Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits

"One of the things I really liked about this book is the people it was focusing on: the sort of generic achievers. He makes clear that that’s what the system is designed to capture, the main thing they’re looking for is people who have not lost at anything, who are good at winning. That means they are top of their class at Ivy League schools, they have achieved whatever they have sought to achieve, no matter how long the odds. But they don’t have to have any particular interests or skills. That’s all they’re looking for, that’s the standard. So that yields people who are successful at doing what they’re told, but not necessarily very good at thinking through what they want, or their own attitudes or thoughts. “These guys are literally crying over their beers about how miserable they are, how hard they work or how badly they’re treated” Then they’re stuck in these jobs. All that’s asked of them, again, is generic competitive behaviour. And they realise that they’re not happy. Now that they are employees at Goldman Sachs, or wherever, they have won again and once again it has not made them happy. You get scenes where these guys are literally crying over their beers at the bar to this journalist about how miserable they are, how hard they work or how badly they’re treated, about how nothing they do means anything to them… Yes, and I think it’s intentional. I think burnout is a labour management strategy. If you’ve seen that graph of arousal and task performance – if you push people over a certain level, their performance declines. This is very basic labour psychology. But for employers facing a labour market where they’ve got all this human capital – people are very educated and are still cheap – they’re in a position to just people over that top. Once they fall off the cliff and breakdown or burn out, they can go get a new one, and push them off the cliff next. If you’re not invested in the long-term wellbeing of your employees or the long-term retention of your employees, then the dominant strategy is to burn them out. You get more out of them that way. Right, there’s no sense in them investing in individuals if individuals are going to do it themselves. If they can create a competitive atmosphere where people are forced to do that work on their own individual behalf, then firms gain."