I guess he wants the new recruits to be able to experience the "magic roundabout"
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.
It won’t die out. People like money. Analyst IBD roles represent not only some of the best compensated roles out of Uni, but puts on a path to a long well-compensated career either at GS or another bank. Or an exit opportunity. And the young folks that go into these roles probably busted their butts at Uni after busting their butts at high school. They are ready for it. And once you get in the culture you get normalised to it.
Yeah but you need to be a top engineering/CS kid to get those high-paying tech jobs.
All you need to get a job in IBD is go to a top school, have a high gpa, and be able to memorize some basic accounting and finance and not blow your interviews.
Getting a technical degree like CS and then passing the interviews at a place like Google or whatever the hottest unicorn grads wanna work at is way tougher IMO
You can make almost as much money (well above the average) doing a "normal" 35-40 hour week in tech. I'd rather have a sensible work:life balance and earn a bit less, than spend my entire life working until midnight.
Plus, I find tech is very egalitarian. Nobody cares whether you went to a public or state school, if you have a regional accent or anything like that. Banking still has the "old money" club problems.
If you can get into a top school, you can spend the few hours to study for technical interviews. Seriously, I’m not joking. It’s not as hard as you make it out to be.
It won’t. There will always be people willing to put in more, especially when your future of making many millions is on the line. This is what unions are for.
It's quite funny isn't it - GS has this reputation for brutally insisting their employees working like this whilst Tech companies very quietly and passively set up conditions where people can work like this. If you think "Who has designed their company so that I work there 24/7 with no break" it's not Goldman, it's Google.
To keep the illusion of having a work-life balance. Another possibly is to not store your belongings in your office. So you go to your stor.. ehrm home to change and water your plants.
What I do not understand, it is known that sleep deprivation leads to similiar effects as beeing drunk. So can these people actually do anything non trivial in the 23h shifts? Or is it so easy you can do it on autopilot? Or do mistakes not matter?
I'm of two minds. I don't think most office work can be done from home all the time, but I think a lot of it can be done efficiently from home. On the other hand I also value the social aspect as well as the easy onboarding in-person.
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.
I doubt that WFH options are a significant factor for the best employees. There are so many other incentives/rewards/perks that imo should rank above this. Eg. Remuneration, opportunities, connection to colleagues (particularly those involved in promotional decisions).
> 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.
Well, if I can 'pay' the employee a lot more just by letting live somewhere cheaper where he'll happy ( say, somewhere with a house, garden, and peace and quiet, an unaffordable luxury to most in large European cities such as London/Paris ), then wfh and compensation suddenly become linked.
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.
Sure, it’s all linked. I think a big factor overlooked here is the interest in hiring locally... I suspect the people paying wages are somewhat invested in the local economy - especially the property market. I wouldn’t expect a major shift before those investors have adjusted their portfolio accordingly ... I.e. no time soon. Just a suspicion, what would I know.
Same. The conditions I cultivated at my home office are unbeatable in many ways, very expensive standing desks and chairs included. Not to mention a world-class quality display that makes most other displays seem like toys.
I invested in my home office and it's perfect for me. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
> if their competitors are offering better working conditions, their top employees may switch over
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 you are kind of conflating what's theoretically efficient, what you personally seem to value, and what you think top performing employees will be able to dictate to the company based on what the competition offers.
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.
Regarding your first point, U.S. companies still hire expensive domestic employees because the quality of education in India isn't comparable to the U.S. I think anyone on HN who has utilized Indian outsourcing understands they produce substandard work when compared to domestic standards. Those who are at the level of a U.S. developer are generally brought over to the U.S.
It's probably more that communication between different cultures and across a 11.5 hour timezone delay pose a significant barrier that require efficient project leadership and company culture to manage.
Neither of these exist in a relatively local WFH setup. People still have the same weather, sports and other interests which allow for better cohesion. Hell, I'd often zoom into a meeting rather than walk to the conf room pre-covid anyway because I'd gain 5m to/from and I had back to back meetings.
I don't work in Investment Banking but I've heard a ton of anecdotal reports that in IB at places like GS the "Work from home" has made their already long hours even worse.
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.
My understanding is that a large part of the finance/banking culture is to be able to show off how much money you are making, and be able to flaunt that - so being in the office/socializing outside is a large part of the job as it were, and being at home wouldn't allow for that.
Most employees of the bank are far from being able to affect money inflows in the bank, so you are specifically talking about traders/private client bankers here, which are few % at most in any bank
That is true, I guess in my head I had assumed that somewhere like GS was just full of traders/ private banking, and not really a lot else - but thinking about it, that doesn't really make sense
On the other hand my home workspace is an actual office, and not some nightmarish open space where my desk was 7th in a row of 8. So the space dedicated to work in that my employer paid for actually sucks and they can have it back.
This! It seems to me the primary “productivity gains” are only due to the hell of open office designs and that these gains would not exist if offices were laid out in a more humane way with cubicles or offices for people to work in. So everyone got excited to lose all the benefits of working in an office (in-person communication versus Zoom!) only because of fictional productivity gains. What we really need is the pendulum to swing back to offices closer to 2000 versus this travesty we found in the late 201x’s.
This. I've been working remotely for almost a year now and I'm not looking forward to being back in the office. I don't spent 3 hours a day on the road, I don't have to see and hear my coworkers and don't want to sit at my desk. My employer may rent another place 5 times smaller, whatever. I'm here at home enjoying my loneliness and I've never felt better about my job.
This is good - but I unfortunately don't have the space, time or money to dedicate to building an office at home - any more than I have to build a gym or pool.
I’m willing to foot that bill in exchange for getting rid of my two hour round trip commute. It probably evens out with the savings on fuel or ticket costs. It doesn’t even factor in the stress of commuting and being on time into the office.
The luxury of able to wake up and just walk into your “office” in your pajamas is priceless to me.
This is a good example of somewhere the two parties can work together. Give a tax break to companies that reimburse you for part of your mortgage/rent/utilities for your home office, and give a tax break to the employee so they don't have to count it as income.
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.
> 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.
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.
The amount of rent paid per employee has been driven down over the decades as the square foot space dedicated per employee has driven down. Give employees those savings and it would amount to converting an already used space (a closet) in your home to some pale representation of what you had in the office. Certainly would not justify adding on to the employee’s house, and not everyone has spare space they bought or rent that they magically don’t need for personal use anymore.
Rent per square foot in the city center where my company's office is located is at least ten times rent per square foot on a house like mine in the suburb I live in. The rent per square foot for a desk in a serviced office near where I live is about halfway between the two.
In fact the rent on a small three bedroom house in my neighbourhood and the rent per employee for office space where I work are comparable.
I think you would be surprised to what the ratio of office square foot to employee headcount looks like. Most modern offices are designed to 150-250 sf per employee including circulating space, common meeting rooms, kitchens, and washrooms.
Also, if what you say is correct, that office space is 10x suburban housing rent, that is most certainly an anomaly unique to your city. That would mean a high end market, like NY or SF with $100-$150 per square foot rents would have housing stock renting for $10-15 per square foot (these are annual numbers). That is not the case in any market I have ever encountered.
My city is unusual, fair. But 5x ratio would be far from unusual. One could easily find an apartment in Staten Island (not even a suburb, not very far from the city center) for less than 1/5 Manhattan office rent per sq ft.
I'm not sure of your point about sq ft per employee. 10 times 150 sq ft seems like quite a nice three bed.
5 times the office space per employee is going to be huge, especially given that most people already have kitchens and bathrooms.
It's probably a better indicator for class divide these days than the classic 'bookshelf'.
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?)
This is a dangerous line of thinking and eventually most young people who think this way will get burned. So you have everything setup as autopay, and then you have no idea what you’re spending on anything. And then there are incorrect or fraudulent charges on your account and you never notice them, or maybe you do but you can’t dispute it because you didn’t notice them for past 6 months and since you paid them previously, the bank closes your dispute because you previously paid them which shows that you accept the charges. Or some service you use starts slowly increasing the price/fees and you never notice, so you never call to complain about it, and then companies start getting away with doing this all the time when they decide they want more money.
There’s a reason people sit down, review bills and their accounts, and actively keep track of things, and it’s not because they are just old and doing things the old way. It’s because if you are not really paying attention, companies will try to screw you. And no, having some central system that shows you pretty graphs of your spending doesn’t help with this either unless you are really spending time studying the report at least every few weeks.
In the UK, you can use one of the challenger banks like Starling or Monzo. They not only show you "pretty graphs", but give you spending notifications and keep track of your direct debits, standing orders etc. So I don't see a reason to do this all manually yourself, which can also be error prone.
> But.. bills? As in receiving letters to find out how much I'm supposed to pay and then somehow manually paying them?
No obviously not literally 'paying a bill'. I mean managing your personal life. Investments, preparing data for your accountant, budgeting, that kind of thing. Do you not have any hobbies that involve managing things or focused reading and writing? Any volunteering that involves managing an organisation and people? The need to take non-work calls to organise things? What room do you do these things in? Do you not have a desk and chair somewhere?
Yes I do, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I just thought 'bills and stuff' was amusing and not the first use that would come to my mind.
So yes I already had and used that space for 'personal stuff', (well actually I mostly worked from home anyway there too) but I do understand there's still an argument that it's nice to have a physical divide between work (employed work) and other. I definitely sit there working longer (or going back to work later) than intended sometimes.
When I want to be doing something else, but work's still on my mind or have some sudden realisation, and all work stuff is right there too so it's too easy to 'just quickly' do.
I don't know, there's no perfect answer, sometimes it really is quick and I'd rather get it done and off my mind (easily, because again, it's all right there) than it be harder or tomorrow.
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.
Do you not have any personal arrangements more complex than 'pressing a button'? Investments? Correspondence with people? Reviewing agreements and portfolios? Do not you do things like budget? What about hobbies that require desk-work and making calls? Volunteering and work with charities? What room do you do these things in?
I want to have a garage where I can build projects and do stuff that is not looking at a computer.
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.
It's 2021. Maybe if you had a calendar in your office you'd know?
Do people not ever need to sit down to manage any of their finances, personal life, or organisations they volunteer in in 2021? Do you do everything from your phone on your sofa? Where do you keep physical books and things? Do you never need to focus and write?
I do it in my kitchen or living room - for a couple of hours a week at most.
If I had a room that I could devote to something that I barely spend any time doing I would have made it into something more fun - like a workshop, or home-gym, or sauna, or whatever. I'll use it how I please - and my employer can keep on paying for somewhere for me to work.
Let's not forget that the old money institutions are very much stuck in their ways, and there is a culture that goes with it - which is their norm.
Newer fintech companies are happy to challenge that norm and modernise it - removing some of that outdated culture.
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 mechanisms of the free market should take care of it. Offering WFH is now something a bank (or any other company that is suitable for WFH) can offer as a bargaining chip. It's yet another factor (next to salary, vacation times, prestige, etc.) on which companies can compete for talent.
Anyone who thinks working at home is going to be the new normal is delusional. If I'm in the office the first people I'm going to talk to are the ones sitting across from me. After that we might move to the whiteboard and forget about everyone else we can't easily pull in.
The people working at home will be left out and it won't even be deliberate.
I don't know what company you are working for or what area but in my company we have team of specialists.
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.
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).
If you think the CEO of Goldman Sachs is focused on the needs of Summer Interns or new hires, I've got a bridge to sell you. GS can't manipulate its employees as effectively from home as it can in person.
Disclaimer: used to work at GS. Left to work remotely in another region.
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.
On-boarding can be done a couple of days in person to learn about each other but I don't think that anything stands in the way to do your regular work from anywhere.
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.
I'm not surprised. Unhappy people with low self esteem will always reject any social behavioural changes which are in contradiction to the norms which allowed them to thrive themselves in some snake environment.
Does WFH imply a much better work life balance for investment bankers? Or is the sheer amount of work they can be assigned make it possible to have just as bad work life balance as in the office?
What’s strange here? I’m working remotely for over 15 years, but still, this is not work for everyone. It’s far from idyllic imaginations of office workers, as grass is always greener on the other side.
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.
My employer has committed to the same. 3:2 onsite/remote, depending on your preference/departmental need. My boss has suggested that he'd like us to get together beginning/end of week to plan & socialize and beyond that it's our discretion. There are some folks on our team who are permanently remote who won't return to office regardless.
Work from home has been detrimental to my mental health.
Yeah if I had a better flat/house it would have been much better than commuting to the office but not everyone can afford this luxury.
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...