He likes his life in general and a divorce would be both costly and difficult. He can tolerate his wife in small doses. Get him drunk some time and you can hear it first hand!
I don’t know about the other fields, but in the past I consistently heard surveys documenting significant percentages of young lawyers regretted their choice of career.
Sun had that also when it was in the current Facebook location in Menlo. (Breakfasts and lunches and free coffee and soda, not dinner.) But does Facebook record who gets dinner. Intel did. And the one person who didn’t stay for dinner after got an Unsatisfactory rating despite the protests of his manager.
Workers understand pretty quickly what it takes to get a raise.
Makes sense. Do they have kids?
I had a few pharmacist colleagues who moonlighted. I’ll admit, I did it a few times, not so much because I needed the money as I needed to help a colleague who was in a pinch. I actually worked one of those for cash; a former co-worker had promised his son that he would take him to some weekend event in town, and the relief person had some emergency, so he called a couple people and I was the first one who said I could. So, I changed clothes and grabbed my wall license, and he paid me out of the big-box store’s petty cash and he got to do his thing, and the technician did all the computer stuff for me.
FWIW, I can’t speak to Facebook’s culture, but my office (before pandemic) had similar perks, and the hours remained quite reasonable.
I’d be curious to know what sort of firm he works for. While most Big Law firms’ billable hours requirements are much lower for paralegals than they are for attorneys, a paralegal who is entrenched with a busy team or teams doesn’t have much say in limiting her or his time to just making their billables.
Many of the firms I’m familiar with require their associates and counsel to bill 2,000 hours in order to be bonus eligible (and those bonuses are worth quite a bit). And billing that much time requires actually working significantly more than that. I know quite a few younger attorneys who have burned themselves completely out of law, often shortly after being able to pay off their school loans, or who moved on to less demanding jobs that use their legal skills so they can work fewer hours. The money simply isn’t worth the enormous loss of quality of life. The attorneys at my firm literally have no restrictions on how many weeks of vacation they can take because there isn’t any way to abuse that and come anywhere near making your hours.
For the people who make it past that point, it really and truly is their life, and many partners I know don’t seem to desire it to be any different. I honestly don’t think they’d know what to do with themselves if they suddenly had more free time. They want to have their days and nights filled with challenging work. Nights, weekends, and “vacations” all still involve being on the clock for them.
It’s completely baffling to me.
Offer them a $300,000 annual salary for a 100 hour per week job and see if you have any takers. If that doesn’t do it, offer them $3 million. I know people making $3 million a year in those jobs. I have known people who made much more. I assure you, there is some price at which you would take that job if someone wanted you to do it. Eventually, sometimes fairly quickly, you will have a fuck you fund that means you never in your life have to do a single thing that you don’t want to do. In the meantime, those people have power and respect while doing work that isn’t cleaning sewers. It isn’t for everyone but it’s not as bad as you make it seem.
They aren’t, from their perspective, missing out on the best years of their lives - they are living them. Some will work on cases that other people will write books about. Some are investing in companies that will create products that will be used by billions of people. Some are spending their brainpower to solve a financial opportunity no other trader on earth saw. This is what they want to do with their time. And in many of these jobs, 100 hour weeks are common but not constant. They usually get to take fabulous vacations and pursue hobbies during occasional slow periods. I don’t know anyone who works 5,000 hours per year (although I hear some programmers might do this - that’s not my world). .
But everyone wants the best lawyer/investment banker/game designer/whatever in the world and you can’t clone her. So you just get her to do as much as you can with the time she has.
I read years ago that half of law school graduates would not be working in the legal profession five years later. Some would never become lawyers and many would leave the industry early. I don’t know if that statistic holds today but I would believe it.
It also means that none of those employees accrue any vacation time so when they quit or get laid off, the firm doesn’t have to pay them for any earned but unused leave.
Of my circle of friends from college (which was also my Dungeons & Dragons group), out of the 10 or so of us, three got law degrees. All of them practiced law at some point, but none of them are currently doing so (though one of the three is now a law school professor).
No and no
not everyone and certainly not me
Of those I’ve met who are in those situations, they do not lead lifestyles that I crave.
I’m reminded of the parable of the fisherman and the businessman.
Sure, there will be a small sub-set of people for whom work is indivisible from their meaning in life and those hours are just a part of who they are.
I think it is a great shame that many people come to think that there is no other way and sign up to work/life balances that will kill them, ruin their relationships and family life or just make them miserable.
People who don’t have any money? I think the whole point is to put the work in while you are younger so your 20s and 30s don’t become the “best years of your life”.
Also, it’s not like these people don’t manage to find time to have fun. It’s a bit of a “work hard / play hard” mentality. Yeah you work a lot. But there are also lots of perks like expensed lunches, dinners, drinks, one company had box seats at Yankee Stadium, stuff like that. I got to travel around a lot, which is sometimes fun. I got to live in Manhattan for awhile (before buying a condo with my wife on the Hudson River in NJ). I could afford to travel with my wife or our friends to Paris, Italy, Brazil, London, Scotland, the Bahamas, Vegas, Aruba, pretty much wherever. And someone is staying in all those homes in The Hamptons.
People who don’t have any money need some money but past a certain point it stops making you any happier and often the costs to be paid for getting that higher amount aren’t worth it.
I think the hierarchy of needs is a bit of a cliche but the priniciple holds in many areas.
e.g. past a certain point a bigger wage does not increase your happiness in any meaningful way.
If your intention is to maximise your happiness and have a healthy work-life balance then chasing the big bucks with the attendant long hours does not seem to do that.
Speaking for myself I’m very happy with a comfortable and modest lifestyle now that is easily maintainable into retirement and I’ve not had to flog myself to death to get there.
I challenge the idea that long hours are the way to get you a good life, or that all the above “perks” are necessary for a happy and fulfilling life for the majority of people.
The world is filled with superficially wealthy, desperately unhappy people who are ticking all the boxes you state above and are probably baffled as to why they aren’t really any happier. I see them, I meet them, I nearly was one and it was a close escape.
They are rarely going to voice it out loud to those they are keeping score with but I know that on many occasions, on business trips after a few beers a depressingly familiar refrain is one of outward wealth underwritten by massive mortgages and car loans, divorce, depression, alimony, child support and relationships in the dustbin.
Are there exceptions? certainly. Such a lifestyle works for some but you don’t need too many unguarded moments of candour to realise that for many it is pretty corrosive and I don’t know that enduring that corrosion for 25 years is objectively worth it.
The OP’s question was why to highly educated people takes these jobs with such crushingly long hours. For some, perhaps many, it will be because they think they have to in order to live the lifestyle they think they should want. I think many would actually be happier if they challenged that. I think we all would be wise to challenge ourselves like that.
The numbers I saw going around were self-reported, i.e. unreliable. These banks do have a culture that values overworking, so they probably are working a lot, just less than they say when asked to report just how virtuous they are.
shudders. Nope!
Wow. I suspected the bias, but not the magnitude.
Yeah - I had 2 young kids at the time. I got in early and simply billed to hit my min. On a review I was informed that the minimum is just that, and that real expectations were for something considerably higher. And instead of enjoying dinner w/ my family, I was expected to hang around the office until 6:30-7, in case some partner wanted his ass wiped. Fuck that shit.
But once you focus on billing, you can find ways to use it to your advantage. Whether you bill in 10th or quarter hour increments, you just make sure you bill EVERYTHING. Hell, I remember th eidea that you could bring your mail into the shitter w/ you, bill the minimum for every piece of mail you touched, and chalk up a couple of hours during your morning dump. NOT a fun way to live.
Not sure of the intent behind this post, but there is no such thing as “the best.” Instead, a limited range of flavors that are quite fungible. A LOT of hardworking, aggressive assholes. JMO
You are right, of course, that there is no objective measure of the best. The point I was trying to make is that when investment banks or law firms recruit, they are trying to recruit whoever they believe (in their cramped worldview) is the best, based on whatever likely invalid metrics they choose. And when they sell those people to clients, they are going to convince those clients that their investment bankers or lawyers are the best. Using twice as many of them and paying them half as much would mean selling to their clients the idea that whoever is second best is good enough for the them. That’s not how firms build their prestige. Exclusive clubs have people lining up outside to get in. They don’t actually let all the gorgeous people into the club at once. They have some of the gorgeous people wait on the pavement at the front of the line as a sign to others about how even more gorgeous the people inside must be. Exclusive firms try to build the same mystique in largely the same way.
And your point about the limited range acceptable flavors is also well taken. People in those firms want people who remind themselves of themselves.
Same here.
I am reminded of the apocryphal story of when a man tried to bribe Abraham Lincoln.
This is true for some of them. There are many others who are both rich and happy. There are some who get rich quickly and pursue happiness by other means later. I have known all three types in my life. It takes all kinds.
I remember one time that I was invited (through my wife) to a reception for a big firm’s new offices in a fancy new downtown Chicago building. I remember my shock at realizing the fucking elevator ceilings were covered in gold leaf! 
The conference rooms were lavish, w/ yards of granite tables. And the library was something out of a movie.
Made me wonder what sorts of clients would see that and be thrilled that their fees were supporting such luxury.
Hell, I want my doctor to be well compensated. But I’m fine w/ her driving a Caddy or BMW instead of an old beater. I don’t need to pay a premium so she can drive a Ferrari!
In all fairness, you mentioned you are retired. So I think it’s a bit disingenuous to act like people are wrong for working so many hour or whatever after you’ve already put in your time and cashed out.
For some people, it’s not just about the money. It’s about having a career that means something to them (whatever that means to them). The people working in these banks and law firms are highly motivated and ambitious young people at the beginning of their careers. Even if they decided it’s not for them after a couple of years, it opens doors to other jobs that they may find more sustainable.
Maybe. These are people who are ambitious at the beginning of their careers. They are trying to get on a trajectory where they will have more options, not just sit at a desk for 40 years until retirement. I don’t really buy into the notion that your 20s are “the best years of your life” as a time to kick back and fuck around. That is really the time when you should be starting your career. Maybe that means working really long hours for a couple of years.
I think the people who say this mostly have never had the perks. When I first started dating my wife she was happy driving a shitty econobox that got her from one place to another and couldn’t understand why I owned three nice cars. So I bought her a decent sports car. She fell in love, it was more comfortable, it was fun to drive every thing about it was better.
I was in the top 1% in my late 20s. It was a blast and without a doubt I’d rather be rich than poor. While I agree there is a huge gain in happiness once you’re paying your bills and don’t have to worry about losing everything (the In-N-out manager above) there is still a ton to be said to going to sporting events and sitting in the front row every time. For me the best thing about being that rich was I could bring my friends along. I didn’t have any broken relationships because when I wasn’t working I would fly my friends out to meet me for a week and pay for all of their expenses.
Of course, I lost it all in a series of bad luck incidents and I had to rebuild so my 30s were mostly lost but we’re mostly back now (top 10% in income) but I’m still working to get back into the top 1% its totally worth it.
nice one!
It does indeed, the real shame is those who feel trapped into a course of action that doesn’t bring them that happiness and who can’t see another way