A Merrill Lynch Financial Analyst: What That Means

I saw in this blog post that the America Blog folks were getting kind of snarky and "serves you right" because the financial analysts at Merrill Lynch aren't too happy with the offer of a $25,000 bonus per year (times 7 years) if they will stay with the company when it is taken over by Bank of America.

I used to work for Merrill Lynch at their world headquarters in the World Financial Center as one of their overnight graphic artists. I used to know some of these financial analysts personally. These people started off life as the kids you remember from high school who spent every day from seventh grade onwards working on putting together the best college application that they could.

Then they went to a private college and came out at the very tip-top of their baccalaureate class with their degree in business... and they spent every summer doing prestigious and much-sought-after 12-hour day apprenticeships in Manhattan investment banks. It was mostly crap work, but it led to the right places.

Then, with luck, they made it into one of the ten or twelve MBA programs from which Merrill Lynch is willing to recruit junior level analysts from. There, they graduated in the upper third of their class... else they would have been relegated to one of the several dozen smaller investment banks in New York City.

After that, they came to work at Merrill Lynch. I met these financial analysts every night at 11:30 p.m. as they were dropping off their PowerPoint presentations at the graphics department for overnight edits, before catching a cab home. I also met those same people every morning at 7:00 as they came back to pick up the finished work. They were usually around on Saturdays as well for a few hours... six or seven maybe. They did take Sundays off though. When you did the math, they were making a hell of a lot less per hour than I was. No overtime.

So, four or five years out, these folks finally have their college loans paid off, and the bottom falls out of their company. These people had put in their time and were now ready to launch up to the half-million-dollar-bonus plus quarter-million-dollar-salary region (and only 60-hour work weeks, as a bonus) and now they are suddenly faced with an employer who is willing to toss them 7 years of $25,000 bonuses instead.

I'm not writing this as some kind of complaint that people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time somehow deserve better: Life tends to be like that sometimes, and it happens far more often to the poor and ill-prepared amongst us than the rich and well-equipped. But nevertheless, while there are a lot of people harrumphing at the several — or even many — executives of these companies who are getting away with millions and suffering no real consequences, there are a fair number of people at the bottom who shouldn't receive any share of the animosity that is being directed at those higher up who deserve it.

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UPDATE:

A bit of info in the comments section sort of discombobulates this post: The Americablog article was referring to Merrill's financial advisors, while I was commenting on Merrill's financial analysts. My defense: Drunk.