Want to watch a bunch of unlikable people do whatever it takes for money and power? Well, you could turn on the evening news or, to mix things up a bit, you could watch Industry, a new HBO/BBC drama that is generating a lot of buzz. The show follows five graduates as they battle it out to secure a full-time job at Pierpoint & Co, a fictional London bank, in the wake of the 2008 crash. It is a heady mixture of cocaine, commodities and cut-throat competition.
In a world where tech workers have largely replaced investment bankers as the malevolent masters of the universe, Industry feels very retro. It certainly transported me back to the past, bringing back nightmarish memories of my life as a graduate trainee at a corporate law firm in the City during the financial crisis. I studied English literature at university and had harboured the usual vague ambitions of working in something artsy and worthy. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any graduate schemes for jobs like that. Panicking about unemployment, I got a training contract at a big law firm. It paid for a law conversion course, gave a grant for living expenses and offered a generous salary. Why wouldn’t you take it?
That is how a depressing number of graduates abandon their dreams: big companies lay out the red carpet for you and suck you in. The guys who wrote Industry based it on their own experience in finance, which, they have said, they ended up in not because they were particularly passionate about it, but because “loads of people were doing it … It was a big, shiny job that made us feel like adults.”
There has been a lot of discussion about how realistic Industry is. While I can’t comment on the cocaine use, what gave me flashbacks to my very short-lived corporate career was the suffocating insularity of it all. It is not just that you work all the time; it is that it is hard to imagine a world beyond your office. There is no time to question what you are doing or why you are doing it – you are just trying to keep up. I remember one trainee who missed her own engagement party because she was working. I really hope she made it to her wedding.
While you obviously had to put in long hours if you wanted to impress people, the other rules for getting ahead were less clearcut. There is a bit in Industry where someone senior rips the pocket off a graduate’s shirt, sneering: “You’re not here to change the lights.” While there wasn’t any public clothes-ripping at my firm, I distinctly remember one posh colleague mocking a less-posh colleague for wearing a pocketed shirt. “Are you the IT person?” he asked. There was, I realised then, a whole set of unwritten rules that some people implicitly knew and the rest of us had to learn.
Coat-rack conventions, for example. It sounds ridiculous, but I am still scarred from the time I hung my coat on a peg that only one of the senior partners was allowed to use. This was not an explicit rule; it was just one of those things that you were expected to know. There were lots of silly things like that, bizarre conventions with no other purpose than ensuring a certain sort of person knew their place.
Leaving law was the best decision I ever made. But being able to take a pay cut and try new things was also an immense privilege. It is even more of a privilege now: the cost of university has tripled since I was a student; the average debt among students who finished their courses in 2019 was £40,000. Jobs in journalism and the arts have been decimated. The kids in Industry may be selling their souls, but at least they are getting paid well for it.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist