Around 2003 I worked at Merrill Lynch, on the IT side supporting investment banking. Our users were creating Pitchbooks, which are these 100 page PowerPoint presentations that contain a lot of financial data taken from various financial statements. The junior employees toil for hours putting these things together for senior managers.
We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial statements and generate complete decks. What previously took dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the junior employees an enormous amount of time.
The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the sake of work.
We had an idea that we could build an application to produce much of the pitchbooks using current tools to pull data from financial statements and generate complete decks. What previously took dozens of hours could be done for them in 15 minutes, saving the junior employees an enormous amount of time.
The Managing Directors rejected the project because they wanted their junior employees to suffer the same way that they did. That was the actual explanation they gave us. It's just work for the sake of work.