Wall Street Work Habits Show Generation Gap

“If you love what you do, it’s not ‘work,” David M. Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chief executive of the private equity giant Carlyle Group, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday.

It is a refrain he’s repeated many times over the years, although it may never have been more appropriate than it is now, as Wall Street firms make a show of re-evaluating the grueling hours long suffered by their junior employees.

But the remarks also hint at two Wall Streets: An older group well-accustomed to the long hours it takes to get to the top, and a younger crowd that increasingly wants meaningful work and the flexibility afforded by technology. One senior executive went so far as to refer to it as an “entitlement” among the new class of recruits.

“There’s a huge gap across the generations in terms of how people look at the whole question of time and commitment and what that means,” said Stewart D. Friedman, director of the Wharton work-life integration project and the author of “Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family.”

But young people don’t necessarily expect to work less than the generations before them, a Wharton study shows. Students graduating in 1992 expected to work 58 hours a week, compared with 72 hours in 2012, according to the survey of undergraduates at the time. And 78 percent of the older generation expected to have children, compared with only 42 percent in 2012.

At the same time, young people don’t expect to move as high up the corporate ladder.

“The expected rise in terms of how far you’re going to advance in a company’s hierarchy is lower now than it was 20 years ago,” Mr. Friedman said. “People have lower aspirations, and just not in work but in their family lives.”

It’s no secret that junior bank analysts and traders work grueling hours to score the big paychecks that lured them to Wall Street. But those paychecks have gotten a bit smaller since the financial crisis, and young people have increasingly flocked to other industries like technology, private equity and hedge funds.

Now, experts say, young people are putting less emphasis on making money and more on finding work that is meaningful to them. They understand that late nights and weekends might be required, but they also want the flexibility that technology can afford - the ability to work remotely, for instance, and to connect easily with others.

“Our students are willing to work really hard,” said Regina Resnick, the associate dean of the career management center at Columbia. “It’s not a matter of hard work, it’s a matter of how one works.”

Wall Street’s round-the-clock work habits have also suffered a public relations crisis. The death of a Bank of America intern last year spurred many firms to re-evaluate their policies on working hours. (The intern had reportedly worked day and night before his death, and an inquest later determined he had died of a seizure).

“People are just more disaffected now with that kind of lifestyle and want to have a greater sense of control,” Mr. Friedman said. “Where companies don’t provide that sense of meaning and purpose, their brand as employer is weakened. They’re not going to be able to compete for the best and the brightest.”

Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have urged junior employees to take more weekend time off. On Monday, Credit Suisse sent out an internal note discouraging its low-level employees from working on Saturdays, except for “live deals.”

There’s a question of whether any of these efforts to improve work-life balance will have any effect in practice.

“How much of a bright line will there be between a live deal and just an important pitch? There can be a gray area sometimes between what is live and what isn’t,” one Credit Suisse analyst told DealBook on Monday. “The enforcement mechanism is what people will be really looking at.”

Still others have more radical suggestions: Let junior bankers sleep all day on weekdays, since they end up staying up all night working anyway.

“Really you could cut out that whole 9-to-7 shift and just pitch up at 7 p.m. ready to eat dinner and do a full 8-hour day of work,” wrote Bloomberg’s Matt Levine on Tuesday. “I mean, not really, but sometimes.”

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Resnick and others, however, praise Wall Street’s efforts to rein in some of the more extreme work habits.

“The long-standing tradition of 100-hour work weeks, that’s not going to be easy to change, but I applaud these efforts,” Mr. Friedman said. “The young people, after two years in an analyst program at a bank on Wall Street, they’re burnt out, they’re saying ‘I don’t want to live like this.’”