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I have an anecdote from a good friend of mine who interned at an investment bank. After 2 days and nights preparing a presentation with other interns they obser

I have an anecdote from a good friend of mine who interned at an investment bank. After 2 days and nights preparing a presentation with other interns they observed the meeting where those hundreds of slides were flipped through in 10min. Asking why they had to expend so much effort if no one is even interested in the details the senior banker said. It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it.

t1lthesky 8y ago
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
- RobertoG 8y ago
  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.
- tome 8y ago
  The brown M&Ms of the corporate world?
  - croon 8y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of Mr Miyagi in a Canali suit.
- passiveincomelg 8y ago
  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.
  - Ntrails 8y ago
    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.
    - bena 8y ago
      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.
      - passiveincomelg 8y ago
        That's a bug not a feature in my book (I'm german, we did that order following thing very very well...)
    - passiveincomelg 8y ago
      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.
- elliotpage 8y ago
  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.
  - bena 8y ago
    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.
sudhirj 8y ago
In some cases it seems to be the equivalent of the Karate Kid wax on, wax off work. Work that's useless in itself, but creates desirable change in the worker.
- RobertoG 8y ago
  Sure, the organization chart is full of Mr. Miyagis that care about your personal development. "Man who catch mistake in power point with chopstick, accomplish anything"
  - passiveincomelg 8y ago
    s/personal development/breaking their spirit/g ?
Viliam1234 8y ago
> It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it. This somehow reminds me of the "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies. You are not doing any useful work, you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power). I wonder if all the waste from bitcoin mining is just an analogy of similar waste in the corporate world... and ironically, now that human work is no longer involved in the loop, people suddenly care more because the old excuses such as "it builds character" no longer make sense.
- notyme 8y ago
  > you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power) This is so true for mate selection in animal kingdom e.g. the gelada baboon male[0] has a bright red spot on its chest and females choose the male with brightest and largest red spot, though it is has no useful biological function. Expending energy to maintain an unnecessary function, hints at superior genes similar to your IB example. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada#Physical_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada#Physical_description
  - Viliam1234 8y ago
    Perhaps if we give baboons another million years to evolve, they will start shooting lasers from their chests. And then it will be useful in the human-baboon wars. :D More seriously, some people think that by a similar mechanism human intelligence has evolved. That in its first stages it was simply a costly (more difficult childbirth because of larger heads, more precious energy burned by brain function) and mostly useless mate-attracting thing. Until at some moment a critical threshold was crossed, and human culture became possible; and then it became dramatically useful. So yes, there is a more general mechanism of how value gets burned in signaling competitions. Robin Hanson built his entire blog on finding examples in human society: www.overcomingbias.com But then there is another general mechanism, where the heaps of waste accumulated by the aforementioned processes suddenly become a new niche to exploit for something useful. Such as people who build huge bitcoin-mining machines in Siberia, where the wasted heat warms their homes. So perhaps on another level there is something good to be gained from the corporate bullshit jobs. Actually, I suspect what it could be... if your job is bullshit, it is less noticeable if you take some time off to browse a web. It could turn out that bullshit jobs are actually a huge factor driving today's culture. -- If you would remove bullshit jobs, for example by reducing the working time to 20 or 15 hours a week, many popular websites (including Hacker News) would lose most of their traffic. Because most people would spend their free afternoons differently, e.g. with their kids, or doing sports. I am not saying it would be worse... just different, maybe in ways we can't predict.
zentiggr 8y ago
Even if there's only three or four soldiers posted outside the armory, it's more persuasive when there are racks and racks of rifles/swords/spears no one will ever use.... No, this hasn't been going on very long at all...
ItsMe000001 8y ago
The stories we tell ourselves are not true just because we tell them. Just because he said it does not mean that's true, it sounds more like post-hoc rationalizing, made up on the spot when he got the question (may not have been the first time, I'm not saying he made it up specifically right then, there might have been an earlier occasion). I mean he may think it is, I mean "true" as in that it actually works. I doubt it, at least in this specific case. I see two levels: On the intellectual one and on a deeper brain level, system 1 and 2 in Kahneman speak, I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain. I think all explanations given here (or, ever) should be viewed under that light. Just because they are given (as explanation) does not actually make them an explanation. After all, one of people's greatest strengths is coming up with convincing stories for anything! That was one of the problems of coming up with the "scientific method" to overcome that very strong tendency, both the one to create stories, but also the one to believe them.
- Verdex_3 8y ago
  > I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain. I think I agree, however. A hundred slides might not impress anyone, but it means that anyone who wants to attack the presenter has too many targets to pick from. This is especially true if many of the terms in the slides are unfamiliar to the listener. It goes by too fast. If you have an objection on slide 43, then by the time you get an opportunity to object you're already on slide 76. Maybe you forget all of the details that you were upset about. And the presenter can claim that your specific objection is handle somewhere in the other 99 slides. Somewhere that you're unlikely to fully understand the details and/or terminology. Nobody likes the guy who gets hung up on one tiny detail and refuses to let it go even though the presenter claims other details resolve the issue. And everybody knows that nobody likes that guy. So everyone is going to be much more reserved about raising objections. You could alternatively attack the presentation holistically, but this becomes potentially exponentially hard as the length of the presentation increases. Depending on how the details interact. Sure, he might believe that the clients only want to know that the vendor is able to create all those slides. And this might be because when they present the slides they get the deals. But the reality might be that when they present the slides the result is that the people who would make important objections are intimidated into keeping quite. And that's why the deals are going through.

t1lthesky 8y ago

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

RobertoG 8y ago
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.
tome 8y ago
The brown M&Ms of the corporate world?
- croon 8y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of Mr Miyagi in a Canali suit.
passiveincomelg 8y ago
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.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  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.
  - bena 8y ago
    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.
    - passiveincomelg 8y ago
      That's a bug not a feature in my book (I'm german, we did that order following thing very very well...)
  - passiveincomelg 8y ago
    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.
elliotpage 8y ago
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.
- bena 8y ago
  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.

sudhirj 8y ago

In some cases it seems to be the equivalent of the Karate Kid wax on, wax off work. Work that's useless in itself, but creates desirable change in the worker.

RobertoG 8y ago
Sure, the organization chart is full of Mr. Miyagis that care about your personal development. "Man who catch mistake in power point with chopstick, accomplish anything"
- passiveincomelg 8y ago
  s/personal development/breaking their spirit/g ?

Viliam1234 8y ago

> It is not about what you do, it is about showing the client we can do it. This somehow reminds me of the "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies. You are not doing any useful work, you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power). I wonder if all the waste from bitcoin mining is just an analogy of similar waste in the corporate world... and ironically, now that human work is no longer involved in the loop, people suddenly care more because the old excuses such as "it builds character" no longer make sense.

notyme 8y ago
> you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power) This is so true for mate selection in animal kingdom e.g. the gelada baboon male[0] has a bright red spot on its chest and females choose the male with brightest and largest red spot, though it is has no useful biological function. Expending energy to maintain an unnecessary function, hints at superior genes similar to your IB example. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada#Physical_description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada#Physical_description
- Viliam1234 8y ago
  Perhaps if we give baboons another million years to evolve, they will start shooting lasers from their chests. And then it will be useful in the human-baboon wars. :D More seriously, some people think that by a similar mechanism human intelligence has evolved. That in its first stages it was simply a costly (more difficult childbirth because of larger heads, more precious energy burned by brain function) and mostly useless mate-attracting thing. Until at some moment a critical threshold was crossed, and human culture became possible; and then it became dramatically useful. So yes, there is a more general mechanism of how value gets burned in signaling competitions. Robin Hanson built his entire blog on finding examples in human society: www.overcomingbias.com But then there is another general mechanism, where the heaps of waste accumulated by the aforementioned processes suddenly become a new niche to exploit for something useful. Such as people who build huge bitcoin-mining machines in Siberia, where the wasted heat warms their homes. So perhaps on another level there is something good to be gained from the corporate bullshit jobs. Actually, I suspect what it could be... if your job is bullshit, it is less noticeable if you take some time off to browse a web. It could turn out that bullshit jobs are actually a huge factor driving today's culture. -- If you would remove bullshit jobs, for example by reducing the working time to 20 or 15 hours a week, many popular websites (including Hacker News) would lose most of their traffic. Because most people would spend their free afternoons differently, e.g. with their kids, or doing sports. I am not saying it would be worse... just different, maybe in ways we can't predict.

zentiggr 8y ago

Even if there's only three or four soldiers posted outside the armory, it's more persuasive when there are racks and racks of rifles/swords/spears no one will ever use.... No, this hasn't been going on very long at all...

ItsMe000001 8y ago

The stories we tell ourselves are not true just because we tell them. Just because he said it does not mean that's true, it sounds more like post-hoc rationalizing, made up on the spot when he got the question (may not have been the first time, I'm not saying he made it up specifically right then, there might have been an earlier occasion). I mean he may think it is, I mean "true" as in that it actually works. I doubt it, at least in this specific case. I see two levels: On the intellectual one and on a deeper brain level, system 1 and 2 in Kahneman speak, I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain. I think all explanations given here (or, ever) should be viewed under that light. Just because they are given (as explanation) does not actually make them an explanation. After all, one of people's greatest strengths is coming up with convincing stories for anything! That was one of the problems of coming up with the "scientific method" to overcome that very strong tendency, both the one to create stories, but also the one to believe them.

Verdex_3 8y ago
> I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain. I think I agree, however. A hundred slides might not impress anyone, but it means that anyone who wants to attack the presenter has too many targets to pick from. This is especially true if many of the terms in the slides are unfamiliar to the listener. It goes by too fast. If you have an objection on slide 43, then by the time you get an opportunity to object you're already on slide 76. Maybe you forget all of the details that you were upset about. And the presenter can claim that your specific objection is handle somewhere in the other 99 slides. Somewhere that you're unlikely to fully understand the details and/or terminology. Nobody likes the guy who gets hung up on one tiny detail and refuses to let it go even though the presenter claims other details resolve the issue. And everybody knows that nobody likes that guy. So everyone is going to be much more reserved about raising objections. You could alternatively attack the presentation holistically, but this becomes potentially exponentially hard as the length of the presentation increases. Depending on how the details interact. Sure, he might believe that the clients only want to know that the vendor is able to create all those slides. And this might be because when they present the slides they get the deals. But the reality might be that when they present the slides the result is that the people who would make important objections are intimidated into keeping quite. And that's why the deals are going through.