Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs M&A associate says she quit after seeing a sad MD eating a burger alone. French bankers are getting worried

efinancialcareers.com:

There are many catalysts for leaving a banking career, most of which involve working hours and bonuses that don't compensate for the toil. But there is also the revelation that even if you stick with the grind and climb the pole, your life may not be the best.

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Gina Farran says she had this epiphany as asenior associate at Goldman Sachs in London. It was 2019, the year before the pandemic, and Farran who studied at HEC in Paris and began her career as an intern at Rothschild in 2014, was still in the office at midnight. She tells the Times that she «glanced over» to see a managing director (MD) in his office.  There, he was eating, “this depressing-looking burger, from the canteen downstairs, on his own," recalls Farran. «His family didn’t even live in the UK, and I just looked at him and was like, ‘This is so uninspiring. If this is what it looks like 15 years into the journey, then it’s just not worth it.’”

Such revelations are not unusual.  Former Morgan Stanley analystFlorian Koelliker discovered that junior bankers were discouraged by the sight of senior bankers when he wrote a dissertation on the industry in 2021. Senior bankers aren't always good role models, said Koelliker's junior interviewees: too many had neglected their private lives due to their „massive workload.“ Similarly, Nickyl Raithatha, a former Goldman Sachs vice president in the principal strategies division, said he left after attending a leaving party for a partner where the partner revealed that he'd worked 26 years at the firm and never had more than two weeks' consecutive holiday. “By every external metric, he is one of the most successful people I still know. But it really hit me — that’s not