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Comment by t1lthesky | Hacker News Reader

There's a column from Matt Levine where he explains the real purpose of useless busywork for ibanking associates. He gives an example of a guy making a PowerPoint who messes up one trivial formatting detail and his boss makes him redo the entire thing. On the surface this seems dumb and pointless, but the idea is that when that when that associate is a senior banker and working on a multi billion dollar deal, making some trivial mistake can potentially cost millions of dollars. The busywork as an associate is training to not make those mistakes in the future. Made a lot more sense to me explained this way. Not that I necessarily agree with it, and if I worked in that industry I would hate it, but a lot more reasonable than they just make you do it for no reason

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It's not for not reason, it's for status, that it's the oldest reason in social primates.

The most people you have reporting to you the more status you have in the organization. What do you make all those people do? Statistics and power points that you can show in meetings with other important people.

Still makes no sense to me whatsoever. Punishing non-mistakes like that doesn't magically make future mistakes disappear.

Training an activity will probably reduce the error rate in that particular activity, but it doesn't do anything for contract negotiation or whatever the senior banker later does where mistakes can be costly.

There are two employees. One rarely presents a piece of work with any errors in. One regularly makes errors which need fixing.

Which employee best demonstrates the ability to thoroughly review their own work? Which would you want as a senior reviewing other peoples work before sending/presenting it to clients?

They're not training a specific activity, they're training an attitude towards mistakes in all cases.

Yeah, it's the military model. A lot of the stuff they make you do in basic is to train you to follow orders without question. So that when something critical depends on you following orders without question, you do it.

That's a bug not a feature in my book (I'm german, we did that order following thing very very well...)

Sure, that vaguely makes sense and doing this is better than doing nothing. Maybe it's just the first step in training those juniors to one day work on the big fat deals.

The brown M&Ms of the corporate world?

I was thinking more along the lines of Mr Miyagi in a Canali suit.

I can understand that explanation, but equally it would be a lot more healthy all around if there was better toleration of these trivial mistakes. People are people, not perfect content robots.

He doesn't want a perfect robot. He wants someone who can thoroughly review his own work. He is training the employee to be fastidious on something trivial so when it's not trivial, he can do it on his own.

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