THE INSIDER: Banking is now a career, not a get rich quick scheme
Take a look around the floor of your investment bank and ask yourself two questions: what's the average age of the workforce, and how many of your former colleagues are no longer with your firm? The answers, you will find, are quite astonishing. Very few i-bankers have grey hairs, and a huge amount of churn goes on in the ranks of an investment bank in both good and bad times.
A major underlying driver behind these two phenomena is an inherently short-term focus in the City, not just within institutions themselves, but also among the individuals who work there. There are very few bankers I know who join a firm and make the mental commitment that it is to be the place where they will work for the rest of their career.
Why is this? First and foremost, it is because of that interview taboo subject - money. Anyone who says they would do their job (with the hours, the stress, the travel, the requirement to live in or near London) even if they were not getting paid the big bucks is either, a) in an interview, b) full of it, c) an idiot - none of which are mutually exclusive by the way. In a good market, guaranteed packages at huge premiums are prevalent, and the incentive to always look for the next best offer is clear.
The second reason that people get out young is that working in the City is a pretty exhausting, low-quality-of-life existence. The hours are long and harsh and spent in Central London. Banking might offer many wonderful experiences, but it's not exactly compatible with a healthy outdoor lifestyle.
This combination of money and a poor lifestyle is what makes people say: "I will do this for a period to make my money before I get out to a better life."
In the current market, it's therefore interesting to see short-termism on the wane. People are resigned to not earning anywhere near as much as they expected to earn two years ago.
The irony is that this forced reduction in short-termism is having positive effects. Bankers are paying more attention to improving how things can be done. It's refreshing, for example, to see bankers looking at the actual management side of the business as much as the transactional side. In addition, with bankers resigned to making less money, the work seems to have become more of a means in itself than a means to a dollar-encrusted ending. And aside from the not inconsiderable involuntary churn, existing teams are more cohesive and better functioning as a consequence.
I am under no illusion that when markets return, short-termism will return to its former rampant self. When that happens, we might be making more money, but we will almost certainly lose something, too.
