[001sky]

Its not about productivity. the people doing the work are junior and replaced every 3-5 years. they are disposable, in that sense. Since the repsonsibility gets quite steep quite quickly, its more efficient to haze the junior staff, to push them to the breaking point and see how they do, before promoting them. Many people enter banking who are not suitable to it, because of greed or social pressure. It would be a lot worse if those people were not weeded out. it might sometimes seem impossible that banks could be more poorly run, but there are many who would be far worse to put in these positions.

[notahacker]

Except that "hazing" arguably selects for those driven by [extreme] greed and social pressure, since anyone smart enough to get into a junior banking position has plenty of more palatable alternatives if they rate "quality of life" higher than "net worth age 30". In theory, if not in practice, ability to rationally appraise alternatives ought to be more important to people making billion pound decisions than energy and sheer bloodymindedness. The only way "hazing" works as a selection effect is if junior analysts' actual work tasks are generally so easy that it won't mentally tax even the below-average ones without sleep deprivation. It's harder to fake competence when you're tired. It's also harder to fake competence if standards are set higher...

The more general excuse for overworking bankers is to limit the number of people accountable for a particular project, meaning no sharing of workload even when it would be efficient to do so.