GUEST COMMENT: Why you wouldn't want to be the analyst working with a beautiful intern

A little eye candy in the office is never a bad thing, except when it poses a real threat to your bonus, as I once learnt to my cost.

This website recently profiled on a certain Swiss female intern, of Eastern European extraction, who is a summer intern at JPMorgan.

As anyone who has spent a few moments on her website can attest, neither her ability to self-publicise, nor her beauty are in question. I cannot testify as to her knowledge of finance, however.

But what if you're tasked with the job of working with so gorgeous an intern? I suspect that the standard situation in which the intern's purpose is making the analyst's life easier would not apply. In the circumstances, the novelty of being in the presence of a very good looking woman would wear off very quickly.

The standard intern/analyst dynamic goes something like this: M.D. arrives at analyst's desk at 6.45 p.m. to dump a large pile of scribbled-on PowerPoint slides to analyst, with the full expectation that everything will be painstakingly updated, colour and font co-ordinated and otherwise consistently formatted and returned back to the M.D. by 9.15 am the following morning.

The MD will normally trot out some clichéd, trite, banking phrase along the lines of, "don't boil the ocean on this one" / "no need to re-invent the wheel here kiddo," etc.

This is clearly a lot of work to accomplish in a short time. As the analyst's face drops, he realises there is one saving grace: at least I have an intern to "help me out with the heavy-lifting" (yes, even the analyst has picked up the annoying habit of using hackneyed management phrases). "I'll give my intern the really boring work, leaving me with the only slightly less monotonous and soul-destroying stuff", he will silently congratulate himself.

And so it is that interns typically work incredibly hard. The analyst might leave at 2 a.m. but the intern leaves an hour or two after that. And worst of all, they both have to be back at work to "flip the pages" with the M.D. at 9.15am the following morning.

In the case of a supermodel intern, a little lateral thinking (something we bankers are not generally known for) is required by the analyst before deciding the best plan. Probably, the intern has been chosen by the bosses for two main reasons: 1) She will, on the basis of her looks, be able to wow and win clients who might not otherwise give mandates to the bank, and 2) She'll raise the otherwise low morale of men who've been paid sub-par / deferred / toxic bonuses for several years in a row.

If this all sounds misogynist and cynical, I should also note that what I describe above is based exclusively on my own experiences. It may well not be representative, and the City is full of women who have, whilst being extremely good-looking, shown themselves to be smarter, more hard-working and more commercial than their males colleagues. Blythe Masters (JPMorgan), Sally Krawcheck (BoAML) and Helena Morrissey (Newton Asset Management) are only three who spring to mind.

However, if you the analyst - without thinking it through - delegate huge chunks of work to the beautiful intern in the manner you're accustomed, she's likely to become tired, cranky and more than a little dishevelled.

The next time that any one of those bankers who outranks you, takes said ex-model aside for a "mentoring coffee" (and rest assured, the queue of guys waiting to do so will stretch from Mayfair to the Wharf), she will tearfully open up to the fact that she has been "working very hard" on a "fascinating project which is teaching me all about the market for widgets in Moldova", whilst "learning a lot from ".

Faster than you can say "succession plan" or "SEC subpoena" to Lloyd Blankfein, you will find yourself in the bad books of large numbers of colleagues who outrank you and will soon be deciding your bonus.

Doesn't sound very palatable? Well neither does the alternative, which is simply taking on the work of two juniors whilst your intern files her nails and checks her ASmallWorld account on her iPhone. The junior banker already faces a Herculean task, and it just got exponentially harder.

The author works in investment management and is an ex-banker.