Welcome to the WSO weekly wrap-up, where I talk with my team about the five most

trending discussions in the Wall Street Oasis community. Enjoy. All right, everybody,

welcome to another episode of the weekly wrap-up. It is June, June 1st, 2023. This week, we're just talking about

a couple fun threads in the forums over the last week or two. Matt, go ahead, kick it off.

Sure. Got two funny ones here for the audience this week. Start up with the first one here.

First trending topic was lying about hours worked. We had one member of the forums pounding the table here saying that he's been mentioning

this a few times now and asking the community, can we please as a whole stop lying about

our hours worked?

So let's kind of get your thoughts on this.

Obviously, investment banking is known for or is notorious for having long hours, but

is there really like all truth to it? People throw around numbers upwards of 100 hours per week?

Is that something that's the norm?

So Pat, we'll kick it off with you.

What are your thoughts about people in line and what their hours work, specifically in investment banking?

I definitely think there's some inflation going on in terms of people like artificially inflating their numbers.

But part of it is you may be in the office for 90 hours in a week, but typically you're

working about 70 of those because you're waiting for turns.

You're kind of missing around in the bullpen going to lunch, going to coffee when there's

downtime.

So it's rare that you're working 90, 100 hour weeks where you literally aren't like getting up and stuff like that.

I think how you hit it, like hit the nail right on the head there in terms of like I think people factor in what they consider downtime as actual working time. So people get that confused. And I've had this thought many times. I say to myself, if I'm sitting here and I put in, let's just say, a hour a day, I don't think, I think it's foolish. I think for 10 hours every single minute there, you're pounding the keyboard and moving that mouse and just going. That's, I think that's unrealistic. Times I would say, well, I pulled a full 10 hour a day. I think it's not realistic of that, but I think that's probably what's happening a lot in investment banking. There's no way you're doing 12 hours, 10 hours a day, every single day. I think it's not realistic of that, but I think that's probably what's happening a lot in investment banking. There's no way you're doing 12 hours, 10 hours a day, every single day and have like workflow. It does happen. It does. I think it's probably cyclical. It's not going to be the norm. And when I say cyclical, I mean like deals in the desk. It's just a busy time. Yes, you will have your hours peak up, but I think people have this expectation or this thought that every week is going to be 100 hours per week and you're just kind of getting grind to the bone. I haven't at least seen that. I haven't heard of that actually occurring at least week and week out for a full year. Nabil, have you seen that? What are your thoughts on? No, I don't think so. It's just like a few weeks when there's live deals and stuff, you're probably going to have like huge hours. But like other than that, but then people like to exaggerate, too. So yeah, I've been working on that weeks for like so long and all that. But then in reality, it's like, yeah, a few weeks you have to put in those us, but either you're there, you're not doing work like Batsett.

Well, sometimes even feel and not work as much, yeah.

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