GUEST COMMENT: Having children WILL be inimical to your career

11 July 2011

2 minute read

GUEST COMMENT: Having children WILL be inimical to your career

It was bound to happen. One by one my peer group have started making "lifestyle choices" -they are compromising their ambitions to become kingpins of finance and focusing on getting sufficient sleep and weekend strolls on Clapham Common.

Children are to blame. If I have to sit through another sermon on how 'children change everything' and 'Greenwich/Clapham/Barnes' (delete as applicable) has plentiful "bright open spaces to take Toby in his pram", I'll anesthetize myself with the bottle of vintage Krug I've been keeping for a special occasion. Or I'll strangle them with my Hermes tie. I have yet to decide.

There comes a point in your financial services career when people who were previously able to calculate VAR in a cab at 2a.m, wander in late to team meetings with baby vomit on their shoulder.

Around this time, they will start telling their bosses that they need a less stressful, less globe-trotting job. Promotion is no longer their overriding aim.

Some will even quit the City. For example, I know a former trading hotshot who's now the chief risk officer at the kind of place he wouldn't even have known the name of a decade ago. Risk is an auxiliary function, it always was and it always will be. These days he likes to pretend otherwise, but he's deluding himself.

I'm not naïve. I appreciate the inevitability of all this.

Everyone's personal business plan has had to become more modest since the financial crisis. We've all had to haircut compensation expectations. Not everyone can afford live-in maids to help raise the kids. Male bankers need to be more present at home to help out; taking the "lifestyle job" is a natural sequitur.

Still, I can help feeling a slight sense of scorn. "Dreams aren't what they used to be" as the Killers' lyrics go.

The author is a former M&A banker who is not taking it easy.

AUTHORAnonymous

Insider Comment

Sa
Saffron
21 July 2011
Heartless, having a conversation with you must be as exciting as having s** with a coffee table!
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FT
FT
12 July 2011
this chap is having a midlife crisis. dreams are and have never been real you moron...use that hermes tie as a noose to hang yourself, please do it, do it now....and send me that bottle of Krug while you are at it ... dick head
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Sa
Sarah, Editor, eFinancialCaree
12 July 2011
@Gun - you are more than entitled to your own opinions and I welcome your continued expression of them. If you read again, you will however notice that the negative comments are on both the issues and the deliveries, as are the positive comments.
All this shooting is effecting your eyesight.
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Gu
Gun
12 July 2011
@Wizard - if I wrote the articles they'd be a huge improvement on what is on here now. However, it's not my job - it's Sarah Butcher's, and she's failing at it.
@Sarah - you point to there being both "negative and positive reactions" to the content of the website as somehow indicative of it being a balanced "debate" about the "issues"? The negative comments on here are not comments on the issues, they are comments on content and delivery.
Dreadful.
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ma
mark e
12 July 2011
Oh, well... Miserable singletons trapped in a rat race and some half-trying working dads, hiding behind the wad of cash that they bring home and moaning about difficulties of bringing up kids in today's world without presumably even being half-involved. In case you forgot, you were someone's kids, and probably at times when many things we nowadays take for granted weren't even there. Some people sacrificed a few pleasures or things to bring you up in this world, so if you're lucky enough to choose and to be able to have a kid or two yourself, enjoy it and deal with it. From my perspective, working parents are much more productive in the City because they haven't got time to waste and cut to the chase. I also find that family people are much less tolerant, unselfish and giving, which definitely singles them out in an industry where greed is good and face time rules etc. etc. Like bowler hats and monocles, present day workaholic singletons without life outside their balance sheet at work or overpriced clubs and restaurants of London will disappear like dinosaurs. The future will belong to people who believe in work-life balance, and that is smt. that guides modern day family people.
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