Lawyers are an example of a meeting their deadline. Not uncommon for some of them to be up to 2, 3 o'clock sifting through cases and preparing for court. Can't dick around with "I didn't do the work because it was past normal opening hours", they have a client they need to represent who expects results.
Confirmed. Back in 2013 there was an incident where the Court didn't bother to inform me about the trial date being moved forwards to that Monday until 4.00pm on Friday. There went my entire weekend. Had to bolt together evidence, get Counsel on board at super short notice, get all the papers up there, do the bundle (ugh, bundling is the bane of my life), agree the case summary, talk it over with the client, throw together a skeleton argument, get a call off Counsel who noticed, well, shouldn't we also be making an application for something else as well, bolt together that application, and so forth. However, to be fair, it is possible to get things done in the time allotted by not last minuting stuff, but last minuting is a habit that a lot of lawyers get into, unfortunately, and is something I am guilty of as well.
Also compliance and similar crap takes up far too much time. More recently had to do a rancid overnight in advance of an audit. Also have been rung up on holiday asking what needs to be done in an emergency because a client has turned up out the blue and is demanding answers NOW, NOW, NOW. Unfortunately that is life.
Thankfully, I have never worked in the City so have never been subject to the whole presenteeism for own sake culture of same (i.e. trainees competing to stay up late and look busy, deliberately taking on extra stuff) or some of the stupider practices in City law firms. One of my favourites is when some random partner rings up at 9.00 pm, says to an underling, "Could you just..." and then rattles off a massive wodge of stuff to do, "...and have it on my desk for 7.00 am tomorrow." Needless to say, the deadline is entirely artificial; it's basically a secret test of character and the same partner's assigned similar things to three or four more junior lawyers and the test is to see who actually does it; and while the work does need done it actually isn't needed for a couple weeks yet.
If you want a fairly truthful account of some of the shit that goes on in City law firms, there's a novel called "Fish Sunday Thinking" which is all about that and set during the 2008-9 recession. In it, the protagonist, one Denton Voyle (named after two large UK law firms, I believe), has a job in the City and the title refers to how he spends his only time off on Sunday afternoons ironing and contemplating why he is killing himself in the hope of being a slightly bigger fish in five years' time.
This is why there's a difference between CDPR requiring paid overtime for the next few weeks, which although not ideal does happen, and Naughty Dog setting the developers against each other with competitive presenteeism and then not bothering to pay them. But because the latter have GARME JURNALIZTS lining up to taste Dreckmann's balloon knot, it's forgotten after a while; CDPR have a track record of wrongthink and wrongtweet so it's held against them forever.
and Mankind Divided (Boredom in a Box), and all the other cyberpunk games, I'm being cautiously optimistic.
