But...finance? I can't imagine even Black–Scholes required that kind of crazy dedication.
I think if we were to make an analogy of "information as alcohol", a programmer's mind is like an installation that only works well with very "distilled" information (say "vodka" and "whisky" :) ) and may work ok with "wine", but it completely sluggs down if you give it "beer" (completely undistilled information). In some domains (medicine is one that I know of), information is so undistilled, diluted and corrupted that it's basically the analogue of "beer with piss in it and rats swimming in the kegs" ("the rats" are my analogue for the "mud minded" people that "just don't get it and never will" and prevent smart geeks from actually doing their jobs)... that's why I wouldn't touch it with a 100 foot pol and I imagine lots of people feels the same about these areas. I imagine this part of finance is a similar "beer pool".
He was not a banker himself, and was known to play Super Mario Bros. in his office and spend his evenings at comedy clubs. And he had a bigger impact on finance than arguably any banker since JPMorgan, without working their hours.
Perry Mehrling wrote a great biography of Black which I can't recommend enough.
http://www.amazon.com/Fischer-Black-Revolutionary-Idea-Finan...
The reason such a strange system exists is the top positions are so lucrative but it's hard to screen for the right abilities so they base it on brute work ethic.
I'm not defending, just explaining.
What many people in finance haven't realized is most of the industry is an IT problem. Much of the work I see involves ingesting data, analysing it, and reporting on it. Most everything else is sales.
Most of the people doing this work come from a finance background and only have a rudimentary understanding of IT or programming. Many know Excel and PowerPoint pretty well, and those tools are pushed to extremes.
The work I see being done by junior analysts is often manual IT work. You wouldn't believe what goes on behind the scenes assembling the statements and reports that are sent to clients. It can be surprisingly difficult to sell software in this environment, because many stakeholders would rather get another junior analyst than solve the problem with software. There are some enlightened firms when it comes to technology, but I would say that is the exception.
Ultimately what I think is going to happen is that companies that are built from the ground up around a technology infrastructure will become more efficient and win business from traditional companies. It will take a long time to displace the bigger players, but it will happen. WealthFront is a good example of a financial company that is built around technology. Eventually these types of firms will win out in the market.
Update: Here is an example of the type of work I see analysts doing:
Manually copy data from 5 different systems into a spreadsheet at the end of the month. The data always has flaws, so go back and validate the data and resolve the issues. When the data is clean, do some processing on the data in the spreadsheet and create some graphs.
Then cut and paste output from the Excel spreadsheet into 150 client PowerPoint presentations, and combine that with commentary saved in an Word document from another department that is stored on a network drive.
At the end of the month an analyst will work 80 hour weeks to complete this in 3-5 business days. This type of workflow is not uncommon.
If you knew how dirty most financial data is when it is released, you would probably be checking your statements more carefully.
A huge part of what i-bankers do is pitch - either pitch to a company that you'd like to bring on as a client, or pitch to potential buyers of your client (and variations of that). Junior guys basically make the presentations for those pitches. There's generally horrible project management going on at the senior level as well, and senior team members have no qualms about making you make pointless updates to a presentation (for example, update the numbers in the presentation for the stock price today even though nobody will see the presentation for a week, and you'll have to update it then anyway). In fact, it's sort of part of the deal.
There's a lot of waiting implied in this for the juniors that are doing 100 hour weeks. For up to half the day they're goofing off, surfing the net, and looking busy. Then they crunch spreadsheets, and write pitch books.
Other divisions have similar hierarchies, but a little less busywork. Research spends a lot of time writing models and coming up with research papers, pitching trade ideas.
In trading, the hours aren't necessarily that bad, though they can be for juniors. Trading hours are 8-10 hours a day, but the jobs are hard to get so juniors spend a lot of time trying to look and impress.
1. Excel work. Valuing companies or modeling a merger or acquisition or financing. Sometimes it goes beyond this, but that’s the bread and butter of what you do in Excel.
2. Writing (PowerPoint or Word). For pitches you’ll write slides on industry trends, executive summaries and explanations of your analysis… for deals you will create marketing documents that “sell” your client in Word or PowerPoint.
3. Research. This can be finding reports for senior bankers, doing industry research, or Googling for hours on end trying to find the adoption rate of cell phones in a southern province of Kazakhstan.
4. Administrative Tasks. I hope you like scheduling meetings, taking notes, and sending out status updates to your team, because you’ll be doing a lot of that.