Is bottom to mid bucket the way?
I'll be the first to admit I'm not a rockstar in my group...not terrible, but not great. After the first couple bonus cycles, I've realized I'm in the lower/mid bucket range. Haven't been getting staffed on any marquee accounts, but my hours are also SIGNIFICANTLY better than my top bucket peers.
Got me thinking, is lower to mid bucket the place to be in terms of maximizing WLB? Not in the bottom 10-15% so not on the chopping block, and also not getting crushed with work. Thoughts?
The idea makes sense to me. As long as the top bucket folks want that amount of work and label to get their bonus. If they want you to carry some weight and you just refuse to… thats a diff story.
Depends on group - if your group pays sh*t bonuses, you may as well be mid to bottom bucket, still get crappy bonus regardless, still get laid off. Why not focus your efforts on moving to pe?
The Alex Moran strategy... the backup gets most of the perks with lower the stress. Definitely wouldn't want to be lower bucket, but middle to upper-middle bucket is definitely the best place to be.
“Come on Moran, grab a sloot!”
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Working your ass off and making sacrifices to secure top ratings never made sense to me since you’re all working the same job with the same title with marginal pay differences.
It’s like those people in traffic who rush past everybody on the road only to end up at the same red light as everyone else.
If only more people had this mentality. Sadly there will always be tryhards skewing the average amount of effort required upward. This my friends, is the drawback to letting Stern / IU Kelley kids into IBD
Not in the US, but aren't Wharton people unnecessarily intense?
After killing myself to work to be top bucket vs seeing what others do to still work in IB but just doing close to the bare minimum and the difference in my pay vs theirs, I can 100% say it's NOT worth it to pursue top bucket
was it worth it in the sense that you get to add marquee deals to your deal sheet? i feel like there’d be some benefits down the line to being on a 40bn USD megamerger. Am i wrong? Just an intern so truly have no idea lol
Depends on what your end goal is. For perspective, I'm at a MM, so don't do the mega billion dollar transactions. If I wanted to go upmarket / work at a top megafund, then yes, they'd want to see the larger deal size, but if you wanted to stay in your same market then it wouldn't really matter
I agree.
Mid-bucket at a strong brand name is 100% the way to go.
The compensation at these levels is not worth it and the extra time for you / recruiting which unlocks way more money in the future is 100% where it’s at.
Isn’t what you are saying “quiet quitting”? Doing the work and close to the minimum required and treating it like a job. Reduces burnout, reduces stress, keeps your job, and you get most of the benefits.
People seem to say that you get 90% of the pay for the same exits and thus money but I feel that is shortsighted way of looking at it. Things compound over time and the marginal hours worked and knowledge gained early on should compound over time to lead to drastically different outcomes 25-30 years down the line, no?
When treating your job "like a job" is now considered "quiet quitting".
I meant treating it as a job vs a career. If you treat the analyst position as a job, you will just turn comments and do the analysis asked. If you treat it as a career, you will push yourself a little more to understand the bigger picture behind what you are doing and next steps.
if you want to have the best long term outcome though, you can’t just treat it as a job, just something to do and get paid. You need to look at it as the building blocks of a career.
There is nothing wrong with treating it just like a job, but a little extra work early on I imagine will go a long way later on.
One of the more effective work habits I've seen is the Lazy Upper-Middle Bucket:
This person is likely a modeling wizard and generally a likeable person overall, but knows to draw the line after a certain hour on most days, and on most weekends. In reality should be a top bucket, but ends up sliding into upper middle bucket. Only a few are like this, many are likely middle bucket then slack and end up in the lower-mid to bottom bucket ranking lol
This described me accurately. I think I was definitely the smartest and most technically proficient in my class. I didn't have "the best attitude" (not bad, just not willing to say "yes sir, can I please have another" over bullshit coffee table books). It certainly cost me on the money front, but I also was the one that somehow managed to stay around the longest. Don't get me wrong, I worked hard and did good work, but I refused to burn myself out on bullshit. Work smarter, not harder.
We've made a point to fire these people recently. They skated by during the post COVID boom because it was so hard to find a lateral, but that's now over.
The incremental benefit of any technical knowledge isn't worth the hit to the group dynamic and we want to be careful not to send the message that you can skate by and only participate when it's convenient.
Would much rather someone dependable that's making an effort even if they need more handholding. For the more senior people, it's a lot easier to occasionally have to do the model myself vs. have someone bail during crunch time.
I guess different strokes for different folks but I take the talented, self-sufficient junior every time over the handheld “great attitude” one.
This was also me. Also, to the guy saying people post covid will get smoked out with this attitude—no they won’t. Here was my gameplan:
The hard pushback from me made it impossible to be above midbucket and while it irked some associates, I was so reliable and reliable with my pushbacks people kinda just shrugged. I disagree with saying post covid this person can’t exist, technical benefit and stress tolerance does matter. I was absolutely the guy people wanted when shit hit the fan, something really complex needed to get done, or people wanted to be certain something was right, I just got burned out and would pushback which very few people did. I think the person above underestimates how many people cry mental health or just provide a lack of confidence when they complete something.
Great plan if you can accurately tell you’re gonna be hitting mid bucket. Just be careful to maintain good relationships and don’t slip down into full bottom bucket. No reason to kill yourself working around the clock for some marginal 10-20k if that.
I tried doing this and ended up getting laid off. YMMV
Upper middle bucket is where you must want to be.
Then how do recruiters verify your bucket ratings? Wouldn't you be caught and blacklisted (if they ask someone on your team who says you are shit).
As a fellow bottom to mid bucketer, I can confirm it is definitely the way to go. I have been chewed out a few times for my lack of attention to detail, not being accessible during weekends / PTO, and general motivation / drive.
HOWEVER:
- I never kill myself on any deliverable and make sure to put in just enough effort for it to be satisfactory
- Never triple or quadruple check work - feel like that takes way too long (the shit we do doesn’t matter anyway)
- Never check email or answer calls during protected hours (7:30pm Friday to ~11:00am Sunday)
- 100% offline during PTO, no exceptions (I use all my PTO days btw)
- Leave the office as soon as my MD leaves if I have nothing to do (don’t care if VP/assoc are still there)
The net result has been me getting promoted to associate, getting maybe 10% less bonus than my top bucket peers, and still having relatively good standing in the group. I am meaningfully less stressed than my peers. All you have to do is play the game. Every time you get a talking to just ramble on about how much you care about the job and how you yearn for your seniors’ trust, etc. This is the way the way fellas.
What i don’t get about “just playing the game” (and not knocking on it at all) is living with the cognitive dissonance that you are not putting forward your best effort but simultaneously need to tell people that you are. That is hard to do when this job is still 80% of your time even when optimizing for mid bucket. Why bother doing that vs. just leaving? Life is too short to manage optics constantly and still hate your job.
Bro life is too short to spend all my time and energy on my job, in my opinion. I’d much rather spend my time working on being a good husband / dad and in the gym than a corporate drone. I personally don’t give a fuck if I’m the best associate/VP in my group and I certainly don’t care if I ever become an MD or not. I found a role where I can coast for the most part and still enjoy all the prestige and money that banking brings. Will this work forever? Probably not, but then again my life goal was never to become an IB MD, so at that point I can find something new. If I can keep making good money to take care of myself and family with minimal effort towards my job then I am going to keep doing it 🤙
Bottom bucket > no bucket
It’s a great idea until you can’t get A2A or 3rd year promo in leaner times or people don’t back you up for PE recruiting (not that as a bottom / middle bucket w less reps, your product sucks anyway). Have seen juniors like these struggles even with corp dev recruiting.
As if re-arranging logos and creating bullshit operating models makes you any better at PE recruiting anyways lol. Also most of the people who do this don't want the promo anyways
Curious on what you mean by people not backing you up on PE recruiting. In terms of associates covering for you, or like will people actually try and get references on you
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