Minimum Effort
Minimum Effort: Office Sim
Investment Banking Simulator for iPhone
The hardest of the five careers in Minimum Effort, and the one that pays the most. Analyst to Managing Director, 98,000 to 480,000, six boss patrols in a single day, and an associate who is still at his desk at 23:40 and can see whether your light is on.
Free download. Banking comes with the Career Pack, a single purchase.
Why it is the hard one
The most money, watched twice as often
The other four careers give you room somewhere. Corporate gives you a slow floor. Consulting gives you the fewest patrols in the game. The startup gives you chaos to hide inside. Banking gives you nothing except the salary.
| Corporate | Investment banking | |
|---|---|---|
| Difficulty | Easy | Extreme |
| Boss patrols per day | 4 | 6 |
| First rung salary | 52,000 | 98,000 |
| Top rung salary | 148,000 | 480,000 |
| Daily quota, first rung | 80 | 110 |
| Daily quota, top rung | 180 | 275 |
| Cost per missing unit | 0.28 | 0.45 |
| Gossip speed | 0.50 | 0.45 |
Read the last row twice. Banking has the quietest floor in the game, quieter than the corporate office, because nobody there has the spare attention to repeat anything. That is the one mercy in the career, and it is not much of one: it means you will not be undone by a rumour, you will be undone by the man who watches you six times a day.
The ladder
Five rungs, and the money grows faster than the quota
| Rung | Salary | Daily quota | Days before a move | Reputation needed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analyst | 98,000 | 110 | 3 | 62 |
| Associate | 145,000 | 145 | 4 | 68 |
| Vice President | 215,000 | 185 | 5 | 74 |
| Director | 320,000 | 225 | 6 | 80 |
| Managing Director | 480,000 | 275 | 8 | 100 |
Managing Director pays 4.9 times what Analyst pays and asks for 2.5 times the daily output. That is the best money to work ratio of any ladder in the game, which is the entire reason anybody puts up with the other numbers on this page.
The desk
Forty five minutes of formatting is the best theatre in the game
Turning the pitchbook, pulling the comparables, running the sanity checks, finishing the model. Those are the four things on this desk that actually deliver. Then there is the formatting: three quarters of an hour, almost no real output, and more perceived work than any other act in the game. It is the highest paying piece of theatre on any floor, and it is not a joke the game invented.
| Act | Minutes | Real work | Perceived work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Actually build the model | 60 | 27 | 11 |
| Write the pitch pages | 50 | 21 | 13 |
| Pull the comparables | 35 | 14 | 7 |
| Run the sanity checks | 25 | 9 | 4 |
| Spend forty five minutes on formatting | 45 | 3 | 17 |
| Sit on the deal team call | 40 | 2 | 14 |
| Look busy on the Bloomberg | 20 | 1 | 10 |
Two careers are in the free download. This one is the deep end.
Four questions this career asks
Every one of them is a trap and you have to pick
-
The staffer is asking about capacity
Whatever you say now decides your next three weekends. Take the staffing, or say you are absolutely slammed at the moment.
-
The MD wants the pitchbook turned
Fifty minutes. The comments are all about alignment and none about the numbers. Spend the whole fifty on alignment, or fix the numbers underneath instead.
-
It is 23:40 and the associate is still here
He can see whether your light is on, and so can everybody else. Stay another forty five minutes, or schedule three emails to send at 02:10 and go home.
-
The model has stopped balancing
The balance sheet is out by 1.4 million and the print is in fifty five minutes. Find the actual error, or hard-code the difference into a cell.
Those four sit on top of the ten events that can happen in any office in the game. The cast is five people: an accomplice, an overachiever with an ambition of 1.0 and a laziness of 0.0, a rival, a snitch whose loyalty is 0.05, and a client who never sees your desk and only ever asks the one question you were supposed to know the answer to.
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