What exactly are they grinding on? Like, what is the output of their effort?
There is a sharp divide between those who bring in revenue and everyone else.
Analysts and associates do not bring revenue. Their work is to idle until a deal is imminent. At that moment, being the team that can immediately whip together materials for a client, that can immediately generate closing documents, that can be the difference between winning and losing the deal. Between tens or hundreds millions of dollars in fees for the firm or zero. Between those intense bursts it's mostly farting around.
At the higher level, more work means more selling. Unless you're in a real bum corner of the market, there is always another deal you could pick up. If you start reaching diminishing returns, empire build--branch out.
One of the biggest breaks I had in my career was moving from a finance culture to an engineering-led one. The finance culture works. But it optimises for short-term results and it optimises for the partners, those at the top.
Management consulting as well.
Law and consulting are different because more hours literally means more revenue. Banking is success fee driven. It's thus theoretically possible for hours to be reduced without impacting--or possibly, positively impacting--revenue.
My understanding is that investment banking, which I made a very deliberate decision not to go into, throws associates at a whole lot of deal book production and proofreading that is only read by some other overworked associate.
From what I recall, the issue was that management knew analyst time was not valuable at all, and so it was common practice for them to leave the office at 7pm with an "i need this by tomorrow" order for client materials that were meant for speculative pitching rather than supporting a live deal.
Thus the analyst ends up getting holidays and weekends crushed repeatedly by projects that aren't really that meaningful and could have been spread out in a much more manageable way if the higher ups had given any consideration at all to what they were asking.
It's a fair complaint. This anecdote stood out:
"VPs create shells for decks that do not align with what senior team members want to show, which results in junior teams creating the wrong materials. Ultimately, senior team members see these materials and junior team members often have to start from scratch on incredibly short timelines (less than 24 hours) – resulting in unnecessary stress, subpar work, and lack of sleep" [1]
This is a problem! Also, when I was an intern, it wasn't uncommon for an MD to have a meeting at 11AM, be back to back until 5PM, to only drop a request on the associate's desk at 6 from that morning meeting.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jyeu-wvS3Z10xQ0BlMIDOkh_INo...