Why We Should Care About the Junior Bankers of Goldman Sachs

First-year analysts are making noise about their ‘inhumane’ working conditions. It’s tempting not to care, but it’s their world and we’re living in it

Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1916 / Library of Congress

A few weeks ago, a group of first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs dropped a “Working Conditions Survey” outlining their hundred-hour weeks, “consistent 9 am-5am’s,” five hours of sleep, and self-reported 2/10 firm and work satisfaction rating. Public response fell along predictable lines. Some said these expectations were clear and the money is great, which is true. Others took issue with normalizing banker burnout and said they still shouldn’t be working that much anyway, which is arguably true. Anonymous investment bankers said the same thing.

So should we worried about the young Goldman Sachs’ bankers? Maybe the answer lies in not looking at what that work does to the bankers, but what it does to everyone else.

In 2009, a young anthropologist, Karen Ho, published Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. As a graduate of Stanford working on her PhD at Princeton, Dr. Ho had been exposed to investment banks’ intense recruiting of students at elite private universities — the book includes a table of Goldman Sachs’s 2000–2001 recruiting schedule…