What do investment banking interns (and bankers) do which benefits from such long hours? Lots of manual data processing? Reading? I absolutely benefit from uninterrupted stretches of 12-24h working on problems sometimes, but only infrequently -- usually hit diminishing returns between 4-12h. The only times where I've been useful >24h was when the task was more "set up this thing which has lots of waiting on other people or long-running processes", or in some cases where external factors (transportation costs, outage window) meant a single 48-72h sprint was worth more than maximum productivity during that period -- and even then, some level of rest during some stage made a huge difference.<p>An entire summer of 17h days is difficult to imagine as a productive way to work.<p>"It's just hazing" is a reasonable answer, but surely that would create a market opportunity for some alternative entity, or at least would mean the hazing has to be limited in duration.
A thought experiment: you have a job that pays exorbitantly well, and you want to offer it to someone. It isn't particularly difficult, and any reasonably well-informed, self-motivated college graduate can handle it. How do you hire for that job? The demand is likely insanely high.<p>Spoiler alert: you create an insanely complicated funnel to weed through huge quantities of candidates. And if talent isn't the primary determiner of success (remember that the job isn't that hard), how do you distinguish people? Simple, you work them nearly to death and see who comes out alive.<p>I'm not saying that is exactly the situation here, but I think as a mental model it's not that far off.
Just a note that a policy to head home at midnight doesn't end the late, late show. It institutionizes it. Midnight is not a reasonable time to leave work.
So interns are expected to stay out of the office from 12am to 7am on weekdays. That's great... Now they're only expected to be there 17 hours a day! But, during those off hours, does that mean that they can remote in and still work?
Investment banking is a religion or something. Long hours of repetitive supplication and devotion wins the day.<p>But then again I do find that what clothes I'm wearing <i>does</i> affect my code. When I wear a bowtie, for instance, I find I use more curly-braces! (facepalm).
It's behind a pay wall. Not fair to make submissions many people can't read. All content I get on HackerNews should be free to read without an implication of paying to join the discussion.<p>The Irish Times allows current articles to be read publicly but anything that gets archived (a few days old) must be payed for to be read. I prefer and pay for this model - would be nice if WSJ adopted it.
This is a good thing. There may be some work piling up as a result of this but it's not like analysts are lacking for hours in a day to get work done. Since these changes are well-publicized, senior people will have to abide by them and clients will hopefully be more understanding on increased turnaround time.