“Do you like your [corporate lending] job?”, people (tentatively) ask.
With feigned weariness, “I like the end result” is the answer.
They laugh with feigned understanding.
I always intended my response to convey some self-awareness and self-deprecation, some poke at class insecurities, some appeal to the same demographic that thinks finance is evil and useless or whatever (these people tend to be not insufferable and actually chill people), but the truth is I meant every word of it. Again, the weariness is feigned.
I do enjoy the ability to solve liquidity problems faced by some of America’s name-brand corporates that do so much for their local economies and customers worldwide. I do like the idea that extending millions of dollars in loan commitments creates efficiencies and spurs economic activity whether through acquisitions, investments, expansion, or refinancing. I do relish the time spent poring over some of the nation’s largest private companies’ balance sheets and projections. I do cherish every minute spent listening to an earnings call, during which I do smirk at Blackstone and Bain Capital analysts who nervously ask CEOs to break down the banal basics of their company, prefaced by “I haven’t had a lot of time to look into this business, so…”
But lately I’ve realized that this enjoyment is not enjoyment of the job itself, but enjoyment of its perks. These perks may be different for everyone. It may be prestige, the desire for which is easily perceived in prospective investment bankers. It may be the top floor view of the city. It may be the people you work with. In my case, it’s the knowledge that you’re giving money to some of the nation’s biggest corporations and interacting with CEOs and talented individuals from the world’s most well-known firms and financial institutions.
But is it enough? Is it enough to justify being in your 60s looking at the same company you looked at when you were 50? Sure, muttering to the conference room that “we looked at this company in LA” and explaining the in-person due diligence you conducted back then is not a worthless consolation, I suppose. But what has the company done in that decade? And what has the bank done? Is it enough to bear with the bureaucracy of investment committees? Of grunt work and regulation reading and hoop-jumping? Of not being around your loved ones for dinner? Of not *gasp* being able to run a mile?
Does it offset the realization, had at an indefinite point in my lending career, that one’s impact on the world was indirect? That you were simply the piggy bank, that you helped these companies, yes, but swept them through for the next one? Transaction fees and interest income’s the bank’s end of the deal. Meanwhile, these companies create goods and services and solutions that impact everyone (for better or for worse).
In the end, I suppose I’m asking you, asking myself, how highly you and I index impact, true impact, in our careers. Some people are happy to just get the bag. Some people have to get the bag to feed their family. In my opinion, I’d rather drop the bag, get out of my bag, lose the load, and erase the sports cars and private schools from my vision of the future… if it meant having a direct impact on the world. And so I’m leaving finance. I see finance as indirect impact — important, nonetheless, but indirect, and corporations as direct impact. I’m going to seek to work at one of these corporations — ideally not in the finance department, but in the department that actually creates the products, provides the services — I’m gonna make something. But what corporation? That’s the fun of it, isn’t it? What kind of direct impact do I want to make? The Fortune 500 is my tasting menu (I mean, YCom’s latest batch would be ideal, but let’s get real — this isn’t Michelin dining, at least not yet) and I’m forming my palate. I’m learning about AI/VR, biotech, and chips.
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I suppose this realization was all started by this comment chain on Wall Street Oasis (the browsing of which is a mostly masochistic exercise, but sometimes there’s some gold in the salt mines). See below:
Green Squiggle, in this case, is a prospective I-banker, at least according to his profile. Green Squiggle was derided by associates and VP’s in I-banking with “talk to me after you’ve hit the desk” and “ok prospie” and other comments of that sort. See the MS (Monkey Shit).
If I had a WSO account, however, I wouldn’t Monkey Shit Green Squiggle. I would SB (Silver Banana) him. Not because he was right, but because he was wrong — and I was wrong like him (to a lesser degree). You see, Green Squiggle cited proximity (I want to work on Wall Street…) to importance/prestige/elitism (…advising corporations) as one of his reasons for working in I-Banking. But even worse, he conflated being proximal to importance/ prestige/elitism as being important/prestigious/elite! I won’t go into the farce of assuming that being an Excel monkey is equivalent to “operat[ing] the lever of power and capital”, as the delusion is obvious.
The truth is, proximity is not enough of a reason to enter a career. Being a human footstool is proximity. Would Green Squiggle be a human footstool? Probably, but most people wouldn’t. And assuming that one is actually pulling the strings of the markets by working in finance is wrong. If the "lever[s] of power and capital” are a series of puppets pulling other puppets, Green Squiggle is being pulled by more puppets than he is pulling. Furthermore, he’s not even a puppet; he’s a sliver of wood mass; a carbon atom, maybe. Depending on the person, this may be enough — hey, at least he’s part of something that is still pulling something — but for me, it’s not. And I thank Green Squiggle for mirroring me, for mirroring the millions like him, for being the Platonic form of my justifications (now revealed to be consolations) of working in corporate lending.
To conclude, when you’re evaluating your career path, you should consider the directness and indirectness of impact as one of your parameters. For me, indirect impact gets old, but direct impact is satisfying. Having an indirect impact is sometimes necessary before having a direct impact, but don’t delude yourself into believing that a) indirect impact is direct impact or b) indirect impact always precedes direct impact or c) indirect impact is something you’re fine with when it’s not. You should also dispel with the proximity myth — the myth that providing services to an industry is a proxy to working in said industry, that financing the problem solver is as meaningful as solving the problems, and that being on the same call with important people makes you an important person. It’s not that you can’t work in the industry, or solve the problems, or be an important person, you can — just not by being proximal to, but actually being.
And so I say goodbye to finance.
Thanks for sending. Thoroughly enjoyed this read and I understand you perfectly. Keep posting—excited to see what’s next!