The investment banking culture is notoriously brutal. Analysts typically work until midnight every day. Deals are unpredictable, deadlines are short and clients are demanding. There is a ritual known in banking circles as the “magic roundabout” — a graduate leaves his or her desk in the early hours of the morning, takes a cab home, and the taxi driver waits outside long enough for the young recruit to shower and change shirt before returning to the office.
https://www.ft.com/content/84adb5a4-2e53-11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3...
It seems more like "I worked like that, so you too should work like that"
My office does have changing rooms but they're intended for cyclists.
The bonus is good
The money is good
For GS, if their competitors are offering better working conditions, their top employees may switch over, leaving them with the ones who don't have a choice. Maybe he would better understand it as saying "Sales employees don't need a nice car or business class tickets or commissions to make sales." Technically true, but if your competitor is offering it you might want to do it as well.
> if your competitor is offering it you might want to do it as well.
That factor only seems relevant in isolation. Financial remuneration is surely the primary factor.
Furthermore, by allowing full WFH, you also expand your recruitment pool to people outside your immediate geographical area.
That being said, I miss the office quite badly : real, physical interactions, can't be replaced with video conferences.
Personally, I wouldn't quit WFH even if someone offered to triple my salary to come work in an office.
Speaking anecdotally as someone who's been away from high finance for a few years. The drift is towards firms who let their employees work together. I don't know of many high performers, or ambitious up and comers, who want to stay isolated at home.
I think it will be more complicated and subtle than this. A few things to consider:
* What's theoretically efficient may never actually materialize. For example, India has ~70 million English-speaking college graduates - that's close to the US in absolute numbers. They can be paid (probably) an order of magnitude less per person. We've had the internet and teleconferencing for decades, yet outsourcing did hit quite a hard limit at some point, and counterintuitively companies before 2020 still hired in the most expensive areas in the world (e.g. SF & Menlo) for fairly routine web programming, and paid $500k comp for what in theory could have been done remotely with English speakers for 1/10th of that. (What happens now? We'll find out)
* Hype of the day - companies making waves extending remote arrangements or conversely bringing everyone back, we'll see how that plays out.
* Social aspects - but of a slightly different kind than some refreshing friendly banter - if you want to get promoted, you need to show your face and be on top of your boss's mind, which is best achieved with regular physical presence and that's an unfair advantage that the onsite people will have.
In pure meritocracy that wouldn't matter of course, but how many places are run as pure meritocracy? At Uber a few years back people bitterly fought for promotions (top 20% would get X times the stock and bonuses) and back then, the rare remote people had to either put up a major extra effort to remotely fight for themselves, or get left out (and eventually let go, I've seen remote people let go mostly because they did not have a major presence in the office). I think it's a bit different now obviously with everyone remote for the time being, but in fiercely competitive environments whoever is closer to the boss wins.
Even before Covid they worked 80-100+ hour weeks 7 days a week. Now that everyone is home all the time the expectations are that you're never "off" as before you'd at least get to go home for 4-6 hours and get some sleep.
I don't know how much of that is self driven vs top down but IB is one of the few jobs where it seems like a lot of people are looking forward to going back to the office from what I've seen.
(I could be be way off the mark here)
I had a space dedicated to work in that my employer paid for. Now I must make a part of my house that space and foot the bill.
The luxury of able to wake up and just walk into your “office” in your pajamas is priceless to me.
You can kind of do this already, but making it explicit would help everyone, and since it's both pro-business and pro-employee, it appeals to both sides of the aisle.
And equipment. I have so far forked out $1000s and there is deductions or rebates where I live for any of it. I have to pay full VAT (25%) unless I can somehow get through the bureaucracy of fortune 500 company to get them to pay for it, in which case I have to find space in my 40 m² apartment for both my stuff and things from employer.
It is seriously messed up and the fault mainly lies with how governments are implementing lockdowns.
But.. bills? As in receiving letters to find out how much I'm supposed to pay and then somehow manually paying them? No, I'm young enough that I've never had to operate like that, but I can barely remember my parents doing so either, certainly not in the last 20 years. Your profile indicates also UK - don't you just pay by DD?
(edit: hang on a second.. my sarcasm detector might be starting to experience a slight tingle.. were you joking?)
Like bills do require a full office in 2021. I pay all my bills by pressing a button on my smartphone. And that's because I like to review them, I could pay them automatically if I really want to.
I just, don't want to have an office in my home. If I need an office for work then someone else can pay for it. I have no desire to own a computer with Linux, but I need one for my work. Guess who paid for it? Not me. And sure yes - I do life admin on my computer on the kitchen table when things are quiet - but I don't spend 40 hours a week doing that.
On the other hand, I can see why a large money firm would want to have people in the office using devices/assets that are under their control/watchful eye.
The management of Revolut are 100x as psychotic as the Partners at Goldman.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavir...
The people working at home will be left out and it won't even be deliberate.
You cannot just grab a sales guy and plan a release of a new product with him but you need an engineer as well. If that engineer will be WFH you will have to schedule a meeting and he has to agree to the timeline.
Grabbing someone from the desk should die and everyone should respect others work. I think WFH is helping with that because people who are agreeable have additional defense. Going to someone because you need an answer "RIGHT NOW" is most annoying thing when I have my own work. Lack of planning on your side is not automatically making it a priority on my table. Sending an email, scheduling call are perfectly fine options unless it is real fire with firefighters storming through the door, not some imagined fire like demanding customer.
In our weekly Slack summary report, 80% of our usage is 1 to 1 direct messaging, not private group chats, and not channel chats.
We have moved to the virtual grab.
At least in real life, you could see if it was happening.
It's undeniable that some work absolutely mandates 100% physical presence. Denying this would be delusional. So when the job absolutely _mandates_ physical presence, sure, do that then.
But if anything, the pandemic very clearly has shown -- to me and my circle of colleagues and friends at least -- that insisting on a physical presence for IT workers is just being stubborn and backwards 99% of the time.
I am also not very convinced of the social aspect, watercooler discussions etc. I mean yeah, I miss them too sometimes but strictly speaking they are not a prerequisite for a productive IT worker. It's just a nice bonus. I found out that I can live without them (I am fully remotely working for 10 years now).
GS is a big company. There's lots of people there. Some 8k people are in the tech division. And the employer competition there is not just with other financial firms. But also with the rest of the tech sector.
So as other commenters say, if other places offer similar conditions, but also remote work. It may be a differentiator. In practise though - working from home for tech some days a week has been totally normal for years. So I expect little actual impact on the company.
Obviously you need a cultural change and how you work, as in person communication must be done written. Biggest hindrance in efficiently working remotely when no one is doing that.
I totally get that these old companies have a problem to adapt. Especially if what someone else here wrote is that you are forced to work long hours just because.
Also, I'm not sure that remote working will work for such businesses as banks, where keeping bank confidentiality may be hard or even impossible to enforce for remote workers. My girlfriend worked at bank once, they were very strict in controlling media drives, notes, even use of personal phones were not allowed near workstations.
I will be doing a hybrid.
