Part 2

Monkey Business; Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle
by John Rolfe, Peter Troob

(Page 2 of 5)

The Associates

At the next rung up the investment banking ladder are the associates, that's what we were. You can generally assume that the associates are a happier lot than the analysts, since they have both the institutional backing and the ability to ease their own misery by heaping agony onto the analysts. Therein lies the beauty of the heirarchy. Since the investment banks are in the aforementioned practice of regularly paroling virtually the entire third-year analyst class, which class would have included any analysts with the potential for promotion to associate, the recruitment of associates and the replacement of these departing third-year analysts becomes a full-time process.

For the associates in an investment bank, there is no corresponding get-out-of-jail-free program to avail oneself of at the end of a two-to-three-year stay. There is no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. The associates are recruited under the expectation that they know what it is they're signing on to do, and that once on board, they'll dutifully climb the corporate ladder to the top of the golden pyramid. Vice president, senior vice president, managing director. The path is clear. In reality, the attrition level for associates is fairly high. They leave for competing investment banks. They leave to work for clients of the investment bank. They leave when they realize that sex with themselves is becoming the norm. Whatever the reason, between the moles brought on board to climb the ladder, and those helicoptered in to replace the departing lemmings, the flood of fresh-faced associates is constant.

The Others-Vice President to Managing Director

Above the associates are the vice presidents, the senior vice presidents (or junior managing directors, depending on the firm), and the managing directors. The associates all have the same goals. They want to make vice president in three to four years, senior vice president in five to seven years, and managing director in seven to nine years. They all hope to be making seven figures by the time they hit managing director.

Sometimes, though, from the associates' perspective, it seems like there are just three levels in the banking hierarchy: analysts, associates, and everybody else. After all, anybody senior to an associate has the institution's divine sanction to s**t on the associate's head, and if you're the one getting s**t upon there isn't usually much reason to further subdivide the hierarchy of those doing the s**tting.

The Breeding Ground-Business Schools

The most fertile grounds for the associate recruits are the nation's graduate business schools. Due to the sheer number of recruits now requisitioned by Wall Street, the preferred hunting grounds have broadened from their original select subset of only the most arrogant Ivy League institutions of the East (i.e., Wharton, Harvard, Columbia) to include other marginally less pompous institutions. As distasteful as this decrease in the overall level of enlistees' arrogance has been for the old-line bankers, it has been driven by necessity.

The business school students, for their part, are in no way gullible victims of the evil capitalist pigs. Most have returned to business school with a sole objective: to further their career goals through exploitation of the recruiting opportunities that the business schools provide. In all fairness, it should probably be acknowledged that a small minority of the graduate business school students do in fact return to school with the accumulation of knowledge as a primary objective. Those that do, however, are swiftly enlightened and made to see the error of their ways.

The indoctrination into the money culture and the transition to job-search mode begins long before the arrival of the MBA-to-be on campus. Following the receipt of the school's acceptance letter, which goes to great lengths to assure all budding MBA candidates of their status as members of an academic aristocracy, a large packet follows in the mail.

At Wharton and Harvard, the packet was similar. It was filled with policy manuals, health care application forms, and sundry other administrative delights. The most important enclosure in the Wharton packet, however, was a pamphlet titled The MBA Placement Survey. The placement survey was a gold digger's delight. Every imaginable statistic on the recruiting success, or lack thereof, of the prior year's business school denizens was broken down and reported: percent taking jobs in given industries, percent taking jobs with given employers, percent taking jobs in given geographic regions, it was all in there. There was only one overriding statistic that really mattered to the budding MBA, though: average starting salary by industry. The first time I saw these figures, my ticker skipped a beat. I was a guy who was coming out of the advertising industry making $17,500 a year and eating black beans and rice four nights a week. There were salaries in The MBA Placement Survey with six figures, and that wasn't counting any decimal places.

We were entering the land of the obscene here. If the starting figures were up on into six-figure range, where would the madness end?

Copyright © 2000 by John Rolfe and Peter Troob

About the Author

John Rolfe grew up in Virginia, the heart of Dixie. He survived on a daily diet of collard greens and ham hocks. He attended the first in a long line of parent-teacher conferences for disciplinary problems as a kindergartner after hocking a loogie onto another student in his gym class. John's parents deny all responsibility for his early, ornery demeanor.

Peter Troob grew up on the rough and tumble streets of Scarsdale New York. While in grade school he starred in James and the Giant Peach and then went on to be Sonny in the Scarsdale High School senior play, Grease. Only 5'8", Peter mistakenly fancied himself a career in the NBA until, during his senior year in high school, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament and decided to take up golf instead.