8 ms·

Goldman Sachs: Bank boss rejects work from home as the 'new normal'

36 points by catchmilk 6y ago

llampx 6y ago
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.
- bottled_poe 6y ago
  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.
  - Agingcoder 6y ago
    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.
    - bottled_poe 6y ago
      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.
      - tankenmate 6y ago
        Anyone wondering what GS is doing now with property ETFs? Obviously this is pure speculation, but... GS have form so... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3goSYkVPNE&t=338 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3goSYkVPNE&t=338
  - anothernewdude 6y ago
    WFH is remuneration - being able to move to a cheaper area can offer an effective 2x or 3x pay increase.
    - bottled_poe 6y ago
      Valid, but see my reply to the other comment about local hiring
  - eertami 6y ago
    >Financial remuneration is surely the primary factor Personally, I wouldn't quit WFH even if someone offered to triple my salary to come work in an office.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      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.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > 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.
- bennyp101 6y ago
  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. (I could be be way off the mark here)
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    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
    - bennyp101 6y ago
      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
      - robjan 6y ago
        You're not too far off it though. The people I know in back office roles at GS tend to have a better work-life balance than most other people I know.
- jboog 6y ago
  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.
- twelve40 6y ago
  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.
  - shdhdmashmash 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
bennyp101 6y ago
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.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  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 The management of Revolut are 100x as psychotic as the Partners at Goldman. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-fintech-politics-storonsky https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavirus https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavir...
christmm 6y ago
who would have guessed that a Goldman Sachs Boss, would have showed this level of common sense in these troubling times
- jmeister 6y ago
  Banks get BS-tested in the market every microsecond. They need to have extraordinary levels of common-sense by necessity.
alibarber 6y ago
Whilst all this work from home is nice and lovely and whatever, for me I still struggle to overlook this cynical fact: 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.
- pram 6y ago
  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.
  - voisin 6y ago
    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.
  - yitchelle 6y ago
    Congrats on your setup. I am struggling to get a similar workspace myself, but I constraint by money, space and family situations.
  - forlorn 6y ago
    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.
  - alibarber 6y ago
    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.
Paulster0031 6y ago
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. https://www.ft.com/content/84adb5a4-2e53-11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3c95 https://www.ft.com/content/84adb5a4-2e53-11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3...
- dkdbejwi383 6y ago
  Baffles me that anyone would want to live like this. The sooner this bizarre culture dies out, the better.
  - bottled_poe 6y ago
    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.
  - braveyellowtoad 6y ago
    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.
    - partingshots 6y ago
      Tech pays so much more though, and you don’t have to kill yourself either for it? (genuinely can’t imagine doing 80-100 hour work weeks) IBD is a dead meme at this point in my opinion. Like how being a lawyer used to be the most lucrative career path.
apples_oranges 6y ago
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.
drenvuk 6y ago
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.
- ozim 6y ago
  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.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    I would like to hope this is true. 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.
_cs2017_ 6y ago
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?
obayesshelton 6y ago
I think this goes for most companies, I enjoy working from home but I miss the office and the culture during and after work. I will be doing a hybrid.
- cholantesh 6y ago
  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.
myspy 6y ago
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.
dustinmoris 6y ago
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.
andrejserafim 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
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.
OJFord 6y ago
Also via Bloomberg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260913
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
celerrimus 6y ago
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.
EdwinLarkin 6y ago
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.
pdimitar 6y ago
Yeah, he wishes. 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).

36 points by catchmilk 6y ago

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.

bottled_poe 6y ago
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.
- Agingcoder 6y ago
  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.
  - bottled_poe 6y ago
    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.
    - tankenmate 6y ago
      Anyone wondering what GS is doing now with property ETFs? Obviously this is pure speculation, but... GS have form so... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3goSYkVPNE&t=338 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3goSYkVPNE&t=338
- anothernewdude 6y ago
  WFH is remuneration - being able to move to a cheaper area can offer an effective 2x or 3x pay increase.
  - bottled_poe 6y ago
    Valid, but see my reply to the other comment about local hiring
- eertami 6y ago
  >Financial remuneration is surely the primary factor Personally, I wouldn't quit WFH even if someone offered to triple my salary to come work in an office.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    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.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> 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.
bennyp101 6y ago
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. (I could be be way off the mark here)
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  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
  - bennyp101 6y ago
    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
    - robjan 6y ago
      You're not too far off it though. The people I know in back office roles at GS tend to have a better work-life balance than most other people I know.
jboog 6y ago
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.
twelve40 6y ago
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.
- shdhdmashmash 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

bennyp101 6y ago

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.

goatinaboat 6y ago
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 The management of Revolut are 100x as psychotic as the Partners at Goldman. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-fintech-politics-storonsky https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavirus https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavir...

christmm 6y ago

who would have guessed that a Goldman Sachs Boss, would have showed this level of common sense in these troubling times

jmeister 6y ago
Banks get BS-tested in the market every microsecond. They need to have extraordinary levels of common-sense by necessity.

alibarber 6y ago

Whilst all this work from home is nice and lovely and whatever, for me I still struggle to overlook this cynical fact: 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.

pram 6y ago
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.
- voisin 6y ago
  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.
- yitchelle 6y ago
  Congrats on your setup. I am struggling to get a similar workspace myself, but I constraint by money, space and family situations.
- forlorn 6y ago
  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.
- alibarber 6y ago
  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.

Paulster0031 6y ago

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. https://www.ft.com/content/84adb5a4-2e53-11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3c95 https://www.ft.com/content/84adb5a4-2e53-11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3...

dkdbejwi383 6y ago
Baffles me that anyone would want to live like this. The sooner this bizarre culture dies out, the better.
- bottled_poe 6y ago
  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.
- braveyellowtoad 6y ago
  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.
  - partingshots 6y ago
    Tech pays so much more though, and you don’t have to kill yourself either for it? (genuinely can’t imagine doing 80-100 hour work weeks) IBD is a dead meme at this point in my opinion. Like how being a lawyer used to be the most lucrative career path.

apples_oranges 6y ago

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.

drenvuk 6y ago

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.

ozim 6y ago
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.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  I would like to hope this is true. 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.

_cs2017_ 6y ago

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?

obayesshelton 6y ago

I think this goes for most companies, I enjoy working from home but I miss the office and the culture during and after work. I will be doing a hybrid.

cholantesh 6y ago
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.

myspy 6y ago

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.

dustinmoris 6y ago

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.

andrejserafim 6y ago

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.

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say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

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.

OJFord 6y ago

Also via Bloomberg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26260913

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celerrimus 6y ago

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.

EdwinLarkin 6y ago

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.

pdimitar 6y ago

Yeah, he wishes. 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).