My Wall Street was an endless-seeming succession of late nights, ruled by the demands of clients and bosses. An investment banking crisis, in my world, was when a surly senior banker would finally deign to look at a client presentation the night before it was due. The ensuing tirade would require me and my team to pull all-nighters to make the changes she or he demanded.

Mine, too, was the glamour of a red-eye flight to a European capital to meet with the executives of a large corporation. There was no time for sleep because of the inevitable fiddling with the presentation. I remember biting the inside of my lip to stay awake in those late-afternoon meetings.

I lived in a constant fugue state, rushing from one meeting to the next, constantly hoping a chief executive would pursue the deal I was advocating. Getting hired for a new assignment, with its potential for a multimillion-dollar fee for the firm, was a rare moment of drug-free euphoria — to be followed by the long downer of sleepless nights as I toiled to make the deal happen.

I used to say of investment banking that it was good one day a year: the day you got your bonus. The kicker: that bonus was nothing more than the present value of an inevitable pink slip. Being well paid but expendable was a fact of life.