What I Learned From My First Job on Wall Street

Cross posted on The Free Agents, a social net for people between jobs

I graduated in 2007 from MIT with dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Management. During college, Wall Street was hitting its post-9/11 stride, with CDOs and structured financial products driving firms to record earnings and bonuses to record levels. I took an internship at a major Wall Street bank in the summer of 2006, and then signed on for a job as an equity derivatives trader for full-time. After 3 months of training, I started up in convertible bond trading in September 2007, shortly before Bear Stearns became the first big Wall Street collapse.

Like any shock of that magnitude, people didn’t know what to make of the effective failure of one of the top 5 brokerage firms. Was it the beginning of the end? Or had we hit a bottom? Other firms hadn’t taken any writedowns yet, so everyone had a different opinion of what this meant for Wall Street, for finance, and for themselves.

A year and a half later, it has gotten much worse. Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch suffered similar fates as Bear, and no investment banks remain after Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs opted to become bank holding companies. The future now looks bleak, with the once oversized bonuses now subject to congressional and societal scrutiny more than ever, and leverage looking more and more difficult to get each day.

Clearly, the last year and half was a unique time in the industry, and frankly, in the history of the United States. A few days ago, my involvement with my company came to an end. The decision was not mine, but it was also not wholly unwelcomed. Rather than be bitter about what was or what could have been, I’d rather spend time focusing on what I learned while I was there and how it will help me in the future.

Most central to my experience was my boss. This was my first job, so he defined the working world, Wall Street, trading, and professionalism for me. Let’s start with his lesser qualities — he was very demanding of his employees, tended to micromanage a bit and was generally pretty inflexible to his people taking time off. From time to time, working there felt very confining, because it was difficult to take a day off for an appointment or a long weekend.

Despite these drawbacks, as my first manager, I would rate him an 8.5/10. What does one want in a first job? While it’s great to have a flexible schedule and a boss that is more inclined to let things slide, it’s ultimately not the ideal way to learn anything. The single most valuable thing I learned from my boss is single-minded dedication. Every single one of his bad qualities comes not from laziness or apathy, but from, if anything, too much dedication to the job. At the end of the day, how can you fault someone for being too careful with their business or too involved in the components that make the business run? He was always demanding, but never once anything but completely respectful. For time off, he didn’t take much (aside from the standard week in the summer and week around Christmas), so he expected the same. From a micromanagement perspective, there are worse qualities than knowing whats going on in all parts of your businesses — like not knowing.

While I think the happy medium of dedication is a touch less than his level, it’s nonetheless good to learn from a strong case. For younger employees, working with a boss like this is certainly a challenge, but a challenge in the same way that motivates someone to choose the most difficult university or decide to run a marathon — not something you will enjoy 100% of the time, but ultimately something that will make you stronger as a person.

To a degree, this sort of dedication motivates (or used to motivate) a lot of Wall Street. The end goal — the reason why everyone got up in the morning — is to make money. If you go out every day and give 70%, you may as well be doing something else, because the pure capitalism that permeates the floor means that someone else will work harder and win the money away from you. It’s greed in the ultimate Gordon Gekko sense, and in some areas (the ones that don’t involve taking risks that could wipe out the firm and millions of shareholders) that greed is, in fact, good.

The next important lesson I learned relates to the value of personal connections. I entered with a class of about 40 people who landed in roles across nearly every area of the firm. What this meant for me was that as a new employee, I had a better network than some people who had been at the firm for years! If I needed advice on interest rates, I was never more than an instant message (or Instant Bloomberg) away from someone on the rates desk. Here, Wall Street is a microcosm of life — it’s not as in-your-face apparent in most cases how someone might help you down the road, but you never know how your freshman-year roommate might be able to help you out in the future. Connections, however, are a funny thing — without maintenance, they degrade over time. So be sure to reach out to those that you want to stay in touch with, because you can’t ignore someone for 10 years and then ask them for a job. Services like LinkedIn and Xobni have formal mechanisms for those who want some structure to their goals of keeping in touch.

The final lesson that I took away is the importance of doing something productive with every day of your life. At the peak (or was it the valley?) of my employment, I worked from 5:45am to about 7:30pm — just shy of 14 hours per day. The fewest hours I worked was about 11 per day, from 6:30 to 5:30 or so. The problem working such a hectic schedule is that it leaves little time for anything else in your life. When you get home after 7 and need to be in bed by 9:30, you have little time to devote to any other pursuits. Most days, I just wanted to sit on the couch for an hour, eat a takeout dinner, and then go to bed. It’s a horrible work-life balance and a degenerative cycle: if you do it for 5 years, you will find that you are forced to continue it, because you no longer have anything in your life outside of work. You don’t decide one day that you no longer have outside interests or hobbies — you decide it every night when you watch TV instead of reading or cooking, or pursuing a hobby.

Without a doubt, it’s a struggle — after a long day of staring at a computer screen the last thing that seems appealing is working on a personal blog or reading a few pages out of a book. However, after repeating that routine for a month or two straight, I realized that there are far too many people that fall into that cycle and wake up one day and realize that they are 40 or 50 years old and have little to show for their lives except the money that they earned at their jobs. The hobbies that they used to enjoy or the cultural knowledge that they used to pride themselves on has given way to short-term market knowledge and the info that can be gleaned from browsing the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

In the end, although there were often times where I felt like my job on Wall Street was worthless and even destructive, I feel that what I learned along the way will prove to help me in my future endeavors. It was undoubtedly a rough time to learn with all that was going on in the markets and in the company. However, what my poor timing lacked in terms of the progression of my career was more than made up for with the general lessons that it taught me instead.