23 ms·

CEO demanded all employees return full-time to the office. Only half showed up

201 points by rustoo 5y ago

eatonphil 5y ago
CEO (of Goldman Sachs).
- tough 5y ago
HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
[dead]
ChoGGi 5y ago
10 000 workers and "includes hiring some 3,000 new college graduates every year," Sounds like a bit of churn happens?
- mushufasa 5y ago
  Yes -- cravath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System
  - richardfey 5y ago
    "Cravath" reminds me of this scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7m388YypnEA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7m388YypnEA
- le-mark 5y ago
  To expand the quote; > graduates every year, who learn from experienced bankers and build networks face-to-face. The experience also encourages teamwork, which is central to the firm’s culture I’m pretty sure the result is not teamwork!
- sdenton4 5y ago
  Every year you make trades and flip a coin. If it's heads you're in another year, if it's trails, you're fired. It takes a lot of churn to get a time tested leader.
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    Goldman doesn't really do a lot of proprietary trading since the '08 crash.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Yes, intentionally so. In many areas of finance, two years at Goldman is roughly equivalent experience to an ivy-league MBA.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  When they say 'hiring' college graduates they mean interns. Because they do pay interns (rather well I might add). It's not the same as churn of permanent employees.
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  In the early 80s, bulge bracket investment banks figured out that they can just hire hungry and ambitious analysts straight out of college, work them to the bone for 1-2-3 years, and then send most of them off to grad/business school or somewhere else. That's why, IMO, jr. investment bankers work such horrendous hours. They know it's a temporary thing, and that the real payoff comes later.
- ec109685 5y ago
  The building referenced in the article holds 10k workers. The firm hires 3k workers / year.
- fnordpiglet 5y ago
aingisni_del 5y ago
Startups will soon follow suit, since GS is a major investor. It's sad that none of the infrastructure was improved during the isolation/quarantine periods, and now we're going back full force and wasting billions in wasted commute time.
- manuelabeledo 5y ago
  > Startups will soon follow suit, since GS is a major investor. I don’t see this happening. GS interests in real estate and churning finance folk in and out, have nothing to do with their riskier investment priorities. Also, GS is not a major player in the venture capital landscape.
  - jupp0r 5y ago
    Also, angel investors have much more influence than VC in how startup culture is set up initially. Once in the VC funding phase, it's too late to tell all key employees to move to commuting distance from main HQ.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  The infrastructure wasn't improved? Pretty much all of the video conferencing tools are much better and tools that didn't have screen sharing & video calls added it. Plus the vast majority of people have actually used those tools now. Pre-pandemic group video calls existed via Teams but a lot of people never used them. I doubt GS's internal culture applies to any startups... not every company needs an apprenticeship culture and it would be a large capital and time expense for startups. GS's model is very different (IIRC), hire a lot of young talent out of premier institutions, then see who's left after 2+ years of 50+ work hour weeks.
  - krainboltgreene 5y ago
    > The infrastructure wasn't improved? Pretty much all of the video conferencing tools are much better and tools that didn't have screen sharing & video calls added it. It's very HN to think infrastructure is "zoom" and not the implied: internet, housing, roads, power.
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
- oblak 5y ago
  No doubt part of problem but it looks more organized to me. There has to be a lot of money involved. Organized wasteful behaviours are often about money, since nothing else would make sense.
funstuff007 5y ago
When the labor market turns, 100% of employees will be doing 100% of what the CEO demands. Right now, labor has the upper hand.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bfostbfostbfost 5y ago
  I’m not asking you to predict the future, though that would be awesome, but could you share some thoughts on when/how the labor market turning might unfold?
  - rocgf 5y ago
    I'm not OP, though I see that he's among the few that shares this opinion of mine. Take what I'm saying with a gigantic grain of salt because I am not some economist. We have had 10 years+ of quantitative easing both in the US and in Europe, with it all peaking during the last 2 years due to Covid. This has delivered an aritificial stimulus to the economy in the form of basically free money. This has had a lot of consequences, including the craziness in the housing market & stock market, as well as a huge influx of money that went into other investments like startups, expansions and so on. Basically, in simpler terms, everybody could easily get money because money has been very cheap. We are now starting to see the side-effects (of an otherwise arguably good thing) in the form of inflation. So the greater powers are now at a fork in the road - they either allow inflation to wreck the working and middle class or they turn off the money tap. The problem is that after living for so long with 0% interest rates, any significant change to this might trigger a recession that will make 2008 look like the good times. I started my career after 2008, so I have only ever experienced an environment in which employeers were heavily competing for engineers (and generally workforce in all professions), so I'm afraid that anyone in a position similar to mine has simply no way of realizing the way things will look a few years from now. Unless I'm seriously missing something of substance, then I'm afraid that there will be quite a few years in which people will lose homes, jobs, sanity and us privileged developers are maybe in a better position than most, but make no mistake - we will all suffer.
gnicholas 5y ago
One possible reason for wanting GS employees back in-person: it's much easier to avoid putting things in writing when you can just walk down the hall. There's probably a lot of stuff they don't want on email/Slack/etc.
- fotta 5y ago
  Isn’t that what video calls are for? Whenever I want to talk to someone and not leave a paper trail I get on a call.
  - nerdawson 5y ago
    Can you be certain those calls aren’t being saved, whether by a party on the call or the underlying service in use?
    - ac29 5y ago
      In many places, including where I live, its illegal to record calls without the consent of all parties on the call. If they are being illegally saved (certainly possible), nothing in them would be admissible in court.
      - ozim 5y ago
        There is whole range of conversations that would never end up in court but if they are recorded can bring a lot of trouble.
      - pests 5y ago
        Where I live, you only need consent of one person (ie: ypu self). But then it changes when you are using company tools. Teams can be configured to automatically record all conversations. The consent is baked into your employment agreement.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    those calls are easily recorded on the server, your speech transcribed with reasonable accuracy and searchable. Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams offer the live transcribe. Whatever it is, it isn't for 'off the books' conversations.
soupfordummies 5y ago
My aunt has been working at a huge company for over 30 years, remote for like 20. The company recently decided everyone had to come back no exceptions, even her. So she’s retiring.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  IBM?
louwrentius 5y ago
I wonder if people working in finance can move as easily as IT people towards a job that does support (partial) remote work. If so, this decision may turn out to be a liability. Obviously, Goldman Sachs is a big name that may make people put up with this stuff, but still.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  Yeah, half those people probably love putting on a dress shirt and feeling fancy about walking into a Goldman office. The thing is, it just takes a toll on you long term. This battle is not rooted in those who like remote and those who don’t. This battle has been fought a long time ago between K-12 and College. In K—12, you are under strict rules to show up on time for every class, 5 days a week, where attendance is taken. Every week for over a decade, and your best chance of escaping it is a snow day or a wonderful sick day. Then you get to college and everyone says ‘enough of the nonsense’, you are free. Your obligation is to pass the class, whether that be by showing up to every lecture or just a few, whether you eat at the cafeteria every day or travel a few blocks to a restaurant. It’s a matter of freedom. Covid was a black swan event that forced everyone for a second time to ‘cut the nonsense’, and ask ‘what is work really?’. Work is work that gets done. If work getting done is the measuring stick, then what is the superfluous push to add additional work? The commute, the banter, the office theatrics (yes, believe it or not I don’t work past lunch, even in the office - I’m staring blankly at the fucking screen). You want to keep the bullshit going?
mkl95 5y ago
Sounds like all those Goldman Sachs employees have some decent leverage. It must be easy to switch jobs if you have worked there for a while.
batmaniam 5y ago
I don't get it. Isn't the covid virus still out there? It only takes one infection to mutate into another strain, one infection to pass it onto many other members of a community, one infection to cause long-lasting damage to your body. Why is policy to go back to the office? That's going to guarantee viral spread. Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed? This policy makes no sense to me.
- ghiculescu 5y ago
  By that logic you will never go back to the office, because the virus will never be entirely eradicated everywhere in the world.
  - richardfey 5y ago
    Has WHO or CDC declared the pandemic as over?
    - spiderice 5y ago
      I think the WHO and CDC have to do a lot of trust building over a lot of years if they want people to start taking them seriously again. I'm glad I'm living in a state that isn't waiting for the CDC to tell us that we can start living our lives again.
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        Most people still take them seriously. The fact that there are entire states that do not speaks more to the leadership of those states than to either the WHO or the CDC. Between the two options, I would certainly trust an epidemiologist over an elected politician on the topic of epidemiology, and I have a hard time understanding the cognitive dissonance that allows people to get to a state of "we have to trust our governor because governments lie." It's not like the governor isn't part of the government.
        5y ago
KaiserPro 5y ago
I really don't understand the militancy of both sides. Some people like the office, some people can't abide it. A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls. I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy. I don't think the future is fully remote _for everyone_, because fundamentally we are social people. On the flip side, I don't think full office 5 days a week is going to be the future either (caveats apply.) The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.
- temp8964 5y ago
  I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, about general stuff or potential new projects. If you go remote, you are going to fully lose this kind of opportunities. Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, Why? I can chat with my boss, he can share with me ideas he he has and I can give my opinion.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      You mean in person or in text message?
    - lastofthemojito 5y ago
      Not the commenter you replied to, but I think my personality is such that I chat casually with my in-group and am a perfectionist with communication with outsiders. Back when I worked in-person, I had daily informal communication with lots of teammates as well as my boss. Since I got a new remote job during the pandemic, I tend to only reach out to those I work most closely with (just a couple of people). Certainly there's nothing actually stopping me from opening a new Teams message to my boss or other teammates and saying "hey, how's life?", but in practice, I don't. It's almost as if most of my team are now "outsiders" who I'm very deliberate messaging, rather than the in-group who I feel comfortable bantering with. It's something I'm aware of and am working on, but I definitely don't have the same level of intra-team communication now as I had pre-pandemic.
barrenko 5y ago
Ain't gonna happen. Resignation is only starting.
- rocgf 5y ago
  In the short-term this may be the case, but the party that we've had due to massive QE is close to ending. We're in an employee's market now, and my guess is that it will turn into an employer's market quite quickly.
  - barrenko 5y ago
    Not sure, I really think we are in the first inning of wfh & further transitions.
    - rocgf 5y ago
      The only reason you can refuse working from the office is the fac that you can simply walk out the door and find another job somewhere else. If this very fragile fact changes, the workers will do whatever the employeers want. Maybe employers will also prefer WFH, but my predicition is that many of them will not.
      - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        When’s this changing? I get 30 inquiries a week for more remote work, there’s 0 chance this changes anytime soon.
        d13 5y ago
        And that’s been my reality for the past 10 years.
      - jupp0r 5y ago
        The only reason you can find another job somewhere else easily is because there are so many remote positions open. There is a balance somewhere and it doesn't look like it's going to favor local employers without remote flexibility.
nine_zeros 5y ago
Here's an idea. Pay employees a special annual bonus - say $30k to come into the office. Management can choose to to forgo part of their own bonuses if money is hard to come by (which is not true in the case of GS)
unpopularopp 5y ago
Yeah but this is the finance sector so more understandable. Like my partner works for one of these companies on the Wall Street and there are so many regulations, compliance etc. that a regular SV startup never comes to close and WFH just made everything more complicated and less secure.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  But whatever setup they've had has been working for two years...
- x1ph0z 5y ago
  I mean wealth simple exists, so does TD. Plenty of finance companies allow WFH.
alecco 5y ago
I think people are missing the point. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks are working just fine remotely. This looks more like Goldman CEO is desperately trying to give a hand to help Manhattan not die. Good luck with that.
- kbelder 5y ago
  Yep. CEO and Mayor had a chat, because Mayor is worried about tax bases, and CEO said "sure, I'll bring'em back in." Maybe a hint at favors, but probably just part of the wholesale giving-of-gifts that circulate at those levels. I doubt the question of productivity, team-building, communication, were even briefly considered as part of the initial decision. Those would all be post-hock rationalizations. Just my guess.
Animats 5y ago
The pandemic isn't over. Look at the graphs.[1] Still around 1,500 deaths a day in the US, day after day. "Real America" may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with Real America. Something funny is going on in a few states. In most states, as case rates decline, so do deaths, a few weeks later. In Florida. Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, reported cases are way down, but reported deaths are climbing. [1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=zaf&areas=grc&areas=hun&areas=gbr&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usdc&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ussc&areasRegional=usca&cumulative=0&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2021-06-01&values=deaths https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
- tptacek 5y ago
  It isn't, and immunocompromised employees should meet no resistance when continuing to work from home, but it's unclear that we're at a point in the pandemic (or have been, for many months) where avoiding office work is a meaningful intervention for slowing transmission. We sort of axiomatically assume that avoiding offices must slow the spread, but the epidemiological evidence for it --- for any kind of social distancing --- is very weak (unlike, say, increasing vaccination). That's not to say those kinds of NPIs weren't very important at earlier phases of the pandemic.
  - lokar 5y ago
    IMO that's because people still go out to restaurants and bars and gatherings in others homes. If you do that stuff, you might as well go into the office.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      No, that seems unlikely; you can compare outcomes for otherwise-similar counties where people go to restaurants at near pre-pandemic rates, and others where they don't. Like I said, the epidemiological evidence for NPIs at this point is very weak. Similar comparisons show powerful evidence for the effectiveness of vaccinations.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
Fuhrer01 5y ago
Only solution is to leave GS
crmrc114 5y ago
Going to be honest my company has a gen x CEO, and mostly gen xyz staff. Our awesome boomers did have some trouble adjusting to remote. I am sure is one hell of a shock for a generation to go from using checkbooks and cash with party lines that were shared with nearby houses to ubiquitous communications and kids who grew up in BFE Texas having best friends they have never met face-to-face in Finland and the Australia. The idea you cant be successful being remote is poppycock. I have been promoted twice during covid as a manager at that- I check in with my teammates at least once a week, they call me for 5min huddles when they need to chat. When your generation was raised with bbs's/IRC/AIM is any of this really that abnormal? Going to be an ageist here, but I think it's foolhardy to claim that remote is as easy for boomers and centenarians as it is for xyz. I think we are seeing a shift in workplace demographics and that is fueling a new normal for work. It's not bad, it's just evolution. My boomer mom loves her remote work now that she has been doing it because she has better interactions with her team. And like me, her office was already global with remote locations everywhere. Mileages may vary, we are all figuring this world out and riding the tiger. I won't go back to a physical office neither will she- if asked she said "I'll just fucking retire" so I think the seas have shifted anyone trying to push for full on-prem IS going to lose resources. When I hear this honestly I think of some crusty old out of touch manager who still uses a paper desk calendar.
- watwut 5y ago
  This is quite odd take given that everywhere I see, young people want to go to office and older one are happier home. While yes, older ones are more afraid of hybrid setup ending up punishing workers from home, because that pattern was visible even before pandemic. However, everyone at home thing was awesome for middle aged people with families or hobbies.
  - jupp0r 5y ago
    It is maybe because "young people" are fresh grads in their twenties without families and "older ones" are people in their late 30s?
    - 5y ago
kkfx 5y ago
IMVHO People should reason about https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ and about the fact that we work to live, not live to work. From that the target is neither WFO or WFO but work less to still have more. In that sense we should/must tend to what makes us feel better. If WFH works for that than we should go for it, if not we should not. The world is not that big, but also not that little, there is room for diversity, not only: diversity is the engine of evolution, we do things differently and compare the outcome in a constantly improving manner, a thing all dictator hate because let people see different worlds instead of "there is no alternative", "we are in the sole and unique possible system" etc but the real engine of human evolution. That means it's about time to change the society, and yes that's not easy, that's might provoke big disasters and suffering before arrive to a new stability but that's is. There is nothing "fully right" and nothing "fully wrong", there is almost never "the best solution" to anything, we need to try, fail, correct, keep evolving.
emptysongglass 5y ago
Hijacking this thread a bit but can someone recommend me the best book on remote work culture and how best to foster it? Perhaps the guidebook for C-suite and the book for employees is different but in either case I'd love to hear your picks!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jupp0r 5y ago
  It's still in Beta currently, but is bound to be published in April 2022: https://pragprog.com/titles/jsrw/effective-remote-work/ https://pragprog.com/titles/jsrw/effective-remote-work/
suggala 5y ago
Banks finance a lot of commercial real estate. It is in the best in best interest of banks to insist to come back to office. They are already neck deep into this.
JaimeThompson 5y ago
I wonder if the workers started getting paid for the drive in and back home if it would make any difference?
GoodJokes 5y ago
GreaterFool 5y ago
Remote is good because I can do laundry and vacuum my flat while thinking about a work problem. Most employers though consider that stealing. Offices aren’t unnecessary but practically all offices I’ve ever worked from are torture chambers. Thanks but no thanks.
quantum_state 5y ago
This CEO does not seem to belong to this internet age …
mbrodersen 5y ago
Companies that don’t offer the choice to work remotely will be less competitive in the recruitment market. So smart companies will offer a hybrid model where you can choose how many days you will work in the office. It’s that simple.
cascom 5y ago
Isn't it also spring break? i bet you last week/this week half the work force is out normally?
gumby 5y ago
Note: have been building/ running hybrid (in-office/remote) businesses since the early 90s. It’s not binary. Think of a continuum of always-in-office <-> satellite team <-> wfh. Most people would not plant themselves in a single point in that line (I would like to be in the office a few days a week, though I have friends who prefer and are more productive at 100% wfh). I used to lock myself in in my office sometime to be productive. And at times I have needed to work in a lab but could do data analysis etc just as well at home. So instead of thinking “we need to start with a bias towards X”, think: how can we support all these modes and how can they even help people who stay in a single point (e.g. accounting who may need to be solely the office for security reasons). E.g. keeping convos in writing not only decouples you spatially but in time. One can search for and return back to prior discussions. This can help everyone. Recording and auto-transcribing meetings, not just zoom calls but ones in conference rooms frees note-takers and opens up new modalities. Perhaps I can skip that meeting and just skim the notes. My gf likes working at big companies (basically FAANG). She says that even before Covid they were videoconferencing people in other buildings and even other floors simply because travel around campus was too slow. These modes should all be considered as falling on that same axis. Frankly the (for many, new) communication habits around zoom calls have been a wasted opportunity to rethink the whole system.
stuaxo 5y ago
Let's not forget that Covid is still here, and new variants are worse. Long Covid is looking to be a real problem, with all sorts of side effects. Even from a cold business perspective why take the risk of causing these problems to your workforce ?
- antifa 5y ago
  "Long covid" makes me wonder if "long X" is an underconsidered medical issue across the board.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Lots of "chronic" issues probably have sources like that, yes. And we often do know that we don't know why exactly they happen.
irrational 5y ago
Between the price of gas and the negative effect driving has on the climate, it seems immoral to force people who can work remote to commute to an office. I haven’t had Covid (I haven’t had even the smallest cold in 2 years) and am vaccinated, but even unvaccinated people can develop long Covid. Forcing people who can work remote into the office where their chances of getting seriously sick go way up seems immoral. My mental health has greatly improved since I started working from home exclusively. Forcing people to work in the office, at the detriment of their mental health, seems immoral. For those whose mental health is improved by working in an office, they should have that choice. Though, if they end up being the only one in the office, that is no justification for forcing everyone else to commute to the disease incubator.

201 points by rustoo 5y ago

eatonphil 5y ago

CEO (of Goldman Sachs).

tough 5y ago

HstryrsrBttn 5y ago

[dead]

ChoGGi 5y ago

10 000 workers and "includes hiring some 3,000 new college graduates every year," Sounds like a bit of churn happens?

mushufasa 5y ago
Yes -- cravath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cravath_System
- richardfey 5y ago
  "Cravath" reminds me of this scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7m388YypnEA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7m388YypnEA
le-mark 5y ago
To expand the quote; > graduates every year, who learn from experienced bankers and build networks face-to-face. The experience also encourages teamwork, which is central to the firm’s culture I’m pretty sure the result is not teamwork!
sdenton4 5y ago
Every year you make trades and flip a coin. If it's heads you're in another year, if it's trails, you're fired. It takes a lot of churn to get a time tested leader.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Goldman doesn't really do a lot of proprietary trading since the '08 crash.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
Yes, intentionally so. In many areas of finance, two years at Goldman is roughly equivalent experience to an ivy-league MBA.
Mikeb85 5y ago
When they say 'hiring' college graduates they mean interns. Because they do pay interns (rather well I might add). It's not the same as churn of permanent employees.
TrackerFF 5y ago
In the early 80s, bulge bracket investment banks figured out that they can just hire hungry and ambitious analysts straight out of college, work them to the bone for 1-2-3 years, and then send most of them off to grad/business school or somewhere else. That's why, IMO, jr. investment bankers work such horrendous hours. They know it's a temporary thing, and that the real payoff comes later.
ec109685 5y ago
The building referenced in the article holds 10k workers. The firm hires 3k workers / year.
fnordpiglet 5y ago

aingisni_del 5y ago

Startups will soon follow suit, since GS is a major investor. It's sad that none of the infrastructure was improved during the isolation/quarantine periods, and now we're going back full force and wasting billions in wasted commute time.

manuelabeledo 5y ago
> Startups will soon follow suit, since GS is a major investor. I don’t see this happening. GS interests in real estate and churning finance folk in and out, have nothing to do with their riskier investment priorities. Also, GS is not a major player in the venture capital landscape.
- jupp0r 5y ago
  Also, angel investors have much more influence than VC in how startup culture is set up initially. Once in the VC funding phase, it's too late to tell all key employees to move to commuting distance from main HQ.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
The infrastructure wasn't improved? Pretty much all of the video conferencing tools are much better and tools that didn't have screen sharing & video calls added it. Plus the vast majority of people have actually used those tools now. Pre-pandemic group video calls existed via Teams but a lot of people never used them. I doubt GS's internal culture applies to any startups... not every company needs an apprenticeship culture and it would be a large capital and time expense for startups. GS's model is very different (IIRC), hire a lot of young talent out of premier institutions, then see who's left after 2+ years of 50+ work hour weeks.
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  > The infrastructure wasn't improved? Pretty much all of the video conferencing tools are much better and tools that didn't have screen sharing & video calls added it. It's very HN to think infrastructure is "zoom" and not the implied: internet, housing, roads, power.

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

oblak 5y ago
No doubt part of problem but it looks more organized to me. There has to be a lot of money involved. Organized wasteful behaviours are often about money, since nothing else would make sense.

funstuff007 5y ago

When the labor market turns, 100% of employees will be doing 100% of what the CEO demands. Right now, labor has the upper hand.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bfostbfostbfost 5y ago
I’m not asking you to predict the future, though that would be awesome, but could you share some thoughts on when/how the labor market turning might unfold?
- rocgf 5y ago
  I'm not OP, though I see that he's among the few that shares this opinion of mine. Take what I'm saying with a gigantic grain of salt because I am not some economist. We have had 10 years+ of quantitative easing both in the US and in Europe, with it all peaking during the last 2 years due to Covid. This has delivered an aritificial stimulus to the economy in the form of basically free money. This has had a lot of consequences, including the craziness in the housing market & stock market, as well as a huge influx of money that went into other investments like startups, expansions and so on. Basically, in simpler terms, everybody could easily get money because money has been very cheap. We are now starting to see the side-effects (of an otherwise arguably good thing) in the form of inflation. So the greater powers are now at a fork in the road - they either allow inflation to wreck the working and middle class or they turn off the money tap. The problem is that after living for so long with 0% interest rates, any significant change to this might trigger a recession that will make 2008 look like the good times. I started my career after 2008, so I have only ever experienced an environment in which employeers were heavily competing for engineers (and generally workforce in all professions), so I'm afraid that anyone in a position similar to mine has simply no way of realizing the way things will look a few years from now. Unless I'm seriously missing something of substance, then I'm afraid that there will be quite a few years in which people will lose homes, jobs, sanity and us privileged developers are maybe in a better position than most, but make no mistake - we will all suffer.

gnicholas 5y ago

One possible reason for wanting GS employees back in-person: it's much easier to avoid putting things in writing when you can just walk down the hall. There's probably a lot of stuff they don't want on email/Slack/etc.

fotta 5y ago
Isn’t that what video calls are for? Whenever I want to talk to someone and not leave a paper trail I get on a call.
- nerdawson 5y ago
  Can you be certain those calls aren’t being saved, whether by a party on the call or the underlying service in use?
  - ac29 5y ago
    In many places, including where I live, its illegal to record calls without the consent of all parties on the call. If they are being illegally saved (certainly possible), nothing in them would be admissible in court.
    - ozim 5y ago
      There is whole range of conversations that would never end up in court but if they are recorded can bring a lot of trouble.
    - pests 5y ago
      Where I live, you only need consent of one person (ie: ypu self). But then it changes when you are using company tools. Teams can be configured to automatically record all conversations. The consent is baked into your employment agreement.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  those calls are easily recorded on the server, your speech transcribed with reasonable accuracy and searchable. Both Zoom and Microsoft Teams offer the live transcribe. Whatever it is, it isn't for 'off the books' conversations.

soupfordummies 5y ago

My aunt has been working at a huge company for over 30 years, remote for like 20. The company recently decided everyone had to come back no exceptions, even her. So she’s retiring.

MattGaiser 5y ago
IBM?

louwrentius 5y ago

I wonder if people working in finance can move as easily as IT people towards a job that does support (partial) remote work. If so, this decision may turn out to be a liability. Obviously, Goldman Sachs is a big name that may make people put up with this stuff, but still.

crate_barre 5y ago
Yeah, half those people probably love putting on a dress shirt and feeling fancy about walking into a Goldman office. The thing is, it just takes a toll on you long term. This battle is not rooted in those who like remote and those who don’t. This battle has been fought a long time ago between K-12 and College. In K—12, you are under strict rules to show up on time for every class, 5 days a week, where attendance is taken. Every week for over a decade, and your best chance of escaping it is a snow day or a wonderful sick day. Then you get to college and everyone says ‘enough of the nonsense’, you are free. Your obligation is to pass the class, whether that be by showing up to every lecture or just a few, whether you eat at the cafeteria every day or travel a few blocks to a restaurant. It’s a matter of freedom. Covid was a black swan event that forced everyone for a second time to ‘cut the nonsense’, and ask ‘what is work really?’. Work is work that gets done. If work getting done is the measuring stick, then what is the superfluous push to add additional work? The commute, the banter, the office theatrics (yes, believe it or not I don’t work past lunch, even in the office - I’m staring blankly at the fucking screen). You want to keep the bullshit going?

mkl95 5y ago

Sounds like all those Goldman Sachs employees have some decent leverage. It must be easy to switch jobs if you have worked there for a while.

batmaniam 5y ago

I don't get it. Isn't the covid virus still out there? It only takes one infection to mutate into another strain, one infection to pass it onto many other members of a community, one infection to cause long-lasting damage to your body. Why is policy to go back to the office? That's going to guarantee viral spread. Shouldn't we at the minimum avoid clustering until the last of the virus is killed? This policy makes no sense to me.

ghiculescu 5y ago
By that logic you will never go back to the office, because the virus will never be entirely eradicated everywhere in the world.
- richardfey 5y ago
  Has WHO or CDC declared the pandemic as over?
  - spiderice 5y ago
    I think the WHO and CDC have to do a lot of trust building over a lot of years if they want people to start taking them seriously again. I'm glad I'm living in a state that isn't waiting for the CDC to tell us that we can start living our lives again.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      Most people still take them seriously. The fact that there are entire states that do not speaks more to the leadership of those states than to either the WHO or the CDC. Between the two options, I would certainly trust an epidemiologist over an elected politician on the topic of epidemiology, and I have a hard time understanding the cognitive dissonance that allows people to get to a state of "we have to trust our governor because governments lie." It's not like the governor isn't part of the government.
      - 5y ago

KaiserPro 5y ago

I really don't understand the militancy of both sides. Some people like the office, some people can't abide it. A lot of programmers love remote because they enjoy the isolation to do work. Others do not, be that because they need to talk to people, or because the home situation sucks donkey balls. I suspect the venom is because people are assuming that its a binary situation, you're either a remote company or not. They worry that their remote will be taken from them. I don't think removing the remote option is wise or healthy. I don't think the future is fully remote _for everyone_, because fundamentally we are social people. On the flip side, I don't think full office 5 days a week is going to be the future either (caveats apply.) The other point to think about is this: remote work is brill if you are enjoying it, but it licks massive donkeyballs if you don't. Having that dread of the workplace seep into where you are living is deeply bad for your mental health.

temp8964 5y ago
I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, about general stuff or potential new projects. If you go remote, you are going to fully lose this kind of opportunities. Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.
- simion314 5y ago
  >I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, Why? I can chat with my boss, he can share with me ideas he he has and I can give my opinion.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    You mean in person or in text message?
  - lastofthemojito 5y ago
    Not the commenter you replied to, but I think my personality is such that I chat casually with my in-group and am a perfectionist with communication with outsiders. Back when I worked in-person, I had daily informal communication with lots of teammates as well as my boss. Since I got a new remote job during the pandemic, I tend to only reach out to those I work most closely with (just a couple of people). Certainly there's nothing actually stopping me from opening a new Teams message to my boss or other teammates and saying "hey, how's life?", but in practice, I don't. It's almost as if most of my team are now "outsiders" who I'm very deliberate messaging, rather than the in-group who I feel comfortable bantering with. It's something I'm aware of and am working on, but I definitely don't have the same level of intra-team communication now as I had pre-pandemic.

barrenko 5y ago

Ain't gonna happen. Resignation is only starting.

rocgf 5y ago
In the short-term this may be the case, but the party that we've had due to massive QE is close to ending. We're in an employee's market now, and my guess is that it will turn into an employer's market quite quickly.
- barrenko 5y ago
  Not sure, I really think we are in the first inning of wfh & further transitions.
  - rocgf 5y ago
    The only reason you can refuse working from the office is the fac that you can simply walk out the door and find another job somewhere else. If this very fragile fact changes, the workers will do whatever the employeers want. Maybe employers will also prefer WFH, but my predicition is that many of them will not.
    - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
      When’s this changing? I get 30 inquiries a week for more remote work, there’s 0 chance this changes anytime soon.
      - d13 5y ago
        And that’s been my reality for the past 10 years.
    - jupp0r 5y ago
      The only reason you can find another job somewhere else easily is because there are so many remote positions open. There is a balance somewhere and it doesn't look like it's going to favor local employers without remote flexibility.

nine_zeros 5y ago

Here's an idea. Pay employees a special annual bonus - say $30k to come into the office. Management can choose to to forgo part of their own bonuses if money is hard to come by (which is not true in the case of GS)

unpopularopp 5y ago

Yeah but this is the finance sector so more understandable. Like my partner works for one of these companies on the Wall Street and there are so many regulations, compliance etc. that a regular SV startup never comes to close and WFH just made everything more complicated and less secure.

arkitaip 5y ago
But whatever setup they've had has been working for two years...
x1ph0z 5y ago
I mean wealth simple exists, so does TD. Plenty of finance companies allow WFH.

alecco 5y ago

I think people are missing the point. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks are working just fine remotely. This looks more like Goldman CEO is desperately trying to give a hand to help Manhattan not die. Good luck with that.

kbelder 5y ago
Yep. CEO and Mayor had a chat, because Mayor is worried about tax bases, and CEO said "sure, I'll bring'em back in." Maybe a hint at favors, but probably just part of the wholesale giving-of-gifts that circulate at those levels. I doubt the question of productivity, team-building, communication, were even briefly considered as part of the initial decision. Those would all be post-hock rationalizations. Just my guess.

Animats 5y ago

The pandemic isn't over. Look at the graphs.[1] Still around 1,500 deaths a day in the US, day after day. "Real America" may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with Real America. Something funny is going on in a few states. In most states, as case rates decline, so do deaths, a few weeks later. In Florida. Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, reported cases are way down, but reported deaths are climbing. [1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=zaf&areas=grc&areas=hun&areas=gbr&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usdc&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ussc&areasRegional=usca&cumulative=0&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2021-06-01&values=deaths https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...

tptacek 5y ago
It isn't, and immunocompromised employees should meet no resistance when continuing to work from home, but it's unclear that we're at a point in the pandemic (or have been, for many months) where avoiding office work is a meaningful intervention for slowing transmission. We sort of axiomatically assume that avoiding offices must slow the spread, but the epidemiological evidence for it --- for any kind of social distancing --- is very weak (unlike, say, increasing vaccination). That's not to say those kinds of NPIs weren't very important at earlier phases of the pandemic.
- lokar 5y ago
  IMO that's because people still go out to restaurants and bars and gatherings in others homes. If you do that stuff, you might as well go into the office.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    No, that seems unlikely; you can compare outcomes for otherwise-similar counties where people go to restaurants at near pre-pandemic rates, and others where they don't. Like I said, the epidemiological evidence for NPIs at this point is very weak. Similar comparisons show powerful evidence for the effectiveness of vaccinations.
- ipaddr 5y ago

Fuhrer01 5y ago

Only solution is to leave GS

crmrc114 5y ago

Going to be honest my company has a gen x CEO, and mostly gen xyz staff. Our awesome boomers did have some trouble adjusting to remote. I am sure is one hell of a shock for a generation to go from using checkbooks and cash with party lines that were shared with nearby houses to ubiquitous communications and kids who grew up in BFE Texas having best friends they have never met face-to-face in Finland and the Australia. The idea you cant be successful being remote is poppycock. I have been promoted twice during covid as a manager at that- I check in with my teammates at least once a week, they call me for 5min huddles when they need to chat. When your generation was raised with bbs's/IRC/AIM is any of this really that abnormal? Going to be an ageist here, but I think it's foolhardy to claim that remote is as easy for boomers and centenarians as it is for xyz. I think we are seeing a shift in workplace demographics and that is fueling a new normal for work. It's not bad, it's just evolution. My boomer mom loves her remote work now that she has been doing it because she has better interactions with her team. And like me, her office was already global with remote locations everywhere. Mileages may vary, we are all figuring this world out and riding the tiger. I won't go back to a physical office neither will she- if asked she said "I'll just fucking retire" so I think the seas have shifted anyone trying to push for full on-prem IS going to lose resources. When I hear this honestly I think of some crusty old out of touch manager who still uses a paper desk calendar.

watwut 5y ago
This is quite odd take given that everywhere I see, young people want to go to office and older one are happier home. While yes, older ones are more afraid of hybrid setup ending up punishing workers from home, because that pattern was visible even before pandemic. However, everyone at home thing was awesome for middle aged people with families or hobbies.
- jupp0r 5y ago
  It is maybe because "young people" are fresh grads in their twenties without families and "older ones" are people in their late 30s?
  - 5y ago

kkfx 5y ago

IMVHO People should reason about https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/ and about the fact that we work to live, not live to work. From that the target is neither WFO or WFO but work less to still have more. In that sense we should/must tend to what makes us feel better. If WFH works for that than we should go for it, if not we should not. The world is not that big, but also not that little, there is room for diversity, not only: diversity is the engine of evolution, we do things differently and compare the outcome in a constantly improving manner, a thing all dictator hate because let people see different worlds instead of "there is no alternative", "we are in the sole and unique possible system" etc but the real engine of human evolution. That means it's about time to change the society, and yes that's not easy, that's might provoke big disasters and suffering before arrive to a new stability but that's is. There is nothing "fully right" and nothing "fully wrong", there is almost never "the best solution" to anything, we need to try, fail, correct, keep evolving.

emptysongglass 5y ago

Hijacking this thread a bit but can someone recommend me the best book on remote work culture and how best to foster it? Perhaps the guidebook for C-suite and the book for employees is different but in either case I'd love to hear your picks!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jupp0r 5y ago
It's still in Beta currently, but is bound to be published in April 2022: https://pragprog.com/titles/jsrw/effective-remote-work/ https://pragprog.com/titles/jsrw/effective-remote-work/

suggala 5y ago

Banks finance a lot of commercial real estate. It is in the best in best interest of banks to insist to come back to office. They are already neck deep into this.

JaimeThompson 5y ago

I wonder if the workers started getting paid for the drive in and back home if it would make any difference?

GoodJokes 5y ago

GreaterFool 5y ago

Remote is good because I can do laundry and vacuum my flat while thinking about a work problem. Most employers though consider that stealing. Offices aren’t unnecessary but practically all offices I’ve ever worked from are torture chambers. Thanks but no thanks.

quantum_state 5y ago

This CEO does not seem to belong to this internet age …

mbrodersen 5y ago

Companies that don’t offer the choice to work remotely will be less competitive in the recruitment market. So smart companies will offer a hybrid model where you can choose how many days you will work in the office. It’s that simple.

cascom 5y ago

Isn't it also spring break? i bet you last week/this week half the work force is out normally?

gumby 5y ago

Note: have been building/ running hybrid (in-office/remote) businesses since the early 90s. It’s not binary. Think of a continuum of always-in-office <-> satellite team <-> wfh. Most people would not plant themselves in a single point in that line (I would like to be in the office a few days a week, though I have friends who prefer and are more productive at 100% wfh). I used to lock myself in in my office sometime to be productive. And at times I have needed to work in a lab but could do data analysis etc just as well at home. So instead of thinking “we need to start with a bias towards X”, think: how can we support all these modes and how can they even help people who stay in a single point (e.g. accounting who may need to be solely the office for security reasons). E.g. keeping convos in writing not only decouples you spatially but in time. One can search for and return back to prior discussions. This can help everyone. Recording and auto-transcribing meetings, not just zoom calls but ones in conference rooms frees note-takers and opens up new modalities. Perhaps I can skip that meeting and just skim the notes. My gf likes working at big companies (basically FAANG). She says that even before Covid they were videoconferencing people in other buildings and even other floors simply because travel around campus was too slow. These modes should all be considered as falling on that same axis. Frankly the (for many, new) communication habits around zoom calls have been a wasted opportunity to rethink the whole system.

stuaxo 5y ago

Let's not forget that Covid is still here, and new variants are worse. Long Covid is looking to be a real problem, with all sorts of side effects. Even from a cold business perspective why take the risk of causing these problems to your workforce ?

antifa 5y ago
"Long covid" makes me wonder if "long X" is an underconsidered medical issue across the board.
- detaro 5y ago
  Lots of "chronic" issues probably have sources like that, yes. And we often do know that we don't know why exactly they happen.

irrational 5y ago

Between the price of gas and the negative effect driving has on the climate, it seems immoral to force people who can work remote to commute to an office. I haven’t had Covid (I haven’t had even the smallest cold in 2 years) and am vaccinated, but even unvaccinated people can develop long Covid. Forcing people who can work remote into the office where their chances of getting seriously sick go way up seems immoral. My mental health has greatly improved since I started working from home exclusively. Forcing people to work in the office, at the detriment of their mental health, seems immoral. For those whose mental health is improved by working in an office, they should have that choice. Though, if they end up being the only one in the office, that is no justification for forcing everyone else to commute to the disease incubator.