Investment Banker · The dealmaker who prices companies and moves capital — a trade running from Medici Florence to today's pitch decks, paid for trust when billions change hands.
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Two things: advise and underwrite. Advisory bankers guide companies, governments and funds through mergers, acquisitions, sales and restructurings; capital-markets bankers raise money for them by underwriting new stocks and bonds and placing them with investors. Investment bankers do not manage individuals' savings or take deposits — the day-to-day work is valuation, negotiation, documents and long client meetings.
No. A commercial banker takes deposits and makes loans; an investment banker advises on deals and underwrites securities. The two were legally separated in the United States by the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 — which split Morgan Stanley out of J.P. Morgan — and although that wall came down in 1999, the jobs, skills and pay structures remain entirely different.
In the United States in 2024, first-year analysts typically earned around $170,000–200,000 in salary plus bonus, and managing directors from roughly $1 million to many multiples of that in strong deal years. London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Tokyo pay less at every level, and bonuses — the majority of senior pay — swing sharply with the deal cycle.
A bachelor's degree, almost always from a university the banks actively recruit at; finance and economics are common but not required — London desks hire historians and classicists. There is no pre-hire license: US bankers sit the FINRA Series 79 exam after joining. The MBA is a separate, later door, used mainly by career-changers entering at associate level.
Junior bankers commonly work 70–95 hours a week during live deals, including weekends; a leaked 2021 internal survey of Goldman Sachs first-year analysts reported averages around 95 hours and five hours of sleep a night. Hours moderate with seniority, and since 2024 several banks, including JPMorgan, have formally capped junior weeks at roughly 80 hours.
The presentation a bank prepares to win a mandate: valuation analysis, market context, potential buyers or targets, and the bank's credentials, often running to a hundred slides. Analysts and associates assemble them, frequently overnight. A famous irony of the trade is that most pitch books lose — banks routinely pitch many times for every mandate they actually win.
Few professions have swung so violently between admiration and contempt. Medieval Christendom consigned moneylenders to Dante's seventh circle of Hell; three centuries later the Medici, grown from bankers into dukes, were commissioning the art of the Renaissance. The same whiplash repeats in every era since — savior in 1907, villain in 1933, "Master of the Universe" in 1987, and public enemy again by 2009.
The trade's internal culture is just as distinctive: an apprenticeship of brutal hours wrapped in rituals — the deal toy, the closing dinner, the bonus number delivered in a two-minute meeting — that convert exhaustion into belonging. Writers keep returning to it because the material is irresistible: enormous stakes, compressed time, and a hierarchy as legible as a royal court's.
How much status the profession carried in each era, on a 0–100 scale.
The Church's usury doctrine made lending at interest a sin; Dante placed usurers in the seventh circle of the Inferno, below murderers of the self. Moneylenders were tolerated as necessary, taxed as convenient, and periodically expelled — indispensable and despised at once.
The great houses converted finance into standing: the Medici produced two popes and married into royalty, and Jakob Fugger, banker to emperors, was plausibly the richest private citizen in European history. Status was real but conditional — a sovereign default or a monarch's displeasure could still destroy a house overnight.
J. Pierpont Morgan rescued the US financial system in 1907 as a private citizen, something no banker before or since has matched. The great houses sat at the peak of social and economic power — and under gathering suspicion, crystallized by the 1912 Pujo "money trust" hearings.
The crash and the Pecora hearings disgraced the profession; Glass–Steagall shrank it. Postwar investment bankers rebuilt a quieter standing — respectable, clubbable, well paid but not spectacularly so, closer to trusted family lawyers than to celebrities. Ambitious graduates of the era more often chose industry or government.
Deregulation and the 1980s takeover boom made bankers cultural icons of wealth — Tom Wolfe's "Masters of the Universe" — and banking the most sought-after graduate job in New York and London. The 2008 crisis converted glamour into public anger, yet application numbers never fell: envied, resented, and oversubscribed.
Matsys's Antwerp panel, now in the Louvre, shows a moneychanger weighing coins while his wife looks up from an illuminated prayer book — the era's whole ambivalence about finance in one image, painted just as Antwerp was becoming northern Europe's money center. It hung in Rubens's personal collection a century later.
Stone, a stockbroker's son, built Gordon Gekko partly from real 1980s raiders; the "greed is good" speech adapts a line Ivan Boesky delivered at Berkeley's business school in 1986, months before his insider-trading guilty plea. Intended as a cautionary tale, the film instead became a recruiting poster — bankers still quote Gekko admiringly.
Lewis's memoir of his years as a Salomon Brothers bond salesman fixed the image of the 1980s trading floor — the "Big Swinging Dick," the trainee blood sport — in the public mind. Lewis meant it as a warning against the industry; a generation of students famously read it as a how-to guide.
Japan's landmark finance drama follows a fund manager buying distressed companies in the post-bubble years, asking whether foreign-style dealmaking rescues or devours them. Its title — "vulture" — entered everyday Japanese vocabulary for buyout investors, and the series shaped how a generation of Japanese viewers understood M&A.
Set across 36 hours at a Lehman-like firm discovering its balance sheet is fatal, Chandor's debut — informed by his own father's decades at Merrill Lynch — is the rare finance film bankers themselves praise for accuracy: the risk meeting at 2 a.m., the seniority rituals, the decision to sell the toxic book before the market wakes up.
Written by two former junior bankers, Industry follows graduates competing for permanent desks at a fictional London bank, rendered with unusual fidelity — the Bloomberg jargon, the RIF day, the all-nighters. It became the definitive portrait of the modern junior experience, watched inside the industry as half drama, half documentary.
When a transaction closes, the working group receives a custom lucite block — the deal's name, size and logos entombed in acrylic. The objects descend from "tombstone" newspaper advertisements announcing completed offerings, and shelves of them function as a banker's visible career ledger. Junior bankers often design them; veterans measure a life's work in the row behind their desk.
On the morning a company goes public, its founders and the deal team stand on the exchange balcony to ring the opening bell — the NYSE has staged the ceremony daily since 1903 — while the bank's name sits on the prospectus below. For the client it marks a transformation; for the bankers it is the rare day the work is performed in public, confetti included.
Once a year, usually in January, each banker is called into a brief meeting and told a single number — the bonus, typically the majority of the year's pay. The figure encodes rank, standing and the year's deal flow at once, and the corridor conversation that follows ("were you happy?") is the industry's most honest performance review. Resignations cluster in the weeks immediately after.
The rituals all serve one purpose: binding people to a trade whose product is invisible. A surgeon can point to a patient and an architect to a building; a banker's monument is a lucite block and a name on a prospectus, which is exactly why the trade manufactures its own tokens of permanence.
And the culture's oldest tension — indispensable yet distrusted — has never resolved, from Dante's usurers to post-2008 protest placards. Every generation of storytellers rediscovers the same figure: the person at the table where enormous decisions are made, whose motives the audience is never quite sure of.
Closest neighbours on the six-score profile — not the same field only.
The medicines expert behind every prescription — from Baghdad's first drug shops and the apothecary's mortar to morphine, artemisinin and the modern dispensary.
AI-resistant 58 📊Finds patterns and builds predictive models from data — a 2008 job title built on three centuries of counting, testing and visualizing evidence.
AI-resistant 38 ✈️The professional flyer who turns weather, machinery and 200 lives into a routine arrival — a craft rebuilt after every crash that taught it something.
AI-resistant 72 🗺️Decides what a company should build next, and why — turning customer needs, business goals and engineering limits into one shared plan nobody else fully owns.
AI-resistant 50 🧾The keeper of the books: heir to a craft so old it invented writing itself, now negotiating with the software built to automate it.
AI-resistant 35 💱The scholar of scarcity — from Adam Smith's pin factory to the central-bank decision room, still asked to predict what no model fully captures.
AI-resistant 62The person who starts the company — spotting the gap, bearing the risk and answering for payroll, from Assyrian caravan financiers to venture-backed founders.
AI-resistant 88 🧾The keeper of the books: heir to a craft so old it invented writing itself, now negotiating with the software built to automate it.
AI-resistant 35 📣The professional who creates demand — from Pompeii's painted walls and P&G's 1931 brand-man memo to the auction-driven feeds of the digital era.
AI-resistant 38 🗺️Decides what a company should build next, and why — turning customer needs, business goals and engineering limits into one shared plan nobody else fully owns.
AI-resistant 50 💱The scholar of scarcity — from Adam Smith's pin factory to the central-bank decision room, still asked to predict what no model fully captures.
AI-resistant 62 🌿Leads the strategy, measurement and reporting that helps organizations reduce environmental and social harm while meeting business obligations.
AI-resistant 66