Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs' ex-Partner's unofficial guide to surviving the grind of banking jobs. Sam Bankman-Fried's "life of delusion" laid bare

efinancialcareers.com:

Junior bankers are tired again. As we reported this week, working hours are back to unsustainable levels at some banks as managing directors who are rightly paranoid about losing their own jobs enter a frenzy of ever more detailed pitching.  

Get Morning Coffee  ☕  in your inbox. Sign up here.

For all those struggling to cope, some will get a buzz off the nervous tics and alopecia that one former associate says result from working in extremis. One of those people appears to have been Stephanie Cohen, the Goldman Sachs partner who resigned this week. 

Cohen ended up working in the cul-de-sac that was Goldman's shrivelling platform division, but she began her career working in M&A in New York in 1999. There, the Financial Times says she«thrived» on the long hours and distinguished herself as a person who would go far.

How do you do this if you're 23-year-old workingwild hours? Cohen doesn't give explicit advice, but there's implicit advice embedded in the FT's portrayal of her. 

Firstly, you need to have a lot of energy in the first place. Cohen «fizzes» with it according to the FT; she may be small, but she's effervescent. Cohen is «intense' and „fills up a room.“

Secondly, you need to be intelligent. The FT says Cohen is „scarily smart.“ This may not be directly relevant when you're building Excel models and formatting pitchbooks, but might give you a sense of the bigger picture. 

Thirdly, it helps to be a wit. Cohen is reportedly „very funny.“ She is also „blunt“, which suggests she was able to quip her way through the analyst years while subsequently delivering information in a way that might have been considered rude were anyone else to attempt the same.

Lastly and most importantly, though, the FT says Cohen had the