Now you have some project that demands actual work - eg big borrowing or acquisition, hitting a margin target that will require firing a bunch of people without breaking the business, crazy accounting/tax/hedging shit to make the numbers when all else fails. These projects have actual deadlines and require someone to ingest a ton of data and produce work product that satisfies leadership and gets the deal done in a way where no one can easily be blamed for missing something or doing a shitty deal. The solution we’ve arrived at is to pay senior finance bros insane amounts of money to haze junior finance bros into loading up on addy and staying up all night pumping out decks and models in the hopes of being promoted and continuing the cycle.

If you work in deals you will see over and over again that the top finance bros can go from knowing nothing about a company to running circles around the people who work for the company in terms of knowledge, strategy and problem-solving. This requires a lot of hours. We could have a different system but the one we have creates a lot of 9-5 jobs that can be done by dumb/lazy people and a smaller pool of insane jobs for intelligent motivated psychos who chase more deals, more money.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5781832&forum_id=2#49317632)