Omar Sadraoui knows firsthand what it’s like to be a junior investment banker. He graduated from HEC Paris’ prestigious Masters in Management Program and spent three years at Deutsche Bank in London, first as an analyst and then as an associate, before quitting last August. Sadraoui says he is not alone: most young people are leaving banking; it is the minority that stays.
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“People leave banking because you and your time are not taken into account,” says Sadraoui. “The people higher up than you take everything for granted. Just a thank you can make people stay longer, but the problem is that management is culturally from a different generation.”
Sadraoui does not say how many hours per week he worked at Deutsche Bank in London, but he does give an example of a fellow analyst who wanted some time off around his graduation. Despite booking the time off and giving it plenty of notice, Sadraoui says the analyst was still asked to work. It is typical of an industry where juniors can be treated as disposable.
“The reality is that you don’t earn much with the hours you put in as a junior banker,” says Sadraoui. “You could get the same thing by working a normal office job and then driving an Uber until 4 a.m.”
Living in London is more expensive than ever and Sadraoui says many people are deciding it’s just not worth it to go into banking anymore. “People don’t get paid enough in the banking industry for the enormous amount of hours and sacrifices they make in their lives. I’m 30 and at my age you start to ask yourself some tough questions about what you want in life.”
After spending the years as an analyst and a year as an associate, Sadraoui may have been on the verge of an easier life. But he says he didn’t want to become the person who makes banking work. “Your life is better as a VP [vice president] because you can exploit other people,” he says. ‘Even as an employee you can do less work yourself and use fear to let the analysts under you do the work, but along the way you become a miserable person. Ultimately, to survive in the industry, you only have to take care of yourself.”
While analysts put in 100-hour weeks, Sadraoui says there are layers of vice presidents and directors who spend their lives in Outlook. “It’s the delivery people,” he says. “They just forward emails and what’s on their plate to people below them. If they do that at 6 p.m., none of those juniors can complain. At that level, a lot of people in the banking industry just want the paycheck, so they try them to get the most out of their work.” with minimal effort.”
Sadraoui says it is doctors who are responsible for the poor lifestyle of young people. ‘The people at the top of the banks are trying to change the culture, but it is the directors who are the problem. They are not organized. If they were, there would be no need to ask people to work all night. “
Doctors also have no incentive to reduce juniors’ working hours: “In medicine, the surgeons get paid, but the surgeons do the work. In banking, the juniors do the work and the seniors get all the money.”
In theory, artificial intelligence will allow senior bankers to do more work themselves in the future. The New York Times recently reported that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are aiming to reduce the size of their analyst classes by 66% as AI takes hold. In reality, according to Sadraoui, juniors will still be needed because banks do not trust AI to do their job: “Everything has to be double, triple and checked. Even with AI, they will need humans to do this.”
What does he do outside the financial world? Sadraoui is back in Paris, where he runs Invest & You, a company that helps other young people find jobs in the financial sector and private equity.
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