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Even reading this makes me go "yuck" at the whole business model of these places. Prop shops etc. manage to produce more value per employee by only working them 40-50 hours a week (notable exceptions excepted) than investment banks manage. All that talent which could be put to good use elsewhere to benefit humanity gets wasted in IB make work.
I know places like Jane Street etc. are expanding out into more traditional type banking and trying to eat the lunch of these dinosaurs billing $100m on something that can be done faster and better by smarter people running a leaner operation but providing a more complete service for under $10 million (while the employees still work something resembling a 9-5).
Similarly in the legal world I know there are now barristers who with their junior bill around £700-£800 an hour but as a one two team coupled with a very hands off instructing solicitor produce more robust documents with a faster turnaround than the overcharging magic circle firms but the MC firms still get a ton of business from clueless corporate charging more to produce worse results just because clients want to communicate with people that have "Clifford Chance" on their letterhead rather than "4 Stone Buildings" even though your average junior at 4SB is higher human capital than a partner at Clifford Chance.
I think you're making a higher-level mistake that has nothing to do with AI.
A vast, innumerable landscape of people in the modern world work on things that are non-productive/with zero business case or sense/don't make money, but they still get paid. This is the problem, in a world driven by capital that naturally optimizes for profit.
Also tangentially related: there are whole fields where the business model is not driven by productivity but by making things measurably worse for everyone, so the solution can be sold back to them.
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If Jane Street does that, then they will end up like Google and all the "faster, leaner, smarter" companies that started off with "we can do this without the bloat, in half the time, for half the cost". They'll grow, get established, become part of the establishment, and start getting bloated and slow themselves.
Eat the dinosaur, turn into the dinosaur.
Ending up like Google is not exactly the worst fate in the world, especially if you're a current Jane Street employee. Google is a money-printing machine, after all. Google is definitely a dinosaur, but they're a tough top-of-the-food chain dinosaur, which is a fine place to be until the asteroid hits (and no place is good then!)
Of course, unlike Google, Jane Street can't really remain itself if it goes public.
Money printing machine, sure, but not an example of "start off lean 'n' mean, remain lean 'n' mean while growing like a weed". Though, given that Jane Street got name-dropped as 'former employer of Sam Bankman-Fried', I imagine they would vastly prefer critical publicity of the "they got big and fat and slow" type to being remembered as "hey, weren't you that place that taught SBF that making hella money hella fast was the only thing that counted?"
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I dunno, in evolutionary terms small nocturnal insectivores did pretty well out of the asteroid strike.
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Jane Street, Point72, Citadel etc are massively scaling up their hiring. It’s like back in the dotcom era or early 2000s when people were saying Google would become one of the biggest companies on earth with only 5000 employees since you dont need that many people to maintain a search engine. Now they have almost 200,000 employees, mostly unnecessary, because everyone wants their fiefdom and when you start making money everybody wants a cut. As the big funds and quant shops start expanding into traditional banking territory they will hire bankers (as they already are) and they will bring headcount, because that is what humans do when there’s money. Jane Street is growing headcount at like 50% a year; revenue is growing faster, but my suspicion is that much of that isn’t due to the headcount.
I take a rather dim view of barristering as a profession. Many barristers are great people, but it’s always seemed like a job for the Oxbridge debate types who don’t like to work very hard and who get paid insane hourly rates to re-enact the Oxford Union in court, RP accent and all. Top solicitor partners make more but they really do seem to work much more too. Maybe I just don’t understand it as a foreigner, but my barrister friends barely seem to work and get paid big time hourly or daily (not sure which it is) to regurgitate the same arguments, cadence and so on for new clients. Plus it’s the clearest example of an AMA-type employment cartel in the UK, because they deliberately restrict training places to a trickle so that fees remain extremely high. The UK decided that lazy people with high verbal IQ and the right accent who read literature or languages at Oxbridge ‘deserve’ a comfortable £120k a year and so they have this process of the conversion course and bar school and then the pupillage bottleneck to give them the job.
£120k? Even junior commerical barristers in their first year post pupillage earn multiples of that each year. From the website of One Essex Court (top Commercial Chambers), bolding mine:
Almost makes me question my life choices... I think I'd be good enough to get pupillage and then tenancy, maybe not at OEC but very likely at one of the other similar caliber sets, I know how to turn up the charm when necessary and while I don't speak in RP I think you could safely describe my accent as "exotic" in the good way.
People tell me the best part of being a barrister is getting others to effectively treat you like royalty: say a FTSE 100 CEO wants to discuss something and he wants a meeting in person. It's now his choice, either he can come visit you at your chambers, or if he's really that busy you're happy to go visit him, but he should be aware that all time from the minute you leave your house door to the minute you get back to your home's door is all chargeable time being billed at £500 per hour (plus VAT of course).
And of course the total independence that comes with being self employed means that even as a junior you can treat some very senior very commercially successful people (almost insulting them to their face when they say something legally stupid) in a way that a solicitor would be terrified of doing because they'd risk losing a massive contract with all the career implications that'd follow.
As a barrister it literally doesn't matter: make the CEO look like an idiot in front of the whole C-Suite and what are they going to do, not hire you again? That's perfectly fine because you're already rejecting so much work your diary would be full twice over. You even have the polite fiction to hide behind that you're an officer of the court and while the lay client pays for your time your first duties are actually to the court and you can not in good conscience do what the CEO wants you to do, what he wants to do will be shot down in court and he'll then have to pay the other side's barrister's fees so actually this is just tough love meant to save you money.
Plus if it's senior court litigation and you're not a natural person you need to have someone with higher rights (almost all barristers) represent you in court by law and every other barrister will give you basically the same answer as I have, so just take my advice and let the professional run the case. Fun fact: as a corporate firm you can do the work of a solicitor through your employees if you want to and you don't need to have a solicitor to run litigation in the higher courts, that's strongly recommended but it's left up to you, but legally you're not allowed to get one of your employees to do the job of a barrister, that's a criminal offense.
Also self employment means that if tonight you don't feel like working tomorrow as long as you don't have any deadlines or court appearance that's fine, there's no boss you're answerable to: you choose when you work. It's basically like being a minor Greek deity (or so my friends who're now reaching the point where they have an established practice tell me). And then there's the whole massive status that comes with being a barrister and especially once you take silk...
They’re the very very highest tier and in the most lucrative corner of commercial law, the average new commercial barrister makes nothing close to that, and for those in crime, chancery, family they make much less still, often even at the height of their career. It reminds me of that funny story going round a few weeks ago about Oxbridge grads laughing Goldman Sachs out the door because they were getting offers at quant firms for £500k or whatever out of the gate, but of course it wasn’t “Oxford grads”, it was a tiny handful of senior researcher PhDs at the tiny quant finance institute moving into industry after a decade plus of academia, a handful a year of them. The base graduate salary in front office in the City is probably still like £50k, and at the Bar it’s similar too. Even so, a mid career highest tier commercial barrister (even at OEC) is making perhaps a million, 1.5 a year; even a top commercial KC tops out at 2.5/3 unless he’s uniquely lucky or mercenary, the cap at top American law firms for a partner is much higher.
But yes, while we can quibble about exact comp it’s extremely good per hour and better than almost anything in finance on an hourly basis unless you’re extremely good, senior or lucky.
Maybe, I tend to think it’s all connections really, although of course they say otherwise. It’s a cartel and they do very well for themselves, but it’s important to say that they are an extractive profession of the kind that was largely abolished with the end of the guild system (again, notable exceptions like the AMA notwithstanding). If I had been born in Britain I would probably try to have become a barrister, it seems to be what all the relatively smart people with good verbal ability from reasonable backgrounds do. I’d probably do something a little more exciting, like crime or divorce, though. Still, one can’t complain too much.
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Investment banking isn’t really an 80/100 hour a week job. No job is, there is research about productivity dropping off a cliff after 50/55 hours anyway. Investment banking is more like one of those jobs where the gap between personal time and work time is dictated by the role (like the army, or working on a ship) rather than a regular 40 or 50 hour a week professional office job.
For example, your investment banker friend says he works 9am to 1am every day. OK. Firstly, he’s not in at 9. You could walk through any bulge bracket investment banking floor at 9.05am and not even 20% of juniors would be in. The usual start time is maybe 9.45am, often 10 if it’s been a late night in the office. So your friend comes in at 10am. He drops his stuff off, then makes a coffee, checks his emails, all the rest of it. There’s usually no last minute work to do unless it’s the literal day of a pitch because the MD (who works from home 2 days a week, sees clients 2 days a week, and comes in from 8-4pm the other day) started reviewing changes to the deck at 8am over his breakfast in Surrey anyway. The junior reads the news, halfheartedly sends a few emails to the lawyers / client / whatever, attends an internal meeting and does some ‘research’ (a YouTube video and ChatGPT) for a couple of long shot rfps that the global vertical head wants to say the bank pitched for.
Then it’s lunch, quick trip to Farmer J, then a coffee, then a walk around outside, then he picks up some dry cleaning. Catches up with a colleague from another team over another long coffee. Then comes back to the office and sends a few more emails, MD comes back with a few small adjustments, maybe some light modelling, pull a few news articles to lazily include in a daily sector market recap summary he will send to some clients that they never read alongside the similar email from every bank and brokerage and research provider and newspaper. Then it’s 4pm. Your friend goes to the gym for a relaxed 90 minutes. Comes back at 6pm after a shower. The day really begins as the MD / director comes back with comments. VPs start getting more demanding. He orders dinner at 7 for 8. He eats, has another coffee, then gets down to real work while “chill beats to work/study to” plays in the background. He works through to 1am then goes home.
If you compare it your archetypal hardworking 45 hour a week PMC, the banker still has time to get his dry cleaning, have a long lunch if he wants to, go to the gym for a long time every day (there are others who sit in the lobby or a cafe and read, take a nap, go for a swim, go shopping, etc), do any “life admin” he needs to (he can go home briefly at 2pm to let in the plumber if he wants, as long as he’s back later), he doesn’t need to make dinner or clean up because it’s paid for every day etc. He actually has a lot of leisure time, my first staffer would play video games for like three hours a day in the afternoon and nobody cared. He doesn’t even necessarily have less sleep than the average worker (company car has him home on empty night roads by 1.30, he showers and sleeps, wakes up at 9, he can easily get 7 hours of sleep). He just needs to technically show his face in the office by 10 and then do his actual work between 7pm and 1am, so the MD can review it over breakfast.
Or, during periods where "in at 9" is being enforced, turns up, has a quick chat with the VP checking up on juniors being in at 9, and then goes to the onsite gym until there is likely to be work to do.
Note that this is for IBD. The average front office junior in trading is working something more like 7-5 with little or no downtime.
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