As JPMorgan restricts working hours, Goldman Sachs' 100-hour week guys have mostly quit
JPMorgan's done it. When Goldman Sachs' analysts complained of their 100-hour weeks in 2021, one of their requests was that 80 hour working weeks should be considered "max capacity." The Wall Street Journal reported today that JPMorgan is now capping junior bankers' working hours at 80 a week "in most cases."
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Goldman Sachs doesn't appear to have done the same. A spokeswoman for the firm says there are no formal caps on hours worked there, but that "junior banker hours are closely monitored and moderated when appropriate.” The WSJ says Goldman is sticking to its existing limits on working hours, in which juniors stop working at 9pm on Friday and don't have to work again until 9am on Sunday.
While Goldman Sachs juniors might lament their lack of additional protections, it's worth noting that many of the Goldman juniors who complained about 100 hour weeks three years ago have since left the firm anyway.
The exits include Joey Coslet, the son of private equity titan Jonathan Coslet, who left the bank in August 2022 according to his FINRA registration and who's now an associate at private equity firm Leonard Green and Partners in Los Angeles.
Coslet was said to have been instrumental in assembling the working conditions survey presentation in which Goldman's then-technology media and telecoms (TMT) analysts complained about their exhaustion. He's not the only ex-Goldman junior at Leonard Green: the firm also employs Chelsea Liu and Garrett Smith, who joined from Goldman's healthcare group in 2023.
At least five TMT analysts from Coslet's class have also departed. Magda Fitsum, a TMT analyst at Goldman in San Francisco between 2020 and 2022, is now at venture capital firm Alpaca VC. Andrew Howard, an analyst in the same team, went to Coatue last year. Henry Hwaun, is now at software company Notion. Sarah Chen is at Sapphire Ventures. Avery Morgan is at Corbets Capital.
The exits are a reminder that intolerable working hours in banking don't last forever. They're not unusual. Banking is increasingly seen as a job to be done for a few years before moving on again; in some cases, fewer than 20% of juniors stay for the long term. The art, then, becomes enduring the unendurable while it lasts. For this reason, limits on working hours are welcome, but even at JPMorgan there are get-outs: bankers working on live deals won't be covered by the new 80-hour restriction; that's a pretty gaping hole.
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