I have almost never heard anyone say anything positive about an investment banker.
I don’t know any personally, so I don’t know if it is true or not. I’m just curious where this observation comes from.
A lot of friends of mine left college to become investment bankers. This was in 1990. The problem I saw was that they had huge amounts of money thrown at them when they were way too young to deal with it. 22 year olds and 6 figure salaries make for an interesting combination.
Once these guys had the basics taken care of - rent and clothes, which even in London left them with a lot of cash in their pockets, the rest tended to get blown. And a lot of it seemed to go on conspicuous consumption - buying bottles of champagne in bars they wouldn’t have wanted to go into 2 years previously, that sort of thing.
These people were simultaneously told at work they were the greatest (“Masters of the Universe”) at the same time as being treated like (extremely well paid) scum. One old friend of mine told me any time he had a vacation weekend away booked, his boss would deliberately assign him to a project on Friday evening making him miss the time off. The boss did this because it had been done to him years before, etc.
This double whammy - hazed but also told you are a God - seemed to lead to them treating us lesser mortals (old college friends who were in grad school etc) as somehow less valuable because we couldn’t/didn’t want to do bottle service at some shitty nightclub. It also led to them treating people in the service industry like vermin, thinking throwing a few bills at them at the end of the night would make up for it (because that is how their employers treated them).
In short, they got the reputation of being douchebags by behaving like douchebags. The one of that group I still see got out before it killed him and is now a school teacher. Oh, and don’t underestimate the influence of coke. Coke makes pretty much anyone into a douchebag.
Jealousy
Edit: This does not mean that many are not douchebags of course. In fact it is not a value judgement at all on investment bankers. It is, however, a judgement of those who judge…
I’ve dated a lot of investment bankers/hedge fund people over the years and had a typically douchey career myself (lawyer). I will be recruiting for corporate finance/i-banking this fall.
In general, professional careers attract certain personality types. I’ve found that a lot of people in professional careers get arrogant about the fact that they can make a lot of money very quickly and over time this builds up their insouciance as to the lives/emotions of others. The money/power becomes a justification (to them) as to why they’re able to flout certain rules. In i-banking, it’s the giddiness of working with a lot of other people’s money combined with something of a sell-sell-sell personality/workplace that ends up creating a personality type that can be off-putting to a goodly number of people for any number of reasons-1) seem too sure of themselves, 2) throws around money to make up for lack of life etc. etc… Hedge funders are kind of the same, but with better math skillz and maybe a little creepier.
Plus, a lot of people tend to hate lawyers/ibankers because they’re not really making anything “tangible” but shuffling paper around.
Generally…
doctors: assholes have god complex
lawyers: assholes have an obsessive need to be right and make the other person admit it
mba: assholes are mild sociopaths
As in any profession, the assholes captivate the attention of the average person, leading to a general stereotype of the entire profession.