The End of the Bonus Culture Is Coming to Wall Street?
No the end of bonus culture is never coming to Wall Street. It sounds nice in theory and makes for a good headline but it never works in real-life, particularly for performance oriented jobs like fundraising, sales, etc.<p>The reason is that when you work in environment that&#x27;s all about getting more funds, selling more products it&#x27;s not a rewarding job like marketing or software development.<p>The only rewarding part is making money, scoring deals and beating your other colleagues, competitors. Other than that, most people hate these jobs. And even to manage sales teams isn&#x27;t easy. High-turnover rates, bunch of high-testosterone jerks ...<p>I&#x27;m talking about finance here. Yes software sales or gym membership sales you can be a nice consultative sales person who&#x27;s simply there to maintain the status quo and benefit from a good product that sells itself.<p>Turn these jobs into regular consultative sales and you&#x27;re going belly up. That&#x27;s because in wall street you don&#x27;t simply have a game-changing product like some Silicon Valley startup - that&#x27;s solving real need.<p>There&#x27;s no difference in what you offer other than how you can win clients on your side. And most of these clients don&#x27;t want to deal with average sales dude ... because they&#x27;re simply not one of them.<p>The top traders at the floor in one of my past jobs didn&#x27;t even sell, they talked about cars, yachting, girls and played golf and poker with clients.<p>And yes, everyone gets bonuses in investment banks, but it&#x27;s really the commissions they earn and dealmakers who drive the performance.