Except investment banking and consulting both have notoriously long (100+ hr/wk) work weeks leaving very little time for other interests and hobbies. These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.
You have 100+ hr/wk for a few years in your 20s, when you're young and can sort of handle it. But by the time you're having a family you work more normal hours and make absolute FU money (e.g my younger brother makes over 10x/yr what I do at only 31 years old). It's not about the salary and hours when you start at 22, its about the salary and hours when you're 32 and 42.
I compare this to my friends who became physicians or accountants, and I think the IB folks have a waaaay better work-to-pay ratio long-term. I'm on the fence about consulting because the pay ceiling seems lower and I don't personally know enough of them.
Ludicrously false. In the long run, sure. But your youth will be spent in whatever random town the residency match takes you to, and that's after having to go wherever there's a med school that'll take you. The flexibility comes much later and by then you may have settled down accidentally somewhere you randomly got placed.
you go to learn the craft at high status institution (like Mayo Clinic in middle of nowhere Minnesota) and help patients with the most complicated health conditions.
I sincerely hope people dont become doctors just for the money. If you want money - it is much easier to become banker or trader. More money and less time spent in academics
If you come from a lower to lower-middle class family, becoming a doctor might as well be becoming a billionaire. Many doctors don’t find out that other careers earn more money until they are already in or beyond residency.
I was in the process of applying to med school, thinking it was my best chance of joining the upper class in America, when I met an extremely wealthy man thru a friend. He gave me the advice “Doctor career is a trap for the middle class. Do something that scales better, and don’t worry about a guaranteed career path, you’ll figure it out as you go along”. It’s a bit dramatic but I think there was truth in it, and it added to the evidence I need to change my career
Also no one does 100+h/wk. That’s not even physically possible. Even juniors in IB which is notorious for being gruelling are actually not doing much during the day. The main issue is that work really starts when your partner finishes their day of meetings and things have to be ready for the next morning.
Any management consultant (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc) not travelling at least 4 full days and in the office 2 of the other 3 isn’t making enough money to be relevant to this conversation. Again, it is time being sucked away from other aspects of your life, regardless of whether you’re working or not.
That’s ridiculous.
There is a world outside of the top 3 strategy consulting companies where people do make good money. What you just did is akin to limiting IT to Google, Apple and Meta.
Plus even there, assignments don’t always have you travelling for days especially if you work from a capital as your clients are likely to be there too. You don’t work 6 days a week every week and the hours get a lot more reasonable as you climb the ladder.
And I say that while not even thinking it’s a good job. I have been in and out of consulting (yes you can go back) during the past decade and think this stint will be my last. When it’s nice, it can be very nice but when it sucks, it sucks a lot. Also at some point you actually forget if you really do interesting things or just get really good at selling what you do.
But no one cares about them. In comparison with MBB they have no cachet or prestige. If you want to make good money there are many options. If you want to tell your fellow Princeton graduates that you did well on the post graduation job hunt you don’t want to say you got hired by Walmart Labs, you want to say you got hired by Google. Deloitte is the Walmart Labs in this analogy, not Google (MBB).
That’s 21 years old with delusion speech. The MBB are nice because they pay better and have a great alumni network. Still I can assure you that both the customers and employees of the other companies do care very much about what they actually do.
In the real world, no one gives a damn about the MBB. 99% of the population don’t know they exist and the rest of your promotion is too occupied living its own life to care about what you do. The whole prestige thing is just catnip for insecure graduates which is nice for the MBB recruitment pool that being said.
People view of how things work change drastically between their junior years, i.e. nearly students, and grade above manager where you start selling. I'm highly tempted to answer you: you will understand when you have grown up but that would be a touch condescending, wouldn't it?
If you have inside knowledge might you be able to confirm the dumbest thing I’ve heard about McKinsey, that they have an absolute bar on hiring people with subpar academic credentials? The example I heard was a guy who was being recruited as an MD and when they discovered he’d gotten a third class honours they had to rescind the offer.
In 2022, who is working 100+ hr/wk in consulting? Doing what? The 1990s/2000s are over. Now, they are mostly milking big dumb corporations by building unnecessary, overpriced software systems. Probably magic circle junior lawyers are working much more than consultants they days, and making more money.
Also you wrote: <<These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.>> Not true. Many people get lucky and are selected for a two year ibanking programme. They work like crazy for two years, learn a decade's worth of banking knowledge, then move on to a different role or career.