8 ms·

JPMorgan reportedly ending remote work for more than 300k employees

74 points by this_weekend 2y ago

this_weekend 2y ago
https://archive.is/lTFWi https://archive.is/lTFWi
michaelhoney 2y ago
"JPMorgan’s leader believes that when employees are inside the office working together (instead of remotely or for a few in-person days here and there) the company and its employees experience greater levels of innovation, creativity and teamwork." tell me about the innovations you've pioneered, Jamie
- greatgib 2y ago
  Screwing people :p But that being said, just think like their boss, when doing remote work you have to record every interaction like email and chats of employees. But when they are in the offi e, you can conspire your fraud in an office room without any record. So remote work easily impact their revenue by limiting their capacity of unethical business practices... https://www.reuters.com/business/france-fines-us-bank-jp-morgan-296-mln-tax-fraud-settlement-2021-09-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/france-fines-us-bank-jp-mor...
  - mulmen 2y ago
    Sure if all employees are in one office. As soon as you need to talk to someone who is in another location and you’re right back to email and video calls.
  - RachelF 2y ago
    Yep, this is a big factor for banks. No audit trail in face-to-face chats.
- chuckwolfe 2y ago
  At Chase you go into work, find a desk or reserve it online, and then you’re in zoom with London, Ohio and India all day I see zero point in coming into the office
  - tootie 2y ago
    The same geniuses who said putting back offices in Asia and working async across massive time differences would be a boon now say you have to sit next to somebody to be productive.
    - dcrazy 2y ago
      A teammate here in the Bay Area is currently collaborating with someone in Israel. It is possibly the worst time zone difference I’ve seen. Worse than Japan/California has been for me.
      - tootie 2y ago
        I once flew from NY to Alberta for a key meeting where the stakeholders didn't come in to their own office and we did the whole thing over the phone. I once spent two days at a different client's office while they were WFH.
  - dcrazy 2y ago
    A lot of the people who make money for the bank were already doing much of their job over email long before the pandemic. (Which directly led to proving the LIBOR scandal.) The longer I’ve been working under my own part-time return to office requirement, the less I think it’s about the day-to-day work. I personally benefit from having a dedicated place where work “lives” that is separate from my home. This helps me shift into a work “mode”. I know some people claim their routines are equally successful, but mine simply aren’t. In the office, I am surrounded by people who are also actively spending time in the same problem space. I’m not constantly pulled back into the domestic world by walking into the kitchen.
- lefstathiou 2y ago
  I believe JPM earns a ~40-50% higher return on equity than almost every other retail bank, which is extraordinary given the scale of their lending. Among banking CEOs, Jamie is regarded as one of the greatest of all time. If anyone else could achieve these results, they would. The Swiss certainly can’t. The systems, processes, culture and technology necessary to achieve that is breathtaking at their scale. They spend billions on software engineering a year. I interact with their fintech team routinely - dedicated solely to innovation - and I’m told it comprises hundreds of people globally (I’ve only met several dozen). They’ve created so many tools that power so many parts of financial markets I can’t fit descriptions of them into this window of HN. Short of maybe their private placements and equity IPO division, I can’t think of one that doesn’t deal in trillions of dollars in flow monthly (fx and settlements do this daily) which is hundreds of times the scale of the GDP of the nation of Tasmania, per day.
  - svnt 2y ago
    Took a hard left at Tasmania there. Is their GDP a common measure in the banking world?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - michaelhoney 2y ago
      Reply was to me and I live in Tasmania. I definitely would not recommend Tasmania as an exemplar of financial innovation :)
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    At my university, JPMorgan were well known for sweeping up the bottom ~10% of each cohort. I'd never work there based on the people I know who went there, they were the students that just didn't get it. My interactions with their recruiting at conferences solidified this somewhat, as it seemed to be a graduate sweat shop with no skills development beyond what was necessary to ship the next bit of code that was legacy tech debt at the point it shipped. > tell me about the innovations you've pioneered, Jamie So I'd say the innovation is having a productive (at a business level) IT org despite the awful software engineering. The software engineer in me says that they're in a local-optimum that costs more than it needs to because they need so many people to achieve what they do given their terrible tech, but I can't really justify this. Its organisations like this that make me really consider whether doing engineering well does actually matter.
- Thaxll 2y ago
  I've been working in IT for the last 15 years and there is nothing that will replace sitting next to your colleague to discuss something, doing a call on teams/zoom is absolutly not the same. Remote work is fine for 2-3 days a week, full remote is absolutly worse than 2 days of social interaction.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    The alternative for most people isn’t sitting next to their colleagues. It’s calling their colleague on Teams, but both sides of the call are sitting in offices instead of at home. Worst of all worlds.
  - linotype 2y ago
    Remote 2 or 3 days a week only works when everyone does it. I’m currently in a situation where half the people are fully remote and the other half come in 2-3 days a week, and the latter are clearly second class citizens.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    A regular commute and having to live in one of a few cities only is absolutely worse than full remote more time and more freedom.
- honestSysAdmin 2y ago
  and coming from a company that doesn't support FIDO2 auth to protect peoples' money, yet insists on SMS 2FA.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Maybe if they aren’t on video conferences all day. I don’t see the point of RTO unless the team is very centralized.
xeox538 2y ago
Well, maybe when the next pandemic hits, there will be no more remote work. Since you do not believe it is an option, if it worked then, why wouldn’t it work now?
NomDePlum 2y ago
According to linked article on this submission RTO is confirmed to be from early March https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659215
OutOfHere 2y ago
> end remote work and require more than 300,000 employees to work from the office five days a week. Ending remote work is one thing. Requiring workers to come to the office five days a week is a whole other thing! There is a wide spectrum between the two. The two are not the same. Whenever this happens, the reason is the same. They want to lay off people without having to pay severance and unemployment benefits.
johnnyb9 2y ago
Well, they did just spend an enormous amount on building a new tower on Park Ave.
realusername 2y ago
Let's not sugarcoat it, it's just a way to fire a large number of employees, it's never been a debate about remote work. The issue for them is that usually it's the best employees leaving when done this way and the company is then stagnating.
- KumaBear 2y ago
  That’s what I keep hearing but the remote job market is getting very competitive. With all these RTO mandates it’s going to be a tough market for many to find work.
  - realusername 2y ago
    Sure, that's the market at play. The companies still opened for remote working have an even more unfair advantage than before. And that'll continue until those policies are reverted.
- AngryData 2y ago
  Also easier to do shady shit when you don't have as much documentation or potential recordings of your meeting discussing nefarious schemes.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  JPM is also building a new 3 billion dollar tower in NYC, right? I believe it just finished all exterior construction work recently and interior is finishing up soon this could also just be a way to prop up the value of real estate. They directly own a lot of real estate, have many client assets parked in real estate, and the collateral for a lot of their lending is also real estate. The RTO trend helps them not face massive losses, effectively by stealing from all the employees worldwide that have to endure lengthy commutes and live in a few concentrated (and therefore expensive) locations.
NomDePlum 2y ago
The odd thing about working in an office for global companies like JPMorgan is that so many daily interactions happen with colleagues who are in a different location and/or timezone. Remote communication is part and parcel of the setup so much more than many/most other companies. The associated benefits of being in a company owned location are almost negligible, at least in the areas I've experienced. Having worked in these types of companies almost all meetings are online anyway even if some of the people are sitting close by, not all are.
- nulbyte 2y ago
  > many daily interactions happen with colleagues who are in a different location and/or timezone I don't work for JPMorgan, but I experience this every day. My boss is in another state. Fellow team members are in other states. Folks in departments we work closely with are in other states or even countries. The top brass loves to talk about the supposed benefits of talking shop with colleagues in line at the coffee shop in the lobby. But they tend to forget a few things: a) I'm not interested in talking shop standing in line for coffee, b) I'm not paid enough to live near or commute to HQ, and c) normies like me make up the majority of the company. I like my job. I like my company. I just wish the bigwigs would get a clue that they don't, in fact, have all the answers, and they never will.
  - bigfatkitten 2y ago
    > But they tend to forget a few things: a) I'm not interested in talking shop standing in line for coffee, b) I'm not paid enough to live near or commute to HQ, and c) normies like me make up the majority of the company. And d) the security awareness e-learning they make you do every year says not to talk shop while you're in line for coffee.
rr808 2y ago
I like remote work but literally the most successful banks are all in the office. Citadel never really left. Goldman Sachs was pretty quick back to RTO. JPM is probably the next successful bank. The ones that are most remote really are second tier, I'm not sure if its because they need to try to keep people or its a symptom of the company.
- dymk 2y ago
  Didn’t they also need bailouts? Is that really success from being in office?
  - nzzn 2y ago
    No
    - dymk 2y ago
      Yes https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
monero-xmr 2y ago
Remote work is the absolute easiest way to hire the best people for cheap. I love when more companies go RTO, the startups can get more talent.
- t-writescode 2y ago
  We need to get more startups, then. So many software devs have been forced RTO or laid off and I haven’t heard of many new companies that aren’t crypto scams or dubiously and maybe-legal gambling sites. Admittedly, I’m trying to start my own company and can’t afford employees (and refuse to take VC money); but I figured we’d see plenty more companies with all the layoffs.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I have bad news for the kind of company ‘monero-xmr is interested in.
chuckwolfe 2y ago
JP Morgan has 60,000 developers for context (I’m biased and only care about developers)
bdndndndbve 2y ago
People have theorized that RTO mandates are shadow layoffs, but I think they might actually be commercial real estate investors trying to prop up the office market. If large companies are able to force RTO those working conditions will trickle down to smaller employers, which will stop the bleeding of tenants for small and midsized buildings. Those commercial office buildings are owned by REITs and investment banks. It's like if the landlords that own malls were allowed to ban online shopping.
- threatofrain 2y ago
  IMO remote work should be evaluated on a role-by-role basis because remote team coordination really is that much harder. The prima facie incentives actually lean hard in the direction of employers because you access the global market of developers, driving down cost big time and real estate is expensive. Thus remote coordination is so hard... that employers would rather pay for expensive real estate and expensive talent, including the burn on time for employees driving around.
  - 8note 2y ago
    at least where im working, team coordination was already dying to dead before covid lockdowns started because all the realted teams were moving to far off locations. the coordination improved with dedicated remote compared to conference room to conference room remote meetings
  - evujumenuk 2y ago
    So what you're implying is that for roles where other companies do have managed to establish functioning remote work protocols, we should interpret RTO mandates as a public display of organizational dysfunction if they were unable to emulate those within the span of, oh, five years? Also I'm pretty sure employers don't generally pay for, or care about, the commute times of employees…
    - spacemanspiff01 2y ago
      Yes, especially for something creative and collaborative like engineering. Creating a culture where remote work works as well as in person is hard, and takes explicit effort and buying from management.
Simplex66 2y ago
[dead]
zxcvbn4038 2y ago
Jamie Dimon's "office" is a 2,500 sq. ft. apartment on Park Avenue in New York. It's paid for by the company, and he lives there with his wife during the week. It's so hypocritical that the guy pushing hardest for a return to work is himself working from home every day.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  It's funny/sad how many of these "we must return to the office" speeches are given by CEOs, over Zoom, sitting in their third home in Aspen or Monaco.
helf 2y ago
[dead]
gaws 2y ago
This is stealth layoffs. Full stop. How many people in upper management will still work remotely?
- nzzn 2y ago
  As mentioned in the article all MD’s are back since mid 2023 so zero.
josephcsible 2y ago
Why haven't any environmentalist politicians tried to pass bills to discourage this, e.g., an "unnecessary commute tax" of $500 per employee per workday that could have been remote but that management required to be in the office?
- bdangubic 2y ago
  In America??? That is funny and also sad that it is funny…
- nzzn 2y ago
  Jamie decided that he gets more out of his vast workforce if they are on site and, given his tenure, he has the data that backs that up.
sincerecook 2y ago
Makes sense, they can wring more of your soul out of you in the office. It's harder to intimidate people over slack. COVID was a swing towards egalitarianism and respect for employees and now we're swinging back to good old tyranny. You're not really a boss if you can't stare down a random pleb and make him feel small once in while.
aragreen05 2y ago
[dead]

74 points by this_weekend 2y ago

https://archive.is/lTFWi https://archive.is/lTFWi

"JPMorgan’s leader believes that when employees are inside the office working together (instead of remotely or for a few in-person days here and there) the company and its employees experience greater levels of innovation, creativity and teamwork." tell me about the innovations you've pioneered, Jamie

greatgib 2y ago
Screwing people :p But that being said, just think like their boss, when doing remote work you have to record every interaction like email and chats of employees. But when they are in the offi e, you can conspire your fraud in an office room without any record. So remote work easily impact their revenue by limiting their capacity of unethical business practices... https://www.reuters.com/business/france-fines-us-bank-jp-morgan-296-mln-tax-fraud-settlement-2021-09-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/france-fines-us-bank-jp-mor...
- mulmen 2y ago
  Sure if all employees are in one office. As soon as you need to talk to someone who is in another location and you’re right back to email and video calls.
- RachelF 2y ago
  Yep, this is a big factor for banks. No audit trail in face-to-face chats.
chuckwolfe 2y ago
At Chase you go into work, find a desk or reserve it online, and then you’re in zoom with London, Ohio and India all day I see zero point in coming into the office
- tootie 2y ago
  The same geniuses who said putting back offices in Asia and working async across massive time differences would be a boon now say you have to sit next to somebody to be productive.
  - dcrazy 2y ago
    A teammate here in the Bay Area is currently collaborating with someone in Israel. It is possibly the worst time zone difference I’ve seen. Worse than Japan/California has been for me.
    - tootie 2y ago
      I once flew from NY to Alberta for a key meeting where the stakeholders didn't come in to their own office and we did the whole thing over the phone. I once spent two days at a different client's office while they were WFH.
- dcrazy 2y ago
  A lot of the people who make money for the bank were already doing much of their job over email long before the pandemic. (Which directly led to proving the LIBOR scandal.) The longer I’ve been working under my own part-time return to office requirement, the less I think it’s about the day-to-day work. I personally benefit from having a dedicated place where work “lives” that is separate from my home. This helps me shift into a work “mode”. I know some people claim their routines are equally successful, but mine simply aren’t. In the office, I am surrounded by people who are also actively spending time in the same problem space. I’m not constantly pulled back into the domestic world by walking into the kitchen.
lefstathiou 2y ago
I believe JPM earns a ~40-50% higher return on equity than almost every other retail bank, which is extraordinary given the scale of their lending. Among banking CEOs, Jamie is regarded as one of the greatest of all time. If anyone else could achieve these results, they would. The Swiss certainly can’t. The systems, processes, culture and technology necessary to achieve that is breathtaking at their scale. They spend billions on software engineering a year. I interact with their fintech team routinely - dedicated solely to innovation - and I’m told it comprises hundreds of people globally (I’ve only met several dozen). They’ve created so many tools that power so many parts of financial markets I can’t fit descriptions of them into this window of HN. Short of maybe their private placements and equity IPO division, I can’t think of one that doesn’t deal in trillions of dollars in flow monthly (fx and settlements do this daily) which is hundreds of times the scale of the GDP of the nation of Tasmania, per day.
- svnt 2y ago
  Took a hard left at Tasmania there. Is their GDP a common measure in the banking world?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelhoney 2y ago
    Reply was to me and I live in Tasmania. I definitely would not recommend Tasmania as an exemplar of financial innovation :)
- danpalmer 2y ago
  At my university, JPMorgan were well known for sweeping up the bottom ~10% of each cohort. I'd never work there based on the people I know who went there, they were the students that just didn't get it. My interactions with their recruiting at conferences solidified this somewhat, as it seemed to be a graduate sweat shop with no skills development beyond what was necessary to ship the next bit of code that was legacy tech debt at the point it shipped. > tell me about the innovations you've pioneered, Jamie So I'd say the innovation is having a productive (at a business level) IT org despite the awful software engineering. The software engineer in me says that they're in a local-optimum that costs more than it needs to because they need so many people to achieve what they do given their terrible tech, but I can't really justify this. Its organisations like this that make me really consider whether doing engineering well does actually matter.
Thaxll 2y ago
I've been working in IT for the last 15 years and there is nothing that will replace sitting next to your colleague to discuss something, doing a call on teams/zoom is absolutly not the same. Remote work is fine for 2-3 days a week, full remote is absolutly worse than 2 days of social interaction.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  The alternative for most people isn’t sitting next to their colleagues. It’s calling their colleague on Teams, but both sides of the call are sitting in offices instead of at home. Worst of all worlds.
- linotype 2y ago
  Remote 2 or 3 days a week only works when everyone does it. I’m currently in a situation where half the people are fully remote and the other half come in 2-3 days a week, and the latter are clearly second class citizens.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  A regular commute and having to live in one of a few cities only is absolutely worse than full remote more time and more freedom.
honestSysAdmin 2y ago
and coming from a company that doesn't support FIDO2 auth to protect peoples' money, yet insists on SMS 2FA.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Maybe if they aren’t on video conferences all day. I don’t see the point of RTO unless the team is very centralized.

xeox538 2y ago

Well, maybe when the next pandemic hits, there will be no more remote work. Since you do not believe it is an option, if it worked then, why wouldn’t it work now?

NomDePlum 2y ago

According to linked article on this submission RTO is confirmed to be from early March https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659215

OutOfHere 2y ago

> end remote work and require more than 300,000 employees to work from the office five days a week. Ending remote work is one thing. Requiring workers to come to the office five days a week is a whole other thing! There is a wide spectrum between the two. The two are not the same. Whenever this happens, the reason is the same. They want to lay off people without having to pay severance and unemployment benefits.

johnnyb9 2y ago

Well, they did just spend an enormous amount on building a new tower on Park Ave.

realusername 2y ago

Let's not sugarcoat it, it's just a way to fire a large number of employees, it's never been a debate about remote work. The issue for them is that usually it's the best employees leaving when done this way and the company is then stagnating.

KumaBear 2y ago
That’s what I keep hearing but the remote job market is getting very competitive. With all these RTO mandates it’s going to be a tough market for many to find work.
- realusername 2y ago
  Sure, that's the market at play. The companies still opened for remote working have an even more unfair advantage than before. And that'll continue until those policies are reverted.
AngryData 2y ago
Also easier to do shady shit when you don't have as much documentation or potential recordings of your meeting discussing nefarious schemes.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
JPM is also building a new 3 billion dollar tower in NYC, right? I believe it just finished all exterior construction work recently and interior is finishing up soon this could also just be a way to prop up the value of real estate. They directly own a lot of real estate, have many client assets parked in real estate, and the collateral for a lot of their lending is also real estate. The RTO trend helps them not face massive losses, effectively by stealing from all the employees worldwide that have to endure lengthy commutes and live in a few concentrated (and therefore expensive) locations.

NomDePlum 2y ago

The odd thing about working in an office for global companies like JPMorgan is that so many daily interactions happen with colleagues who are in a different location and/or timezone. Remote communication is part and parcel of the setup so much more than many/most other companies. The associated benefits of being in a company owned location are almost negligible, at least in the areas I've experienced. Having worked in these types of companies almost all meetings are online anyway even if some of the people are sitting close by, not all are.

nulbyte 2y ago
> many daily interactions happen with colleagues who are in a different location and/or timezone I don't work for JPMorgan, but I experience this every day. My boss is in another state. Fellow team members are in other states. Folks in departments we work closely with are in other states or even countries. The top brass loves to talk about the supposed benefits of talking shop with colleagues in line at the coffee shop in the lobby. But they tend to forget a few things: a) I'm not interested in talking shop standing in line for coffee, b) I'm not paid enough to live near or commute to HQ, and c) normies like me make up the majority of the company. I like my job. I like my company. I just wish the bigwigs would get a clue that they don't, in fact, have all the answers, and they never will.
- bigfatkitten 2y ago
  > But they tend to forget a few things: a) I'm not interested in talking shop standing in line for coffee, b) I'm not paid enough to live near or commute to HQ, and c) normies like me make up the majority of the company. And d) the security awareness e-learning they make you do every year says not to talk shop while you're in line for coffee.

rr808 2y ago

I like remote work but literally the most successful banks are all in the office. Citadel never really left. Goldman Sachs was pretty quick back to RTO. JPM is probably the next successful bank. The ones that are most remote really are second tier, I'm not sure if its because they need to try to keep people or its a symptom of the company.

dymk 2y ago
Didn’t they also need bailouts? Is that really success from being in office?
- nzzn 2y ago
  No
  - dymk 2y ago
    Yes https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

monero-xmr 2y ago

Remote work is the absolute easiest way to hire the best people for cheap. I love when more companies go RTO, the startups can get more talent.

t-writescode 2y ago
We need to get more startups, then. So many software devs have been forced RTO or laid off and I haven’t heard of many new companies that aren’t crypto scams or dubiously and maybe-legal gambling sites. Admittedly, I’m trying to start my own company and can’t afford employees (and refuse to take VC money); but I figured we’d see plenty more companies with all the layoffs.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I have bad news for the kind of company ‘monero-xmr is interested in.

chuckwolfe 2y ago

JP Morgan has 60,000 developers for context (I’m biased and only care about developers)

bdndndndbve 2y ago

People have theorized that RTO mandates are shadow layoffs, but I think they might actually be commercial real estate investors trying to prop up the office market. If large companies are able to force RTO those working conditions will trickle down to smaller employers, which will stop the bleeding of tenants for small and midsized buildings. Those commercial office buildings are owned by REITs and investment banks. It's like if the landlords that own malls were allowed to ban online shopping.

threatofrain 2y ago
IMO remote work should be evaluated on a role-by-role basis because remote team coordination really is that much harder. The prima facie incentives actually lean hard in the direction of employers because you access the global market of developers, driving down cost big time and real estate is expensive. Thus remote coordination is so hard... that employers would rather pay for expensive real estate and expensive talent, including the burn on time for employees driving around.
- 8note 2y ago
  at least where im working, team coordination was already dying to dead before covid lockdowns started because all the realted teams were moving to far off locations. the coordination improved with dedicated remote compared to conference room to conference room remote meetings
- evujumenuk 2y ago
  So what you're implying is that for roles where other companies do have managed to establish functioning remote work protocols, we should interpret RTO mandates as a public display of organizational dysfunction if they were unable to emulate those within the span of, oh, five years? Also I'm pretty sure employers don't generally pay for, or care about, the commute times of employees…
  - spacemanspiff01 2y ago
    Yes, especially for something creative and collaborative like engineering. Creating a culture where remote work works as well as in person is hard, and takes explicit effort and buying from management.

Simplex66 2y ago

[dead]

zxcvbn4038 2y ago

Jamie Dimon's "office" is a 2,500 sq. ft. apartment on Park Avenue in New York. It's paid for by the company, and he lives there with his wife during the week. It's so hypocritical that the guy pushing hardest for a return to work is himself working from home every day.

ryandrake 2y ago
It's funny/sad how many of these "we must return to the office" speeches are given by CEOs, over Zoom, sitting in their third home in Aspen or Monaco.

helf 2y ago

[dead]

gaws 2y ago

This is stealth layoffs. Full stop. How many people in upper management will still work remotely?

nzzn 2y ago
As mentioned in the article all MD’s are back since mid 2023 so zero.

josephcsible 2y ago

Why haven't any environmentalist politicians tried to pass bills to discourage this, e.g., an "unnecessary commute tax" of $500 per employee per workday that could have been remote but that management required to be in the office?

bdangubic 2y ago
In America??? That is funny and also sad that it is funny…
nzzn 2y ago
Jamie decided that he gets more out of his vast workforce if they are on site and, given his tenure, he has the data that backs that up.

sincerecook 2y ago

Makes sense, they can wring more of your soul out of you in the office. It's harder to intimidate people over slack. COVID was a swing towards egalitarianism and respect for employees and now we're swinging back to good old tyranny. You're not really a boss if you can't stare down a random pleb and make him feel small once in while.

aragreen05 2y ago

[dead]