Posted on 02/19/2014 4:27:35 PM PST by SeekAndFind
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 change 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
[ Jeremy and Samson — I’ve change 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. ]
I wonder how much of it is “OMG we are living an economic lie....” ....
Most young people don’t have any idea that the rest of the world copes with that kind of uncertainty every single day. There are people out in fly over country that are smarter, work harder and don’t expect anything that even resembles job security.
If you hate your job so much, QUIT and find another!
I will try hard not to cry myself to sleep tonight about these poor wretches. It will be a challenge, I doubt not.
How foolish; foolish to think that it would be a skate job, be a place where they would be able to develop their tender idealism, and foolish to think the real world would coddle them.
They’d arrived from their Ivy League campuses less than a year before, fresh-faced and idealistic.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” (The Princess Bride)
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