Edit: Especially keeping in mind that half the pay probably nets the 40h person much more than half the salary due to tax progrssion
The second reason is that work is siloed. If you and your team takes on an opportunity, for instance creating a buy-side valuation or a sell-side offer, you and your team only will work on it.
It has ties with how teams are split by specialities and know-hows, but also with how your end-of-year bonus is calculated.
Is there any reason this answer cannot wait until 9am the next morning?
I’m fairly certain Goldman Sachs doesn’t have to do any (bottom of the) barrel scraping.
Possibilities:
* Yes, it's sequential. It's hard to partition the task of creating a model of some analysis in a spreadsheet to multiple parties. Amdahl's law affects humans too.
* Context. Transferring context -- implicit knowledge -- from a client to partner to a junior associates is hard. Transferring it to two junior associates is harder. The more skilled or more domain knowledge someone gets, the harder the skill/KT transfer gets.
* Coordination. Partitioning a task to two associates coherently, getting both to equally understand it, execute on it, having them communicate effectively with each other on it, getting results back that are coherent and consistent, is all a burden you don't have if you have one person working longer. Brooks's law basically.
* Competitive culture. Goldman recruits from the most competitive academic institutions and thus gets people who are very bright and work very hard and have spent years competing with others and harnessing those two capabilities when competing with each other or the standard of pleasing someone (professor, client, etc). Even without management pushing, in an environment competing as junior associates, they will continue to use both of those strengths to their utmost in an attempt to dominate (or keep their head above water).
* Deadlines - Tight deadlines make all the above problems worse. The sooner the deadline the harder to partition the problem and the easier to just "work more hours"
Meta-dynamics:
* Firm competitive advantage/moat - If a firm can hire the very brightest people who also work the hardest, they can promise the best results on the tightest deadline. By promising a tight deadline of X quality, they can then offer something their competitors don't/can't. If they sacrifice either of those hiring approaches, they are subject to significant competitive pressures. Thus a firm in Goldman's position is led for competitive reasons to push for shortest deadlines possible which leads to the above effects.
* Normally salaries would limit the amount of abuse people would take but there is extra capital for pay available in the financial sector in part because the monetary focus and measurements and payoffs can be so clear and direct (for management). The higher pay allows associates to more quickly pay off college loans and accumulate capital. Ironically, this in turn is partially used by elite universities to justify charging more tuition which then requires a certain set of poeople in those universities to need to go work in a place like Goldman to more quickly recoup their educational investment ... a vicious cycle/positive-feedback-loop.
I'm sure there are more and better explanations, but that's what I see...
20 hours a week of meetings, OTOH, is brutal amd I don’t miss it. These days I’m much closer to about 5/week average.