Well, traders more specifically. You see plenty of 50-year old senior investment bankers -- they're the ones with the client relationships who bring in the big deals. It's pretty rare to see a trader over 40.
Corp finance and traders are rival tribes within a bank. The finance people think the traders are vulgar and the traders think the finance people are effete. Lumping them all together as bankers is like lumping developers, sysadmins, qa together as "computer people".
Unfortunately most people fail to realize that. In the last few months, bashing bankers has become a socially acceptable norm... and I don't know whether that anger is directed at investment bankers themselves (you know, the ones who do corporate finance) or at anyone who happens to work at an investment bank.
On the cultural aspects of traders, Tom Wolfe wrote a rather biased (not to mention obnoxious) article on that a couple of years ago:
"The traders are on the front lines moment by moment, pulling the trigger with only seconds to think about it. They are our kind! They are aggressive real men! Their plain vanilla C.E.O.’s know it too. They will pay a daring, battle-hardened trader $50 million and up per year to keep him from defecting to our pirate fleet. They pay them more than they pay themselves, because they are worth more, because they are real men, because they are willing to fight. What idiot thought up "boards of directors" anyway? My board of directors consists of me, myself, and I. My investors don’t have to love me. I don’t have to charm them. I have to do one thing and one thing only, make them money."
My anecdotal impression is that one of two things happens. Either they build up enough that they'd rather retire than continue building it, or they run into an up-or-out policy at the company.
