Long hours and little reward: it doesn’t add up

Nurses are often told other professions have their drawbacks too – but at least they offer better pay

Long hours, disrupted sleep and dissatisfaction with work-life balance: a job description more often associated with nursing than with investment banking – until March this year.

That was when the news broke that first-year analysts working at US investment bank Goldman Sachs had threatened to quit unless their working conditions improved.

The ‘high-paid sweat shop’ of banking

They worked an average 95 hours a week, and slept for only five hours a night, they said. They rated their employer and their work life a two out of ten, on a scale where ten was ‘very satisfied’ – a finding