IFC's pay, at senior level, is 1/10th that of private market. Now, you can imagine, what kind of people will be okay with this kind of incentive structure? The people who stay at IFC for a long time, especially those whose only jobs are at IFC, can not transact as real investment professionals. Their ability to negotiate are weak, as they are merely a voice for IFC's internal committees and have not had any experience doing real commercial negotiations in the real world.
The most ridiculous is tha IFC still flies a large number of inexperienced but senior staff across the globe to "evaluate projects". These people incur heavy travel costs and visit different continents a few times a year to "share their expertise" and make decisions. How inept would the local professionals (in and out side of IFC) be for them to not know things better than tourists who drop in a few times a year? This is reflected in the IFC's result - as published by its public annual reports, its return is astonishingly low. The longer one stays at IFC, the longer one starts to skew in that mindset and the less they accumulate any transferable skills in the real world, and this is the reason why many lifetime members become lifers.
