I worked as an analyst in Investment Banking for a while. To me it seemed that the analysts who worked the really long hours worked on projects in teams, where each team member was responsible for a part of a project. No one can start or continue until that part is done, so they just sit and wait.
There were many times when people just wouldn't respect other people's time. At 5PM I would get an email: "Hey, I need this done for tomorrow morning"..."So why didn't you just tell me earlier? I know you knew about it in advance."
Exactly this. I worked in investment banking in NY and SF before moving over to VC/growth equity (and now a hedge fund).
Not only are bankers by definition terrible managers, but there's absolutely zero incentive for them to try to treat the junior people below them well. Junior people's time is viewed as an consumable resource like an oil well or a coal seam.
As a result, the sort of "pizza-sized team" project management that is the heartbeat of software companies is just a total unknown on the corporate finance/M&A side of investment banks. (Less so in consulting.)
Worse, there is no concern for what we used to call "yield loss:" slides or analyses that we'd create because a senior banker demanded them that were never presented to the client or in which they client had no interest. Countless times I've been the creator of and recipient of extensive presentations of which maybe one slide was relevant. I recall numerous instances of sending such books by messenger or FedEx to hotels/partners' houses, only to learn that they were never even picked up, let alone looked at.
As a VC/private equity guy, the presentations and investment memos that were no doubt largely written between 2 and 5 AM were mostly discarded; I extracted the few numbers I needed and tossed them, as I wanted the raw data from management and not the bankers' glossy sales pitch. I had stacks of these things in my office.
I'm not of the opinion that investment banking adds no value. But I firmly believe that the culture and habits of investment banks result in piles of unnecessary work that just burns out everyone associated with the enterprise and is not in any meaningful way related to the quality or value of the service delivered.
Clients don't care how many hours you worked, they care about the end results.
(I make exception here for situations with real economic deadlines like M&A auctions, but the biggest issues are not usually financial--they're business issues that bankers don't actually help much with compared to strategy consultants--I was one of those for a summer too, and the hours were long but reasonable.)
I created reports that needed to be presented every time a public finance analyst went to visit a client. I built tools in R that sped up the analysis process, but putting everything together took a few hours.
The reason why I said the analysts knew they needed the reports before 5 o'clock is because they were the once who set those meetings up weeks in advance (they are institutional clients, it doesn't just happen last minute), they just forgot to share it with our team.
I actually liked working on deals that needed to be analyzed quickly, it was usually something new and I got to be more creative.
There were many times when people just wouldn't respect other people's time. At 5PM I would get an email: "Hey, I need this done for tomorrow morning"..."So why didn't you just tell me earlier? I know you knew about it in advance."