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Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

213 points by arcanus 5y ago

cm2187 5y ago
The problem is that if everyone doesn’t come back in the office you just end up spending your time on zoom in an office desk which negates the whole point. Working in a large bank in europe where we observed the same, between a third and half of the staff decline to come back
- ID1452319 5y ago
  The problem is that even if everyone DOES come back to the office, you still end up spending your time on Zoom (or Teams in my case) in an office desk, as you inevitably have meetings with colleagues in different offices, countries or outside companies, suppliers and vendors - which negates the whole point.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
>She often woke up at 4:30 a.m. to drive from her home in New Jersey, catch a bus into Manhattan, hop on the subway, squeeze in a workout and get to Jefferies’ trading floor by 7:30 a.m. Work dinners ran late into the night, and redeye flights to London were common. >For Ms. Batchelor, Jefferies’s new policy means coming in to the office three days a week. Although she plans to travel to meetings when necessary, Ms. Batchelor said she was grateful to spend more time with her children and cut back on her long commute. “I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said. Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes. As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Exactly, click bait nonsense. The thing is that before companies could claim "work won't get done if you aren't in the office". Now that that has been proven false, the are grudgingly trying to keep their employees. Remote work is the new carrot just like healthcare was in WWII.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  Intentional selection bias and cherry picking is a real problem in media and other domains. Waiting to hear all the pieces you want to hear and then weaving them together to create the story you want in others' voices. It makes things seem more legitimate than they are because it is a set of real data, it just happens to be a heavily manipulated and carefully chosen set. It sounds innocent at first because you're not creating false data directly, but you are falsifying the representation of the data which is just as bad if not worse.
- onion2k 5y ago
  As if anyone would believe this person was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. In my experience working with highly motivated, highly paid people they often aren't particularly self-aware or introspective. In their mind it's not a tradeoff; they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hours and said "Yes" to every request from the beginning of their careers. They genuinely don't understand that things could be different. This is why so many businesses are struggling with remote working. They honestly don't get that people can work differently.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    >they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. It was, for the woman in the article. But no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages.
    - coralreef 5y ago
      And no one forced her to take a break and take conscious perspective of how we live our lives. This is a common experience: we all take things for granted or assume that things have to be done a certain way, simply because that's the way we've been doing it for so long.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages Changing career later in life is a risky thing to do, especially if you don't have much in the way of transferable skills. Wanting to avoid poverty isn't quite the same as a "desire to earn high wages". People might know they'd happy on low- or mid-level wages but fearful of ending up with no wages. That's a reasonable concern.
      - saiya-jin 5y ago
        People who work in Manhattan and fly often to London aren't in category of ending in poverty, more like having less paid (but still above average) and less stimulating job. Of course if one has so messed up life priorities that job and life satisfaction coming from it is their #1 concern, way above raising their own kids, then its another of those sad stories later. People are fearful of many things, usually not in very rational or smart way. One thing about being a proper adult (and a good parent) is to understand which fears are real and address them, and which are just some self-illusions because folks can't get their mind straight and sort out themselves and their lives (for the lack of better words).
- smoe 5y ago
  Not that I disagree with the point on journalists behavior, I think while people are to a degree aware of the tradeoffs they are making initially, over time they normalize everything and get basically Stockholm syndromed and peer pressured into their situation. Early in my career I met a manager type guy in his late 30s that prided himself of only having taken a week of vacation in 4 years and was fully convinced that those kind of things are a pre-requisite of success for everyone. He got a lot more relaxed about life a couple years later after divorce and bankruptcy, having to start many things from scratch. So I do buy that people can have a revelation about changing lifestyle, even if initially it was a conscious decision to prioritize career over family.
- toss1 5y ago
  >>Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes. They definitely select the most eye-catching/rolling quotes out of an interview, been there, done that, been astonished at the way the article turned out. That said, however, this is NOT unusual. When I worked at IBM in Manhattan, my manager lived in Poughipse, and woke up at 4:30 every morning to catch the train, slept on the way in, and was in the office before I was, and I lived about 40 blocks away. And he most definitely did NOT make the big banking salary and bonuses. A lot of people want the suburban quality of life for their kids, and were willing to sacrifice a lot for that. Now, seeing that it is unnecessary, they are pushing back. Which is a damn good thing.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- acdha 5y ago
  I don't think that's a fair summation: it's really common for people go with what's familiar without critically examining it and both economics and psychology are rife with studies showing how people make decisions less than purely rationally. Some of the most famous examples are related to that quote above: people buy larger houses thinking about the times they'll use extra amenities while ignoring how infrequently they do so or how much time they're spending every day commuting to where they could afford that wish list, or downplaying how much time they spend commuting because they want to think they have a 45 minute commute rather than an hour and are thus “running late” almost every day, etc. Even very smart people do this kind of thing — I'm thinking of someone I knew who has a math Ph.D. but chronically misjudged their bank account — because they aren't approaching it as a rigorous analytical problem but are just running along on habit, what their peers are doing, and often the stories they tell about how it'll get better once they're further along in their career. If you've been telling yourself that the long hours will get better once you have experience, then that promotion, then at the next job, … it's not hard to just keep doing what you've been doing, especially if you're well paid enough to say it's worth it because you'll retire early.
- protastus 5y ago
  > As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. I believe her. Life doesn't have an open enrollment period every year where you're presented multiple career and lifestyle options, and asked to choose one. Instead, one generally converges into a local optimum and breaking out can involve significant energy and risk. From the perspective of remote work, the pandemic helped a lot of people break out of their local optimum.
- watwut 5y ago
  > As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. 1.) The tradeoff now is different. It changed. 2.) People used to long commute say pretty much same things when they change job. I realized how much easier my life is when working from home during covid too. I can completely relate to "now realizing how much better it is when I save full hour a day and plus can organize my own day as I wish".
mabbo 5y ago
Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. And that's not to detract from either side of that choice. It's just a choice that has to be made. What's going to be more interesting is what this does to the market rate for labor compensation between these two pools. Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent (in the city) or increased time (commuting). Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. If the advantage of face to face is actually significant, then we'll see the remote firms slowly die off. If it's not, then they're going to be here permanently. Or they might just take over.
- macintux 5y ago
  It will be interesting to see whether companies can make a hybrid model work reliably. I tend to think that combining remote with on-site leads to worse results, because it’s easy to leave the remote people out of the loop.
  - murph-almighty 5y ago
    The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.
    - krageon 5y ago
      The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.
chadash 5y ago
While I do think that attitudes towards remote work have fundamentally changed, it'll be interesting to see how things shake out over the next 5-10 years. I suspect that as people start to go into the office more, there will be pressure to do so for your career to advance, in many fields. If your boss's boss works in the office, who is more likely to get a promotion, the person that works from home or the person who goes in and eats lunch with them once a week? In an ideal world, the answer would be "the one who does better work", but we don't live an ideal world.
- krageon 5y ago
  You can have lunch with someone once a week and still work from home. These kinds of issues are not related, it just requires a different attitude and approach to networking within your own company. No matter what, if you are more social you will make more money. It is not required to be in the office to be perceived well by your peers.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    You’re totally right, of course, but there’s a massive power in changing from one default to another. With remote working, the overwhelming default is not “I’ll have a casual lunch with my boss’ boss a couple times a month.” where a 50-person company with everyone on-site, you’re likely to eat with your boss’ boss a couple times a week in the cafe.
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  > as people start to go into the office more, there will be pressure to do so for your career to advance China's "lying flat" movement is already starting to take a hold in the West, and I think as the reality of climate catastrophe and other systemic breakdowns continue to remain visible in the post-pandemic world, there will be an increasingly large number of people that have absolutely zero interest in "career advance". I wouldn't be surprised if everything you say happens for the subset that is still clinging to the fantasy that career can create meaning. However I think this group will represent an increasingly small number of workers, especially in the new generation arriving to the work for now.
lekanwang 5y ago
I'm finding with the teams I'm working with that the junior employees are the ones most impacted by not working from an office, but they often don't realize what they're missing -- the less formal forms of mentorship, stronger community, interacting with more people that's not on their team and in their role, overhearing context, the ability to have a 3-min quick chat with a senior person without a scheduled meeting, and developing that stronger sense of "what good looks like." I'm really concerned that we're going to have a two-tiered system where a bunch of people early in their careers are going to feel stuck in a few years and not even realize why.
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  IMO, This is the biggest problem with WFH. I personally have avoided all internship/development programs since COVID started at my company because I know it will just make my life harder and be frustrating on both sides. We're already starting to feel the effects of the reduced talent pipeline especially as we get deeper into the Great Resignation.
- dsizzle 5y ago
  In my hybrid office, the juniors are also mostly the ones going into the office, so maybe they've appreciated your point. I also observe that they are also the ones hanging out outside the office, so I would guess this is part of it too. Seniors tend to compartmentalize "work friends" vs friend-friends.
- getYeGone 5y ago
  As a junior employee (1 year experience, entirely remote), you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. I've been having a miserable time working remote for all the reasons you've mentioned. It doesn't help that my team seems to really lean into independent work. The biggest thing that I wish I had was more opportunities to learn from senior devs. Now that I feel like I have enough experience to find a new job, I will be looking for a workplace with a strong emphasis on in-person work & collaboration.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
guenthert 5y ago
How well do those, now remote working, bankers understand computer security? How well do those who are not 'best in class'? How high do they prioritize it? That will be the limit IT can strive for. Happy hacking!
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.md/ujxAx https://archive.md/ujxAx
bob331 5y ago
Barclays lost half of my team including me because they wouldn’t go remote. Their loss I got a 50% pay rise
MrPatan 5y ago
I'm waiting for all the studies reinvestigating the height salary and career premium in the age of remote working.
- tuna-piano 5y ago
  I'd love to see a 2019-2021 salary change by height study. Or Zoom interview vs in person interview acceptance rate by height. Did short people benefit more compared to tall people given the remote work+hiring situation?
Animats 5y ago
Wall Street banks posted record profit and revenue during the pandemic, as government stimulus supported consumers stuck at home and companies sought to do deals, proving to bankers and traders that they have little need to work out of the office the way they used to. The attendance numbers are low. The financial industry employs 332,100 people in New York City. In October, only 27 percent of those people came in daily. That says it doesn't make economic sense to bring people back to the office. The executives pushing for that may be the ones on the way out.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Economic sense for the big companies, but probably not for cities and local businesses.
- Sebguer 5y ago
  I mean it's also been a ridiculous bull market completely irrespective of where people are working.
- gutitout 5y ago
  Do the Wall Street banks own the mortgages of the commercial office spaces?
- totalZero 5y ago
  I'm willing to bet that trading desks can make more money in person than working from home, for a given market regime. An astonishing amount of real-time information flies around on a bank's trading floor. If I were a risk manager at one of those banks, I'd want to be as close to that information as possible.
- daniel-thompson 5y ago
  Government stimulus is the main reason there's been a bull market and that's why banks' profits have been through the roof. I'm pretty sure that whether or not bankers worked remotely had little to do with it. When J Powell eventually turns off the money printer, the market is going to pull back, the banks are going to go through leaner times, and the old-school executives in charge of them are going to be in a much stronger position to argue for employees to come back to the office, regardless of the merits.
snicker7 5y ago
I work at a hedge fund. Despite a recent return-to-work mandate, literally no one in my team is in the office. Our job is super stressful and emotionally taxing. Not having wearing to pants makes it somewhat bearable.
- helsinki 5y ago
  Same, except my team is in the office again.
- lvl100 5y ago
  Your job is “super stressful and emotionally taxing?” Why do Wall Streeters always grossly overestimate their jobs? Managing money is really not that hard especially in the past 10 years. Even monkeys can do it.
  - travoc 5y ago
    Monkeys can do it, but can they sell it?
  - noisy_boy 5y ago
    Why did you assume that the person is managing money? They could be a front office developer or support person - having been there, it is indeed stressful when the application is down and angry traders are shouting because they are losing money.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ng12 5y ago
    Why would anyone pay $500k+ a year for a job a monkey can do? Starting a private zoo is certainly cheaper.
golemotron 5y ago
> In the early days, our team experienced the burn that comes with the realities of having a large monorepo ... This severe lag stemmed from having code housed with so many other services — regardless of whether or not the code actually interacted with or affected those other services. Naturally, it quickly became apparent that this model was incapable of supporting an agile, fast-moving company. Google would like a word.
throwaway55421 5y ago
I just wish I could find a 100% normal in person job. Like I had in Feb 2020. I don't want to work from home. I don't want to interact with others through a screen. Zoom calls are like torture to me. I don't want to spend all of my time in the same place. I want to go to work on the Tube, have lunch and go to the pub with my colleagues, and then go home. I think video work is another thing we'll just regret in 10 years time, like how social media and the Internet fucked up communities. A sugar high for some, and then a crash.
- cheeze 5y ago
  I find that I agree. I like living downtown in a city and walking into the office. I don't care that rent is higher. I'd be living here regardless. For me, the biggest thing is that I feel bad when I'm not fully productive at home. Half hour lunch break feels long, and I end up feeling guilty if I don't get enough done. When I'm in the office? Hell yeah I'm taking an hour lunch, possibly longer with some coworkers. We'll have random concersations and shoot the shit about life, work, etc. I am much happier in the office. I hate remote. It's okay that some folks like it, more power to them. But I want to be in the office with coworkers who have to as well.
- halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  That’s great for you and I hope you find that but there’s an entire class of us who are sick of 1+ hour commutes, inane “water cooler” conversation that goes nowhere and just want to do work. Work for me is not an extension of my social life, it is how I provide for my family and support my social life outside of work. We’ve waited for ages for WFH to be normalized and I hope that this trend continues.
  - throwaway55421 5y ago
    So you're poor and live miles away from everything. I don't see why we should optimize life around this but meh. You do you, I guess. I already quit so w/e.
theonlybutlet 5y ago
The bankers I'm very sure want a return as it's easier to squeeze those additional unpaid long hours out of staff when they're working in the office.

213 points by arcanus 5y ago

The problem is that if everyone doesn’t come back in the office you just end up spending your time on zoom in an office desk which negates the whole point. Working in a large bank in europe where we observed the same, between a third and half of the staff decline to come back

ID1452319 5y ago
The problem is that even if everyone DOES come back to the office, you still end up spending your time on Zoom (or Teams in my case) in an office desk, as you inevitably have meetings with colleagues in different offices, countries or outside companies, suppliers and vendors - which negates the whole point.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

>She often woke up at 4:30 a.m. to drive from her home in New Jersey, catch a bus into Manhattan, hop on the subway, squeeze in a workout and get to Jefferies’ trading floor by 7:30 a.m. Work dinners ran late into the night, and redeye flights to London were common. >For Ms. Batchelor, Jefferies’s new policy means coming in to the office three days a week. Although she plans to travel to meetings when necessary, Ms. Batchelor said she was grateful to spend more time with her children and cut back on her long commute. “I didn’t know what I was missing,” she said. Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes. As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.

snarf21 5y ago
Exactly, click bait nonsense. The thing is that before companies could claim "work won't get done if you aren't in the office". Now that that has been proven false, the are grudgingly trying to keep their employees. Remote work is the new carrot just like healthcare was in WWII.
Frost1x 5y ago
Intentional selection bias and cherry picking is a real problem in media and other domains. Waiting to hear all the pieces you want to hear and then weaving them together to create the story you want in others' voices. It makes things seem more legitimate than they are because it is a set of real data, it just happens to be a heavily manipulated and carefully chosen set. It sounds innocent at first because you're not creating false data directly, but you are falsifying the representation of the data which is just as bad if not worse.
onion2k 5y ago
As if anyone would believe this person was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. In my experience working with highly motivated, highly paid people they often aren't particularly self-aware or introspective. In their mind it's not a tradeoff; they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. I suspect this is due to the fact that they've worked long hours and said "Yes" to every request from the beginning of their careers. They genuinely don't understand that things could be different. This is why so many businesses are struggling with remote working. They honestly don't get that people can work differently.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  >they usually believe that every job in their industry is like theirs. It was, for the woman in the article. But no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages.
  - coralreef 5y ago
    And no one forced her to take a break and take conscious perspective of how we live our lives. This is a common experience: we all take things for granted or assume that things have to be done a certain way, simply because that's the way we've been doing it for so long.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    no one forces them to be in that industry, other than their desire to earn high wages Changing career later in life is a risky thing to do, especially if you don't have much in the way of transferable skills. Wanting to avoid poverty isn't quite the same as a "desire to earn high wages". People might know they'd happy on low- or mid-level wages but fearful of ending up with no wages. That's a reasonable concern.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      People who work in Manhattan and fly often to London aren't in category of ending in poverty, more like having less paid (but still above average) and less stimulating job. Of course if one has so messed up life priorities that job and life satisfaction coming from it is their #1 concern, way above raising their own kids, then its another of those sad stories later. People are fearful of many things, usually not in very rational or smart way. One thing about being a proper adult (and a good parent) is to understand which fears are real and address them, and which are just some self-illusions because folks can't get their mind straight and sort out themselves and their lives (for the lack of better words).
smoe 5y ago
Not that I disagree with the point on journalists behavior, I think while people are to a degree aware of the tradeoffs they are making initially, over time they normalize everything and get basically Stockholm syndromed and peer pressured into their situation. Early in my career I met a manager type guy in his late 30s that prided himself of only having taken a week of vacation in 4 years and was fully convinced that those kind of things are a pre-requisite of success for everyone. He got a lot more relaxed about life a couple years later after divorce and bankruptcy, having to start many things from scratch. So I do buy that people can have a revelation about changing lifestyle, even if initially it was a conscious decision to prioritize career over family.
toss1 5y ago
>>Sometimes I wonder if journalists compete to get the most eye rolling quotes. They definitely select the most eye-catching/rolling quotes out of an interview, been there, done that, been astonished at the way the article turned out. That said, however, this is NOT unusual. When I worked at IBM in Manhattan, my manager lived in Poughipse, and woke up at 4:30 every morning to catch the train, slept on the way in, and was in the office before I was, and I lived about 40 blocks away. And he most definitely did NOT make the big banking salary and bonuses. A lot of people want the suburban quality of life for their kids, and were willing to sacrifice a lot for that. Now, seeing that it is unnecessary, they are pushing back. Which is a damn good thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
acdha 5y ago
I don't think that's a fair summation: it's really common for people go with what's familiar without critically examining it and both economics and psychology are rife with studies showing how people make decisions less than purely rationally. Some of the most famous examples are related to that quote above: people buy larger houses thinking about the times they'll use extra amenities while ignoring how infrequently they do so or how much time they're spending every day commuting to where they could afford that wish list, or downplaying how much time they spend commuting because they want to think they have a 45 minute commute rather than an hour and are thus “running late” almost every day, etc. Even very smart people do this kind of thing — I'm thinking of someone I knew who has a math Ph.D. but chronically misjudged their bank account — because they aren't approaching it as a rigorous analytical problem but are just running along on habit, what their peers are doing, and often the stories they tell about how it'll get better once they're further along in their career. If you've been telling yourself that the long hours will get better once you have experience, then that promotion, then at the next job, … it's not hard to just keep doing what you've been doing, especially if you're well paid enough to say it's worth it because you'll retire early.
protastus 5y ago
> As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. I believe her. Life doesn't have an open enrollment period every year where you're presented multiple career and lifestyle options, and asked to choose one. Instead, one generally converges into a local optimum and breaking out can involve significant energy and risk. From the perspective of remote work, the pandemic helped a lot of people break out of their local optimum.
watwut 5y ago
> As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay. 1.) The tradeoff now is different. It changed. 2.) People used to long commute say pretty much same things when they change job. I realized how much easier my life is when working from home during covid too. I can completely relate to "now realizing how much better it is when I save full hour a day and plus can organize my own day as I wish".

mabbo 5y ago

Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't. And that's not to detract from either side of that choice. It's just a choice that has to be made. What's going to be more interesting is what this does to the market rate for labor compensation between these two pools. Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent (in the city) or increased time (commuting). Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. If the advantage of face to face is actually significant, then we'll see the remote firms slowly die off. If it's not, then they're going to be here permanently. Or they might just take over.

macintux 5y ago
It will be interesting to see whether companies can make a hybrid model work reliably. I tend to think that combining remote with on-site leads to worse results, because it’s easy to leave the remote people out of the loop.
- murph-almighty 5y ago
  The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.
  - krageon 5y ago
    The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.

chadash 5y ago

While I do think that attitudes towards remote work have fundamentally changed, it'll be interesting to see how things shake out over the next 5-10 years. I suspect that as people start to go into the office more, there will be pressure to do so for your career to advance, in many fields. If your boss's boss works in the office, who is more likely to get a promotion, the person that works from home or the person who goes in and eats lunch with them once a week? In an ideal world, the answer would be "the one who does better work", but we don't live an ideal world.

krageon 5y ago
You can have lunch with someone once a week and still work from home. These kinds of issues are not related, it just requires a different attitude and approach to networking within your own company. No matter what, if you are more social you will make more money. It is not required to be in the office to be perceived well by your peers.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  You’re totally right, of course, but there’s a massive power in changing from one default to another. With remote working, the overwhelming default is not “I’ll have a casual lunch with my boss’ boss a couple times a month.” where a 50-person company with everyone on-site, you’re likely to eat with your boss’ boss a couple times a week in the cafe.
time_to_smile 5y ago
> as people start to go into the office more, there will be pressure to do so for your career to advance China's "lying flat" movement is already starting to take a hold in the West, and I think as the reality of climate catastrophe and other systemic breakdowns continue to remain visible in the post-pandemic world, there will be an increasingly large number of people that have absolutely zero interest in "career advance". I wouldn't be surprised if everything you say happens for the subset that is still clinging to the fantasy that career can create meaning. However I think this group will represent an increasingly small number of workers, especially in the new generation arriving to the work for now.

lekanwang 5y ago

I'm finding with the teams I'm working with that the junior employees are the ones most impacted by not working from an office, but they often don't realize what they're missing -- the less formal forms of mentorship, stronger community, interacting with more people that's not on their team and in their role, overhearing context, the ability to have a 3-min quick chat with a senior person without a scheduled meeting, and developing that stronger sense of "what good looks like." I'm really concerned that we're going to have a two-tiered system where a bunch of people early in their careers are going to feel stuck in a few years and not even realize why.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
IMO, This is the biggest problem with WFH. I personally have avoided all internship/development programs since COVID started at my company because I know it will just make my life harder and be frustrating on both sides. We're already starting to feel the effects of the reduced talent pipeline especially as we get deeper into the Great Resignation.
dsizzle 5y ago
In my hybrid office, the juniors are also mostly the ones going into the office, so maybe they've appreciated your point. I also observe that they are also the ones hanging out outside the office, so I would guess this is part of it too. Seniors tend to compartmentalize "work friends" vs friend-friends.
getYeGone 5y ago
As a junior employee (1 year experience, entirely remote), you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. I've been having a miserable time working remote for all the reasons you've mentioned. It doesn't help that my team seems to really lean into independent work. The biggest thing that I wish I had was more opportunities to learn from senior devs. Now that I feel like I have enough experience to find a new job, I will be looking for a workplace with a strong emphasis on in-person work & collaboration.
- Gigachad 5y ago

guenthert 5y ago

How well do those, now remote working, bankers understand computer security? How well do those who are not 'best in class'? How high do they prioritize it? That will be the limit IT can strive for. Happy hacking!

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.md/ujxAx https://archive.md/ujxAx

bob331 5y ago

Barclays lost half of my team including me because they wouldn’t go remote. Their loss I got a 50% pay rise

MrPatan 5y ago

I'm waiting for all the studies reinvestigating the height salary and career premium in the age of remote working.

tuna-piano 5y ago
I'd love to see a 2019-2021 salary change by height study. Or Zoom interview vs in person interview acceptance rate by height. Did short people benefit more compared to tall people given the remote work+hiring situation?

Animats 5y ago

Wall Street banks posted record profit and revenue during the pandemic, as government stimulus supported consumers stuck at home and companies sought to do deals, proving to bankers and traders that they have little need to work out of the office the way they used to. The attendance numbers are low. The financial industry employs 332,100 people in New York City. In October, only 27 percent of those people came in daily. That says it doesn't make economic sense to bring people back to the office. The executives pushing for that may be the ones on the way out.

dillondoyle 5y ago
Economic sense for the big companies, but probably not for cities and local businesses.
Sebguer 5y ago
I mean it's also been a ridiculous bull market completely irrespective of where people are working.
gutitout 5y ago
Do the Wall Street banks own the mortgages of the commercial office spaces?
totalZero 5y ago
I'm willing to bet that trading desks can make more money in person than working from home, for a given market regime. An astonishing amount of real-time information flies around on a bank's trading floor. If I were a risk manager at one of those banks, I'd want to be as close to that information as possible.
daniel-thompson 5y ago
Government stimulus is the main reason there's been a bull market and that's why banks' profits have been through the roof. I'm pretty sure that whether or not bankers worked remotely had little to do with it. When J Powell eventually turns off the money printer, the market is going to pull back, the banks are going to go through leaner times, and the old-school executives in charge of them are going to be in a much stronger position to argue for employees to come back to the office, regardless of the merits.

snicker7 5y ago

I work at a hedge fund. Despite a recent return-to-work mandate, literally no one in my team is in the office. Our job is super stressful and emotionally taxing. Not having wearing to pants makes it somewhat bearable.

helsinki 5y ago
Same, except my team is in the office again.
lvl100 5y ago
Your job is “super stressful and emotionally taxing?” Why do Wall Streeters always grossly overestimate their jobs? Managing money is really not that hard especially in the past 10 years. Even monkeys can do it.
- travoc 5y ago
  Monkeys can do it, but can they sell it?
- noisy_boy 5y ago
  Why did you assume that the person is managing money? They could be a front office developer or support person - having been there, it is indeed stressful when the application is down and angry traders are shouting because they are losing money.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ng12 5y ago
  Why would anyone pay $500k+ a year for a job a monkey can do? Starting a private zoo is certainly cheaper.

golemotron 5y ago

> In the early days, our team experienced the burn that comes with the realities of having a large monorepo ... This severe lag stemmed from having code housed with so many other services — regardless of whether or not the code actually interacted with or affected those other services. Naturally, it quickly became apparent that this model was incapable of supporting an agile, fast-moving company. Google would like a word.

throwaway55421 5y ago

I just wish I could find a 100% normal in person job. Like I had in Feb 2020. I don't want to work from home. I don't want to interact with others through a screen. Zoom calls are like torture to me. I don't want to spend all of my time in the same place. I want to go to work on the Tube, have lunch and go to the pub with my colleagues, and then go home. I think video work is another thing we'll just regret in 10 years time, like how social media and the Internet fucked up communities. A sugar high for some, and then a crash.

cheeze 5y ago
I find that I agree. I like living downtown in a city and walking into the office. I don't care that rent is higher. I'd be living here regardless. For me, the biggest thing is that I feel bad when I'm not fully productive at home. Half hour lunch break feels long, and I end up feeling guilty if I don't get enough done. When I'm in the office? Hell yeah I'm taking an hour lunch, possibly longer with some coworkers. We'll have random concersations and shoot the shit about life, work, etc. I am much happier in the office. I hate remote. It's okay that some folks like it, more power to them. But I want to be in the office with coworkers who have to as well.
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
That’s great for you and I hope you find that but there’s an entire class of us who are sick of 1+ hour commutes, inane “water cooler” conversation that goes nowhere and just want to do work. Work for me is not an extension of my social life, it is how I provide for my family and support my social life outside of work. We’ve waited for ages for WFH to be normalized and I hope that this trend continues.
- throwaway55421 5y ago
  So you're poor and live miles away from everything. I don't see why we should optimize life around this but meh. You do you, I guess. I already quit so w/e.

theonlybutlet 5y ago

The bankers I'm very sure want a return as it's easier to squeeze those additional unpaid long hours out of staff when they're working in the office.