This is incredibly accurate. Aside from the guys who come out of MIT and Caltech to do quantitative analysis, almost everything on Wall Street is smoke and mirrors hiding what are incredibly simple ideas. Even a lot of the ostensibly esoteric and complex products (that a lot of the Wall Street guys don't understand!) hide a really simple core concept once you peel back the layers of jargon.
This is true for the majority of jobs out there.
Because Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Farmville are complex ideas?
Nearly every good idea looks "simple" in hindsight. That's what makes it a good idea.
99% of software work is straightforward too. Here's a form for entering data. Here's a report for formatting data someone else entered. Every website is just these two concepts that have been around since the 60s. Don't kid yourself that a "full stack developer" or a "rockstar ninja" is anything special.
Hiring more people does help but there will still not be 40 hour work weeks. In many instances, some people in the team has built up the knowledge on a particular part of the deal that it is difficult to outsource since it would be much faster for the person to complete the work themselves.
Hiring more people also means that the information is diffused around. If one person working on a deal it means that he knows 100% about the deal. If 100 people is working on the same deal, efficiency would greatly decrease as knowledge management becomes important (lots of emails).
In my short time at a small consulting firm (Management / C level), this was also the case.
Many times my long hours were due to "deliverables" (PowerPoints, documents, etc.) being in a choke point based on an Analyst, Consultant, etc.
E.g., waiting on numbers to finish a presentation.
However, much of the time, their is ALWAYS something to do, and much of it is very much face-time (butts in seats = working).
Why is that the case? Is it just human nature and people are weird and illogical?
It seems to me like if a deal makes business sense at Friday at 11:30 pm, it will still make financial sense next Tuesday at 10:30 am.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/three-piece-suit...
But they're there to serve a Higher Purpose: to engender classic, Stockholm Syndrome endearment -- and unquestioned obedience.
The problem is Wall Street is sweeping up a THIRD of Ivy league graduates. This no doubt causes harm to US economy. Can you imagine what a young really bright scientist/engineer can do putting in 120hr/week at a stretch? They probably couldn't produce something amazing soon but learn enough skill that they can be producing something that really adds value to the society. But that's not happening because Wall Street sweeps up so many.
This is very, very true. In my experience, investment banking is by no means a particularly difficult thing to do, given enough capital to play around with. Quants aside, the concepts that are used (take, for example, "mezzanine capital") are mostly buzzwords used to give a professional air to really very simple processes/ideas. It is a far cry from the serious, dedicated abstract thought demanded by fields such as software engineering/machine learning/data science etc.
However, what large financial institutions need are people who are extremely assiduous to small details, have a work ethic in which 7am-11pm hours creating powerpoints are no big deal (and have good sounding qualifications to impress investors).