First, I'll quibble with the definition of all-nighter: "I ended up doing an all-nighter in my first week as an intern, which is when you start work at nine, you stay until five or six the next morning, you go home, have a quick shower and then head back into the office and continue working."
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC), that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Third, he's leaving out the part where a deal dies and you find yourself with nothing to do for days. You may not experience that as an intern, but once you're actually working the 100-hour weeks will be interspersed with very dead weeks.
* Three hours of sleep - if that - is far, far too little for any normal human being to function normally. Also yes, working until 6 AM is an all-nighter, it's dawn then.
> Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Never. I don't get why people do it either, it's not like it makes you a better student. If anything, having to pull all-nighters for college can, in my limited and breezing-through-school opinion, mean only a few things:
* You only started to work on an assignment / study for an exam at the very last moment.
* The US school system is terribly broken and puts a disproportionately and unhealthily high workload on its students, turning it into a Chinese sweatshop instead of a nurturing educational facility.
In software methodology, there's an expression called 'Sustainable Pace' [0]. When building software, it's pointless to go and do 'crunch time', since, one by one, your people will start underperforming or even outright crashing, leaving the remainder under duress to compensate. Doesn't work.
I don't know what these 'deals' are, but I can't see how they'd require anyone to work 21-hour workdays for any duration of time.
Personally, I work a 9-5 job as a software developer / consultant, and I close the door behind me at 5. I resist my colleague's excitement over DOING ALL THE THINGS!11one, simply because I know I can't deal with it. I've seen enough colleagues (and my superiors, lol) work too much and unable to let go of their job and becoming unfit for work. So yeah, I like to dramatise this a bit, and not allow myself to fall into the same traps. It's not like I'd gain anything from it, anyway.
College students who pull all-nighters do so two reasons:
1. They tend to be terrible at time management and prioritization. They procrastinate until the last minute and then have no choice but to cram.
2. They do it to create a narrative that can protect both their ego and their image. "I failed the exam despite pulling an all-nighter - it was just crazy hard!" sounds a lot better than "I failed the exam because I'm dumb" or "I failed the exam because I didn't start studying until the last minute."
I'd like to disagree - at least for my university, which to be fair is notorious for being brutal in terms of workload. It's not unusual for me and many of my friends to have so much work for classes and extracurriculars over the course of a week or month that there literally isn't enough time to do all of it and also eat and sleep in the 168 hrs/week that you have.
Allowing that there may be exceptions such as your own case (assuming you are properly assessing your situation), would you still agree that the generalization holds for the vast majority of cases?
Not at my university, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was somewhat true generally. I think a valid comparison might be between a hard sciences student at a top school who's also involved in a lot of extracurriculars and up at all hours just to stay on top of everything, and someone working on an early stage company where there's always something burning. The opposite end of that would be the investment banking intern spending 100+ hours a week at the office spinning their wheels or college student who does nothing all week and then stays up to make themselves feel better about failing the exam. That's sleep deprivation for the sake of appearances.
There's that, yes, but I think there's a point to be made for workload. I remember back in college all the courses would inevitably pile the workload on at the same time.
Around the same 2 weeks during a semester the profs will load up on all the projects, labs, and other must-dos, across all your courses. Taken separately these workload increases are modest, but as a whole you literally start running out of time.
My coping mechanism back then was to strategically not do some of these things, but then again my only intention going to school was to get a piece of paper that would unlock the Magical HR Gates at companies. My GPA isn't exactly great.
>>Around the same 2 weeks during a semester the profs will load up on all the projects, labs, and other must-dos, across all your courses. Taken separately these workload increases are modest, but as a whole you literally start running out of time.
At least for me, this became an issue only if I didn't do the homework assignments and study the class notes. What would happen is that we would get a large project, and I would realize that I didn't even have a firm grasp of the material. So I'd have to work two or three times as much, first to understand the prerequisite subjects, and then start working on the project itself.
After I figured this out and started to study regularly, projects started to become progressively easier, and as a result took less time. Even when professors loaded up on all of them within a short period of time, I could knock them out quickly because I was already very familiar with the subject.
It's like picking up a new programming language. There's the learning curve of the language itself, and then there's the learning curve of all the tools. But if you are already familiar with the tools themselves, you can learn the language much faster and get projects done much more quickly.
Yes, I see having to pull an all-nighter as a big failure on my part. I did once or twice, but I noticed it's just counter productive. I was adding negative value at 2-6am, it would have been better to sleep and continue the next morning, or just let it go.
I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep. I spent quite a while sleeping exactly 6 hours per night, and then spent about 11 weeks alternating between 3 and 4.5 hours of sleep on weeknights and about 7.5 hours of sleep on weekends. This almost certainly wouldn't be a healthy thing to do for years on end, but for the 11 week period that I did this I felt pretty good (maybe 90-95% mental capacity) and was able to get a ton of stuff done with my ~20 hour days.
Again related to your post, this sparse sleep schedule was caused by college. I go to Caltech (for those who haven't heard of it, its probably pretty similar to MIT in terms of workload/intensity) and have a fairly typical sleep schedule among my peers. I'm pretty sure that every term (10 weeks) that I've been here I've had at least one 40+ hour period with 0 sleep, and had a term where I would sleep from about 7AM to 10AM every weekday (and then at least 10 hours/day on weekends). These longs hours are mostly caused by problem sets + studying, and things get a bit worse when you're actually too busy working to have time to go to class (which is a common occurrence).
As for why students do it, its to get everything done. Typical courseload is 5 courses/term, and starting in the middle of sophomore year most people are taking courses that would be intro graduate level courses at most institutions. 4 advanced math + 1 social studies/humanities course definitely keep you busy.
Also, among my group of peers, we typically define an "all-nighter" to be where you just complete the planned activities for the following day without any sleep at all. This generally involves staying awake from one morning (10AM) to dinner time on the next day (~5PM), making an all-nighter be ~30 hours. If an all-nighter were defined more leniently, we'd have a depressingly large number of all-nighters.
Note: Most of the above applies to my more difficult terms. I've also had terms where I slept 7+ hrs/night and maybe only worked until the sun rose about 2 or 3 times.
> I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep.
Your opinion has been proven wrong by every single scientific study on sleep. Humans do not effectively adapt to less sleep. Error rates go way up, productivity goes down disproportionally, focus goes down, etc.
Here is my problem with people like you pulling out their study reference lists against every anecdote: results drawn about people in aggregate do not necessarily mean much for this specific person in this specific situation.
"I am not the exception" is a good principle to live by, but it is also important to note that sometimes you are the exception, you are in exceptional circumstances, or you can become the exception (through exceptionally hard work for example, or exceptional stupidity. Being the exception is not always a good thing).
My experience is similar to lightcatcher's. When I was younger, before I was married and had kids, it was common for me to sleep 0-3 hours for a few days while I was working on something and then crash for a few days, sleeping 10-14hrs. Basically I slept when I felt tired, stayed up if I still felt alert. At the time I did not feel less productive and I did not feel like I was putting out lower quality work. Looking back objectively those were the most productive times of my life to date, and the quality of the work was on-par or better with anything else I have done. Temporary sleep deprivation under specific conditions was highly effective by all the objective measures I can think of.
Okay, but driverdan was saying "people can adapt to less sleep" not "I have adapted to less sleep." As if it's reasonable to expect that from people in general when, empirically, it's not.
Although I could have expressed myself better, you still quoted me out of context. I was particularly talking about people dealing with less sleep on a relatively small timescale (less than 3 months). I'm choosing the 3 month window because it replicates the length of a college term and greatly reduces the risk of burnout (which I don't think is as big of an issue in college as in industry, because typical college schedules give at least a few weeks off after each term).
Are there any studies that compare how much people can done in a few months on different sleep schedules? I'm imagining some sort of cognitive task (like reading books and passing a comprehension test, or working through all the proofs in a math book) where the goal of the participants in the experiment is to accomplish said task as many times as possible in a fixed time period. This would be very difficult to design because one needs to decide on cognitive difficulty for the task (if the task was very easy, then less sleep = more time would almost certainly help) and have roughly equivalent ability between the 2 groups. This study wouldn't capture dealing with context switches or retention of information; just how much can be done in a fixed time period.
As far as I know, such a study doesn't exist. Anecdotally, I've seen many people make the decision to trade sleep for more time even while working on cognitively difficult tasks. Personally, I feel like I accomplished more during my terms in school than I could have sleeping 7+ hours/night.
On the other hand, I acknowledge long term sleep deprivation is not good for long term health, and I've personally seen my ability to run with intensity suffer during periods of low sleep.
In summary, I don't doubt the long term effects of low sleep on health, I slightly doubt the negative long term effects of sleep on productivity (know people who have been doing uberman for years and swear by it), and I heavily doubt that people can't be more productive over <3 month window by sleeping less than the recommended 8 hours per day.
Those studies have been performed several times [1][2][3][4]; most of them indicate that moderate sleep deprivation (<6 hours) produces the same amount of cognitive impairment as being legally drunk. Many of them also show that people are unaware that their cognitive function is impaired when sleep-deprived: they may feel like they're productive, but their actual performance is riddled with errors that then need to be corrected.
> I'm of the opinion that people can adapt to less sleep.
Fortunately, we have facts about this, so we don't need opinions. Its not true, although it can appear true over short periods of time. More importantly, the amount of sleep a person needs can vary a lot between individuals - you might only need 6 hours/night, but that doesn't make it physically possible for everyone to survive like that.
Looking at the just the productivity aspect of sleeping less, I have yet to see a study that accounts for the extra waking time that people have when they sleep less.
How much you get done = rate of work * time working.
Many studies have shown that the rate at which people can "work" (which means something like respond to visual stimulus) decreases when people sleep less. I haven't seen a study that compares this decrease in rate to the increase in time available for work.
If I have to do a task 1000 times each day and each time takes me 2 seconds longer on 5 hours of sleep than it does on 8, it'll take me 2000s ~= 34 extra minutes to do the task 1000x when I'm on less sleep, but then I still have 2.5 hours left out of the 3 that I decided not to sleep. (Numbers from this inspired by [1])
I acknowledge the health issues of chronic sleep deprivation.
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
It may not have killed you, but somewhere along the way, something you did, or something that happened to you cruelly robbed you of your critical thinking skills. The non-sequitur in the above sentence is so obvious, it's almost shocking that you don't see it.
Also:
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC),
20 minutes? If you live across the street. Or in the same building, maybe.
that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
When he said that all you have time to do is take a shower before heading back to the office, he meant just that.
You aren't just "quibbling" with his definitions here; you're playing semantic head games.
"If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC), that's like 3 whole hours of sleep."
First, as stated, these are interns, which wouldn't have the money to live in NYC. Second, three hours of sleep may help but in the long run it is just as unhealthy. This is shown by the answer to myth #3 on WebMD's "7 Myths About Sleep" (http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/7-myths-about-...).
"Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die."
How many times did take prescription pills to stay awake? Mix that in with lack of sleep and lack of exercise (after all, how are you going to exercise if you are working all of the time) and you have a potential recipe for disaster. Plus, there are the possibilities of health conditions that the individual may not know about or may not want to disclose in this particularly fast-paced and competitive environment.
I've had several friends intern as investment bankers and management consultants in the past couple years. The going rate in NYC is about $60k-80k prorated, I believe -- more than enough for a room in Manhattan (which is where they all lived). Even if that weren't the case, most in that career track come from relatively well-off families anyway.
I still agree it's an insanely unhealthy and stressful lifestyle, which is why I never even considered it, but these interns are certainly able to make it home rather quickly from the office. And judging from Facebook statuses and casual conversation, they often take pride in all the hours they put in. This is a very ambitious crowd.
More than enough for where in Manhattan is the real question. $60K a year isn't a great deal of money in NYC. It's very livable - but not if your criteria is "within 20 min of FiDi". You can probably get a decent room on the Upper West Side or Upper East Side, but then you're nowhere close to being within 20 min from work, especially in the middle of the night.
"They're just not aware of how sleepy they are," says Thomas Roth, Ph.D., sleep researcher at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
I don't mean to disparage the Dr, but how does he know that about those specific people? It seems exceedingly presumptuous to say, basically, that he knows these people whom he has probably never met in person better than they know themselves.
"Wakefulness for 18 hours makes you perform almost as though you're legally drunk," says Walsleben.
This is stated like it is a law of nature, true for all people in all circumstances. Is it though? If I well rested beforehand I know I can go at least 18 hours and still function nominally. "Well, your perception and evaluation of your own performance degrades as well. You just think you are performing nominally." I concede the possibility, but when I look back later (well-rested again) at my work I can only conclude that if the above statement is true then I must be a very high-functioning drunk. Driving particularly is hard to measure outside of a controlled environment--it is easy to over-estimate yourself unless something goes very wrong--but I would be very interested in doing some sort of before and after. Take me when I am well-rested and establish a baseline driving performance. Then take me when I am 18 hours out (after being well-rested, as stated above) and compare the same performance. I would expect to see a drop in performance, but I highly doubt it would be as exaggerated as this claims. I would not presume that I am indicative of the normal population, but I think I would stand as a counter-example to the absolute veracity of that statement.
I am not arguing against moderation in our sleeping patterns, and I am not contesting the results of the many studies published. I just find it hard to swallow when we draw these conclusions and state them like they are universal truths about all people in all circumstances when the reality is that people and circumstances vary far more than the studies account for, especially since we don't really understand the causal relation between sleep and performance.
Doctors in their residency have notoriously awful hours, so bad that they had to legislation was crafted merely to cap the hours at a four-week average of 80 hours (meaning that, yes, they could work 3 one hundred hour weeks and one 20-hour week).
88 hours for neurosurgical residents. And, speaking as someone who is married to one, that hypothetical "20 hour week" never happens.
Also, you are expected to be active researching and publishing and studying for certification; figure another few hours a day outside of the hospital when you're not on call.
Unfortunately the working time directive for doctors in the UK is also averaged over a longer time period. So my wife has just come off an 80+ hour week of night shifts
Back here (Netherlands), GP's (local doctors, they get all the booboos for a certain area) as well as pharmacists would get called out of bed in the middle of the night in case of emergencies. (I was carried off to the doctor at night when I developed pneumonia once, got diagnosed, penicillin from the pharmacy, etc in a matter of an hour or so). I'm guessing that happened frequently, so I'm sure doctors would miss quite some sleep from time to time, especially during flu epidemics and the like.
Nowadays, they have a new system, "Doctor's Watch", where the GP's from a certain area operate at night in rotation. It's a bit more official and less personal, but it does allow those not on rotation to get a proper night's sleep. Pretty sure they'd compensate that by working less hours during the day / week.
Yes, and that's why my doctor friends have given me a bunch of times of week where they won't go to hospital unless they're literally about to die. Any amount of pain/worry/discomfort is, for them, better than seeing a colleague at the end of their shift if they want their problem fixed.
When I started as an intern developing, I could quite easily spend 70-hours a week in the office, plus my whole weekend on my computer at home. Not because I had to, but because I was keen to figure out how everything fit together, why something didn't work and what I was doing wrong mainly.
The banking industry is well known for being able to make a lot of money in, but having to put in long hours. Unfortunately I can't feel sorry for people working in that industry, you have to keep an eye on the long term goals of earning 6-figure salary with bonuses that double that (I know plenty of people doing that who have "put in the time")
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Every single time I have done that, in college or grad school, it has fucked me over far worse than if I had just planned ahead, scheduled my work well, and gotten plenty of sleep like a sensible person.
That's true but also besides the point. As a banker, you can't schedule your work like a sensible person. The client asks a question one afternoon and you work late into the night so you can get him an answer by the morning. It's all about latency, not throughput. The question isn't: is this efficient? It's: will it kill you? And the answer is: almost certainly not.
I did pull a few all-nighters in college, and it was generally the crappiest work I did in my whole college career. I learned the least from it and in general developed a distaste for whatever it was I was doing during the all-nighters
It was also pretty rare. In the vast majority of classes I took, an all-nighter was never necessary so long as you didn't procrastinate. It was just in one or two classes where we'd unexpectedly get assigned huge projects at the end of the semester.
How many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count.
Enough to realize that it's a really stupid idea (for the same reasons everyone else is saying), like a whole lot of other stupid things one does during those years. Like drinking before your midterm, or waking up in bed with someone without being able to remember, for the life of you, how you got there, or why.
If you're a banking intern, it means you're a college kid. If you're in NYC, you can do something like live in NYU student housing for the summer. It's no big deal.
As an analyst, you'll be making over six figures, with a base in the $70-$80k range. You can live 20 minutes from midtown Manhattan on that, though you'll probably have to have roommates (but hey you're 22 so again, no big deal).
You know, if your base is $80k, and you're regularly working 100 hour weeks, your hourly wage rapidly approaches $16 / hour ... which is about what the fast food workers are currently striking for.
I do not think I could be coerced to work 100 hours a week regularly for less than $50/hour of cash and equity, and the lower bound might be closer to $100/hour.
You're not working 100 hour weeks consistently over the year. I'd be surprised if the yearly average is over 75 (in IB; I'd be surprised if it were over 60 in trading). Moreover, you don't take the job for the first-year salary. You take it for the potential of making $500k+ before 30 (if you stick it out), or going the MBA route and getting a cushy $200k 9-6 at some F500 afterward.
What is the success rate like? Do 100% of IB starters make it? 1%? 10%?
If you've got decent odds of hitting the big payoff, that's one thing, but if the expected value is low, it just becomes another lottery, with a few winners, a lot of losers, and a the winners enriching themselves at the expense of the losers.
Putting up with banking hours is all about the pay-off 7-10 years down the road.
If you can put up with the hours until you end up as a director or higher, you can pretty reliably makes over a million dollars per year (with continuous increases in salary) putting only 50-60 hrs a week.
People do banking because it's one of the lowest risk ways to becoming rich.
I worked as a technology intern at a large investment bank for one summer, and my salary was a prorated 80k. The IB kids were making about the same (although they worked many, many more hours than we did). This was 2 years ago.
N.B.: This was awful and I am now safely far, far away from the banking industry.
First, I'll quibble with the definition of all-nighter: "I ended up doing an all-nighter in my first week as an intern, which is when you start work at nine, you stay until five or six the next morning, you go home, have a quick shower and then head back into the office and continue working."
If you leave work at 5 and start at 9, and are sensible and live within 20 minutes of work (which you can on a banker's salary, at least in NYC), that's like 3 whole hours of sleep.
Second, how many times did you pull a few all-nighters in a row during college? I can't even count. I certainly didn't die.
Third, he's leaving out the part where a deal dies and you find yourself with nothing to do for days. You may not experience that as an intern, but once you're actually working the 100-hour weeks will be interspersed with very dead weeks.