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Deutsche Bank staff sent home as 18,000 job cuts begin
- kediz 7y agoDoes Wall Street going to absorb these people back or they might have to find another trades all together? How general the skills learned on the Sales and Trading are?
- ohaideredevs 7y agoI very much doubt Wall Street will absorb them. The number of needed Finance jobs collapsed with automation. The only people getting analyst jobs are those with connections or an Ivy League background (and a top one with certs at that). The call center jobs are just being cut and/or the salary has been dropping rapidly since 2008.
- mocha_nate 7y agoCall center people are being cut out at both ends: 1. The type of people that would rather call than use an app are getting older and will eventually stop calling 2. The type of problems automation can solve is removing the need for a live person.
- kediz 7y agoSo those fired bankers will find themselves (un)gainfully unemployed for a long time... Do you know any career track that can use skills learned from Investment Bank(other than general salesman job)
- natrik 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs 18,000 unnecessary staff amassed over the years. Edit: *Not all of them were unnecessary of course.
- void_nill 7y agoI've read the book and it's pretty good, it also shows how bad the economy is. Especially where there are a lot of "manager" jobs that seem to be quite superfluous. The fact that Deutsche Bank is cutting 18K jobs is quite bitter, because the mass of people is quite large. I wonder if other banks are planning such layoffs and if we will have to expect more mass cutts.
- lm28469 7y agoDepends how you look at it, how many truly _necessary_ jobs can you create ? Certainly not enough to employ every healthy person from 20 to 65. These people still need to pay their bills, eat food, sleep under a roof. We won't get out of this as long as we see unemployed people as the plague, in the meantime we'll see a surge in bs services (uber, deliveroo, hellofresh, &c.)
- moate 7y ago>>We won't get out of this as long as we see unemployed people as the plague What are you talking about? "Management" sees unemployed people, especially those with actual skills, as a great asset. They provide a downward force on wages. It's only other laborers who see them as competition and a problem.
- vertex-four 7y agoUnemployed people are, in current society, often dependent on the state to survive, which means taxation to support them, which many people don't like and often implement policies to deny them that support.
- moate 7y agoSo what you're telling me is that laborer's see the unemployed as both competition for their jobs(if low-wage, unskilled laborers) or siphoning money from them (if high-wage, skilled laborers) and that politicians then play that disdain into successful creation of policy targeting these unemployed people which directly benefits management by creating a constant underclass which they can tap into at any time for low cost due to the desperation of these people? I'm shocked.
- Neil44 7y agoTo prep for that quantity of offboarding without anything leaking is pretty impressive.
- DangerousPie 7y agoWhat makes you think that nothing leaked? Pretty sure these job cuts have been anticipated for a while, I was reading an article expecting 20,000 cuts last week.
- coldcode 7y agoWhen I was at Apple back before Steve came back (when they lost a billion or so) we knew there would be layoffs because the rent-a-guards were standing at the doors.
- duxup 7y agoI was part of a fairly large layoff a while back. Effectively the company made the decision and then a few folks in HR were involved in hiring an outside firm to handle everything. Even internally few in HR knew what was coming until that day. Most decisions were entirely high level based on really simple calculations "this whole group", "anyone in this group that is X" and such. Pretty easy to do if you make it easy.
- greenshackle2 7y agoIt's not really a surprise for anyone who's been paying attention to financial news though, and especially not for the DB bankers who have been spending their time at the pub these past weeks. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-01/empty-desks-and-early-beers-life-at-deutsche-bank-in-new-york https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-01/empty-des...
- algaeontoast 7y agoLooks like the average value of a non-ivy "business" / "finance" degree was just docked to a "CCC" rating?
- ohaideredevs 7y agoAs someone with one, my understanding is that its market value sits somewhere between art history and lower-tier engineering degrees (e.g. civil). It opens the door to $40,000 office jobs, but that's about it.
- algaeontoast 7y agoWow, that's shocking! I have a CS degree from a non-ivy but well known private engineering school in the Cambridge / Boston area. CS students obv seem to have no issues, but I was always curious what kind of work / salary "business" or "finance" degrees would fetch. It's hard to place my position on the subject since I know a number of talented and intelligent non-engineering majors with the above qualifications, but an order or magnitude more complete idiots who partied their way through college and think their $40 haircut is more of a bargaining tool than actual skills.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIt’s interesting how many highly paid managers can come and go at Deutsche Bank, do some experiments that will fail and then leave. They really seem to have no clue where they want to go. It’s pretty sad to see how a once solid bank had been managed into a shell of its former self.
- duxup 7y agoI wonder what "banking" is to a bank like Deutsche Bank? I have some visibility to a bank that grew from a community bank to a fairly sizable regional bank in the US, but it is still largely a consumer type bank with individual account holders / businesses. Almost everything they do as a "bank" is very much what anyone might think a bank is. It's surprisingly simple how they operate and everyone at the bank is on the same page. At large banks I see what seems more like a whole lot of speculation, tax management, random opportunities etc.... seems like that easily can get out of hand.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIt seems they have reached a point where they just want to make a lot of money and they are trying to work their way backwards from that goal. But they don’t have a deeper business goal.
- oaiey 7y agoThe Deutsche Bank was mainly an industrial bank doing classic credits business in Germany. At a certain moment, the bank was critical to Germany as the car industry was. Then they got crazy and wanted to be a Wall Street investment bank. That failed. I think their current goal is to refocus on that.
- rmah 7y agoA large international bank like DeutscheBank operates in many different business areas. Basically, they can be broken down into six main areas: 1. Retail banking 2. Commercial banking 3. Investment banking 4. Investment/money management services 5. Proprietary trading 6. Other random financial things Retail banking is mostly what you're thinking of for your community bank. That is consumer deposits and loans (for cars, houses, etc). And possibly small business loans, lines of credit, etc. (though at some banks, these are part of commercial banking instead). These things are typically handled at the local branch level. Commercial banking is for larger corporate customers. The bank generally offers more services in addition to deposits and lines of credit. They may include loans, foreign exchange, treasury services (cash management), payment services, etc. Investment banking is sort of related to commercial banking. Generally speaking, it revolves around arranging financing (rather than providing it as commercial bankers would do). It includes things like bond issuences, mergers & acquisitions, private equity deals, etc. Investment/money management services may include an actual brokerage operation, custody services, and high-net-worth money management/investment advisers. Services range from do-it-yourself-online to we-handle-everything-for-you-so-you-don't-have-to-think-about-it. Part of this will often be the production of analyst reports and market forecasts, though this is sometimes outsourced. Proprietary trading is where the bank uses its own money to trade or invest in various securities. This is distinct from investment services in that they do not use client money and thus must be segregated into a different group by law. Finally, there are a slew of random financial services that some banks do and some banks don't. In terms of size, they can be very large (or even dominate) to a rounding error on their books. Everything from trust accounts to credit card issuance, from tax prep to reselling insurance. And really finally, there are a number of internal groups that are specific to banks. Two that come to mind are compliance and risk management. IT often also has quite a large headcount (though often spread out in different business units). Each bank organizes itself somewhat differently so take what I wrote with a grain of salt. Sometimes the same product may even fall under different departments in different countries because of regulatory issues.
- the-dude 7y agoThey will also setup a 74bn 'bad bank' : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/07/07/deutsche-confirms-bad-bank-plan-amid-wider-restructuring/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/07/07/deutsche-con...
- shahbaby 7y agoSoftware developers take note, once we solve AI, we'll be next.
- diminish 7y agoComing Soon : "Show HN : AI React developer for 99USD/month"
- nradov 7y agoOK so we should start worrying in about 100 years then?
- sethammons 7y agoDefine AI. All jobs might be "next." As it stands, the most advanced AI systems in the world won't tell me if it will rain today, but will respond with a weather report, and many voice requests end with, "here are some search results.'
- umvi 7y agoAssuming "AI" is "solvable" That's like saying: "nuclear engineers take note, once we solve cold fusion, we'll be next"
- shahbaby 7y agoCold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction. Solving AI is more like solving flight. Before flight was solved, leading experts believed it would be impossible. Same could be said for the moon landing. Hackernews crowd seems to be in denial about how true AI would make most of them redundant.
- umvi 7y agoUntil we fully understand the human brain, we won't be anywhere near AGI or "true AI" as you call it. Current AGI efforts amount to cargo cult science where experimenters create increasingly vast neural networks and hope some kind of intelligence/consciousness magically emerges. So far "AI" seems to be a combination of if statements, neural networks, and linear algebra - which is great for specialized tasks! But light years away from the way humans can pick an area and self-teach. Believe it or not, not all of HN is atheist either, so that means many people believe the human mind is more than just a biological Turing machine/neural network and that there is some sort of "spirit" or "soul" if you will that accounts for our first person consciousness experience. Hence, without a spirit/soul, you'll never be able to create a conscious computer.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20379842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20379842
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]