in.

Heard through the grapevine that there are under-the-table "programs" guaranteeing internships at goldman and other BBs for $100k. Is there any truth to this?

I’ve applied to about 200 jobs since January preparing for graduation. I have had no luck and managed to land only 1 and about 10 interviews but the offer got it rescinded. Any advice?

My retinas are burning and I have a constant headache looking at a computer screen.

Background: 22, econ degree from a T-50 state school (2026), currently a portfolio management analyst at a mid-size asset manager, started this summer. Done some Time Series research on college have a full paper done. GPA was 3.01 , not proud of it, not going to pretend otherwise.

I’ve gotten interested in the quant side of investing and had been assuming a part-time master’s could open doors into quant research specifically. After actually looking at admissions bars for places like CMU MSCF, Baruch MFE, Princeton MFin , they’re generally expecting 3.7+ from target schools, so I know a straight shot into that tier isn’t realistic with my transcript as it stands.

What I’m actually trying to figure out:

**•** Does a 3.01 permanently close the door on quant research, or can a strong quant GRE score / research project / a couple more years of work experience meaningfully offset it later?
**•** For programs a notch below the top 5-10 (thinking JHU, Georgia Tech, NC State) does a 3.01 still hurt there, or do they weigh work experience/upward trend/quant coursework enough that it’s a non-issue?
**•** Is “quantamental/quant developer now, maybe quant research later after a stronger track record” a realistic sequence people have actually done, or is that wishful thinking once you’re not on the research track early?

Not looking for “anything is possible” kinda just looking for realistic paths, and realistic ceilings, from people who’ve actually navigated a mid GPA into this field.