A job in finance was once seen as a ticket to early security and a glamorous lifestyle, but that is not the picture that emerges from a new book, Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits, by Kevin Roose, a journalist at New York magazine. The eight entry-level bankers Roose profiles are too busy and tired for the kind of high jinks shown in Liar’s Poker and The Wolf of Wall Street. They’re checking their BlackBerries around the clock, eating three meals a day at the desk and running to the office in the middle of the night to correct typos for tyrannical bosses. The excesses of the 1980s are gone, and they’ve been replaced by Excel spreadsheets and fussy PowerPoint presentations. “Among the young bankers I interviewed,” Roose writes, “I saw disillusionment, depression, and feelings of worthlessness that were deeper and more foundational than simple work frustrations.”
Yet you could replace “bankers” with any number of professions and that sentence would ring just as true. Leaving the safety and structure of college and embarking on a career can trigger an existential crisis in even the most pragmatic and well-adjusted person, and the problems plaguing young financiers – long hours, menial tasks, demanding bosses – will sound familiar to young professionals far outside the world of finance. Junior doctors work 100-hour weeks. Young academics get shunted from university to university as adjuncts. Aspiring journalists get caught in a cycle of short-term internships. Roose thinks he’s written a book about finance but in fact it’s a book about a generation.
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