Confessions of a Cat-holic (208)

Zhang Chen, my former boss from AIC Education in Beijing, confessed to me what happened to him at Citibank's IBD division in New York. A guy in his office almost dropped dead at work, and none of his coworkers did anything about it. They just walked pass his almost dead body and continued to work. No one even bothered to call the police or send him to a hospital. He had a seizure, not sure if it was from overdose or overwork. But the most ironic thing was that this very same guy went back to work after a week with no rest right out of hospital. This was totally absurd, but it was happening around us every day.

So this was what prompted Zhang Chen to start his own company in admissions consulting. He knew a banking career was not sustainable. He was truly amazing because he started his company while he was working as a banker. His hours were bad, as you could tell from the dead body incident in his office. In order to prepare for his start up and apply for seed funds, he had to spend all his weekends at Columbia's butler library on business proposals and marketing materials for dissemination. He compiled a book that gathered all the successful application essays from high school students in New Jersey. (Yes, he lived in Jersey.) He didn't want to spread himself too thin at the expense of work quality, so he paid an Indian guy on his team to do his work and alleviate his workload during the day. And as the company started to take off, he quitted his job and never turned back to banking again. He was very inspiring and to be honest, we all shared some of his traumatic experiences. I would say that he was a role model that I looked up to on my career track.

Ally Yip, my former boss from The Edge, told me her HBS and MIT peers at Goldman had the very same story. They joined the firm with a thick and enviable paycheck and signing bonus. But that halo and glamour could not save them from terminal diseases (strokes, cancers, rare diseases and heart attacks, etc) a few months down the road. Usually, if they were lucky, they could still go back to work and enslave themselves for a few more years, like Edmond. But for those who were less fortunate, they might never make it back to work again.

Most of these stories happened in IBD. Some happened in prime brokerage. I rarely heard or saw anything lethal on the trading floor. This might have explained why sales and trading was not aggressive in college recruitment. From talking to the HRs of the banks, I knew that sales openings were very hard to come by and they usually wouldn't take fresh graduates. You needed to have some sort of connections or relationships to get hired. In my case, it was a placement under the SEO. When I worked at Lehman, I got 10 calls to join IBD with almost no invitation for an interview for a sales role. The only interview I received was with Goldman, but I didn't want to work there. My plan was that I really should be patient and wait for the right job opening rather than rushing in for a job that might kill me. If not Lehman's fixed income sales, I could not see myself working elsewhere in the financial industry. No private equity, no hedge funds, no buy-side, no equity research, no ECM, no DCM, no prime brokerage, no IBD, I just wanted to work in fixed income sales and maybe private wealth management, which both were known to be very secretive in their hiring processes.

And this was what I had seen with my own eyes at Lehman. Most of the staff in Eric Tsang's team stayed at their jobs for 10+ years. They all had a family and stable career, with no intention to switch jobs or firms. They never intended to leave Lehman, not by legal binding or peer pressure. They simply wanted to stay at their job because it was sustainable. Occasionally, Lehman was ranked very badly in the caring company list and regional fixed income sales league. We sometimes had to call our clients up to give us a vote that might boost the company brand. But overall, all of us were content to stay low profile.