When I was working in IB, burnout was constant, and I noticed something specific: it never really got solved by desperately hunting for an exit. Most of my coworkers who were burning out ended up coming to me to vent, because I tended to be supportive and I actually enjoyed helping them work through it. What I watched happen to them afterward is not something people usually write down.
The short version
Burnout in IB is close to universal, and once someone is deep in it, the trajectory tends to go downhill fast, work quality slips, sleep slips, the spiral compounds. The uncomfortable structural truth: even a staffer who genuinely cares cannot meaningfully reduce someone's workload once live deals are running, because the deal work doesn't shrink just because a person is struggling.
A few people I knew quit on their own terms. Years later, several told me, privately, that they regretted it and wished they had pushed through a little longer. One specific story stuck with me: a coworker who left to chase a Silicon Valley "right-hand-man" role at a startup, ran out of time on his work visa, went home, and years later concluded over coffee that he had romanticized the dream more than he actually wanted the slow, unglamorous work underneath it. He is doing genuinely well now, just not in the life he originally pictured. That is the honest, complicated version of what leaving IB actually looks like.Why people vented to me
I was never the most senior person on my desks, but coworkers who were burning out gravitated toward me specifically, because I was supportive and genuinely willing to listen rather than just nod along. That put me in a position to watch burnout up close, across a lot of different people, not just experience my own version of it. The pattern I noticed: once someone is genuinely burned out, it doesn't stay flat. It tends to trend downhill, quietly, until something forces a decision.
Why the staffer usually cannot fix it
Here's the uncomfortable structural reality: even a staffer who genuinely knows someone is struggling usually can't meaningfully reduce their workload, because live deal work doesn't shrink to match a person's capacity. The deal needs what it needs. That's not a callous system, it's just the actual mechanics of client-driven deadlines, and it means burnout in this industry is rarely solved by someone above you noticing and fixing it. It usually has to be solved by the person themselves, one way or another.
The quiet regret I heard years later
A few people I worked with did eventually quit, on their own terms, not pushed out. What surprised me, talking to several of them years afterward, is how many privately told me they regretted leaving when they did, and wished they had pushed through a bit longer. This is not something people say in their professional circles or write publicly. It came up specifically because we had built real trust, the kind where people say the honest version instead of the polished one.
The Silicon Valley fantasy, and what actually happened
One specific story has stayed with me. A coworker, not a US citizen, working in IB on a visa, was genuinely struggling with the hours and wanted out, specifically toward a Silicon Valley startup role, not as a founder, but as a right-hand-man type of seat, something like head of GTM or head of strategy. He never landed that role in time, and his visa clock was running out. He left, went back to his home country, and by his own account was fairly depressed for a stretch.
Years later, we caught up over coffee in his home country. He told me directly that he sometimes wished he had pushed through. But talking it through further, we landed somewhere more honest and more useful: what he had actually been chasing wasn't really the startup job itself, it was the fantasy of building a billion-dollar tech company and the equity outcome attached to that story. There's nothing wrong with that dream. But the reality most people don't say out loud is that most equity compensation at that stage never actually turns into real money, most of these companies don't hit that outcome, and the day-to-day of the path there is slow, unglamorous work, not the version of the story that gets told after the fact.
By the time we finished that conversation, he had a different read on it. He's now doing genuinely well, running pet stores and health-related businesses in his home country, work I won't detail further to protect his identity. He seemed happy with himself, with some real but manageable regret sitting underneath it. And we both landed in the same place: leaving IB, whether from burnout or toward a fantasized dream career or a higher-comp job, doesn't come with a guaranteed outcome either way. Life is life. You make the best call you can and wait to see how it actually unfolds.
The mental health resources nobody uses
Banks and firms genuinely do offer mental health benefits. I don't personally know anyone who actually used the formal ones. What I did see, on the teams where real trust existed, was people confiding directly in each other instead, the same way that coworker confided in me. The formal resources exist. The stigma around actually using them is real too, and I think that gap is worth naming honestly rather than pretending the benefits alone solve the problem.
What this actually means for you
If you're burned out right now, the honest picture is this: the myth that IB pays you well and the job itself is easy is just wrong, the pay is real but the hours and the mental load are genuinely hard to carry, especially while also trying to think clearly about the rest of your life at a young age. Quitting doesn't automatically fix that, and neither does staying. What I'd actually ask yourself, based on what I watched happen to people who left: are you trying to escape the hours, or are you chasing a specific fantasy outcome you haven't actually pressure-tested. Those are different problems with different answers, and conflating them is exactly what happened to the person in this story before he figured it out, years later, over a cup of coffee on the other side of the world.
This account is drawn from real conversations with real former coworkers during and after my time in investment banking. Identifying details have been intentionally removed or generalized to protect their privacy; nothing here is a composite or invented example.
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