Overall a good place to work for a junior employee; nice culture and decent work-life balance - Associate Thomas Weisel Partners Employee Review

I worked at TWP straight out of college. While many banks and consulting firms describe themselves as having a collegiate atmosphere, TWP actually lives up to the promise. I would routinely find myself tossing around the pig skin with my coworkers at 11pm while waiting for the days work to go out. There is very little feelings of competition with your coworkers and aside fromn everyone bitching about how pay isnt that competitive, everyone is pretty happy. For example, even though i am two years out, I I had dinner with two of my coworkers just a few days ago.

This may seem like an obvious observation but trust me, it’ll hit you after your first week of working at home. Consider this: your buddies wake up in the morning, get dressed, take a drive, get to the office, have some lunch, get back on the road, and then return home. Meanwhile, you’ve been there the whole time. This may seem like a sweet deal at first, but you may find yourself growing a bit tired of the environment - you are, after all, there 24/7. No matter how great of a work environment you’ve set up for yourself, a static environment can sometimes suck the life out of you. This pain point hits home the hardest at the end of the day when you’re simply dying to get out. The problem is, your buddies are all relieved to finally be back home and don’t have the energy to head out to the bar with you. Suddenly a drive out to the gas station is a major treat.

The junior people are all very friendly and nice. The firm, or my group anyway, tends to be pretty forgiving about letting you get out when you need to. I haven't had a problem with that. Access to senior people is definitely there if you want it, also. As junior banker, I've spoken with one of the Co-Heads of Investment Banking personally, and he was very open with me. People here tend to be pretty laid back in general.

The pay is definitely not on par with the street. Since it's a small bank, you can end up doing a lot of Biz-Dev work, and co-managed deals, and you never see something that makes its way onto the frontpage of the Wall Street Journal like you would if you were at buldge (potentially). There can be a very hierarchical attitude, here, as well--to the point of creating frustration and inefficiency. You can get a lot of assisine requests from senior people who think it's your job to do something, when the process of telling you to do it wastes more time than if they had just done it themselves (example: sending out a meeting invite). This is definitely true at larger banks as well, but you would hope to escape that BS here.