[basseq]

> "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other people or long-running processes"

It's exactly this in I-banking, from what I understand. A lot of the day is spent tweaking/waiting. Towards the end of the day, you get feedback from clients/managers, and that's when the "real work" starts.

From an external perspective, it's always struck me as horribly inefficient.

[whatok]

A lot of it is ego-driven. Senior people think that because they went through it, all junior people have to go through it too. Companies feel that if they're shelling out huge money in fees that banks should be on-call 24/7. If you're responsible for a deal either from the company or adviser side, , you'd rather have it fixed before anyone notices or at least as quickly as possible. Thus the benefit of junior staff working crazy hours.

[jsprogrammer]

What it really sounds like is that a lot of shit work is being done all over the place. If everyone needs to be on-call 24/7 and most of their time is spent applying fixes to problems that are continually happening, something is probably broken in your organization.

[Keyframe]

Sounds like ad agencies do their work.