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  • Industry on BBC, Ep1 promising. I have no idea about the realism of the characters and pressures portrayed, but my brother who does something within banking says it is or was probably quite accurate.

  • Industry on BBC, Ep1 promising. I have no idea about the realism of the characters and pressures portrayed, but my brother who does something within banking says it is or was probably quite accurate.

    On here?

    I reckon the office work/politics/pressure bits are somewhat less ruthless than the reality, at least as it was in big firms pre-2008. I worked a few support roles including on a trading floor, in view of the 'C-suite' (yuk) offices. In real life, there was much more overnight working, more baseball bat brandishing, much longer shouting rages, more involuntary redundancies (and you'd be escorted straight from the HR interview to the street and handed your desk contents in a box), more intimidation and threats, and a few actual sociopaths.

    I was not invited to the sex and drugs bits, so cannot confirm, but drug use was fairly evident in behaviour.

    A specific example that comes to mind as chilling: I moved to a fund manager, where a team colleague told me in my second week (when I'd dragged myself in to an offsite with a streaming cold, and first agenda item was finding who to personally blame for a mistake the previous week) that the previous year he'd had a heart attack, was told by his doctor to take three months off work, actually took three weeks, and came back to find a pile of exactly three weeks work on his desk. Our manager did not assist in any way, during his absence or when he returned.

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