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Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

nytimes.com

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Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#211

Post by joelbondurant »

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote: post #86
actually_a_dog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal. It seems a lot of people disagree with you: > In an accompanying survey of more than 1,200 technology professionals, Hired found that 75% of employees would begin looking for a new job if their salary were to decrease, while 45% of candidates disagreed with using the cost of living of the employee's location as a baselin…

But what if you turn that around? If you are currently remote but considering an offer from a place that's in-office, wouldn't you want a higher wage to compensate you for the extra hassle of commuting? That's extra free time you're never getting back.

I'd need a six figure signing bonus to tolerate coworkers who treat everyone like a biohazard.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#212

Post by __turbobrew__ »

jollybean wrote: post #16
mabbo wrote: post #5

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…

"you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves. There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will. In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-fa…

> Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain

One of these is not like the others

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#213

Post by tshaddox »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #115
heavyset_go wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around. Truthfully, I don't see this working out in the long run. Companies like Facebook are making desperate grabs to keep control over ho…

> Truthfully, I don't see this working out in the long run. Companies like Facebook are making desperate grabs to keep control over how work is done and how it is compensated, but I believe market forces will kill efforts like ZIP code based compensation. I think you're right, but I don't think the end game is that everyone gets FAANG-level salaries everywhere. When companies realize that they can hire people for a f…

It strikes me as unlikely that big tech companies could save a large fraction of their engineering salary payments by firing a ton of engineers and replacing them with newly-hired engineers in different countries, and the only reason that they haven’t done this is that they simply have not had this same realization that you have had. It’s possible, of course, but I have a sneaking suspicion there’s more to the story.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#214

Post by jjk166 »

mint2 wrote: post #207
jjk166 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't have to commute, you'd have an extra hour per day to cycle wherever you wanted instead of having to specifically bike that path. Hell you could still bike that path if that's what you like. In the absolute best case scenario, commuting is breakeven, but realistically you are objectively worse off for it.

Except that’s not how it often works. sometimes one needs a little motivation to keep up a routine.

That is not the purpose of a commute, nor is a commute required to accomplish that goal. Think of all the other routines you maintain just fine without having to worry about getting fired from your job if you don't want to one day. If this was really the thing you wanted to do most, you'd find the motivation on your own just as you do with all the other things. If you need to be forced to do something, even if you derive some benefit, it's still not what you want. If I chase you with a machete, you may derive some benefit from being highly motivated to run, but that doesn't mean you should be thanking me.

Life is full of objectively bad things that nevertheless have a silver lining. It's good to look on the bright side when faced with problems you can not change, but it's important not to be fooled into thinking that these things aren't problems, especially when they are within your power to fix. That's how people wind up justifying all sorts of terrible situations like abusive relationships and terrible jobs.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#215

Post by KronisLV »

mabbo wrote: post #5

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…

> Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't.

I actually wrote more about it in my blog post, "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...

To me, it feels like we have people in the industry with wildly different preferences in regards to working, preferences that are oftentimes at odds. For a long time, the trend of working at the office has been set by the folk that are more comfortable with this mode of work and that has been considered "normal", however in the past few years many have also gotten a taste for the remote work alternative.

Personally, i wouldn't want to go back to the office, resigning and looking for a remote opportunity (or even starting my own company) being preferable to that. For other folks, the opposite is probably true. Neither is wrong, it's just that they're at odds - some people would feel as uncomfortable with remote work and async communication, as i would with in person work. The long term consequences of this remain to be seen, however.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#216

Post by whizzter »

murph-almighty wrote: post #15
macintux wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Definitely this, in fact I suspect that some larger organizations that get this right might become more competitive to smaller firms than before the pandemic, simple because meeting happy people will have their opportunities to steal focus curtailed and actual work time for people will be more clearly boxed out.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#218

Post by DrBazza »

sumedh wrote: post #142
DrBazza wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, and cost more than it saved. Time zones didn’t work. Language problems. Lack of communication. There’s a reason London and New York work well together. Time zones and language. And a relatively short plane hop.

> Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, Your one anecdote is pretty meaningless, you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.

My "anecdote" isn't "pretty meaningless". The bank I worked for didn't spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a whim. They spent the money with the aim of saving more money by outsourcing technology work to India.

It failed, and it failed miserably, and my former employer learnt a very expensive lesson. My colleagues in other investment banks reported similar stories in the 00s. That's far more than one data point.

Investment banks are not like other companies. They particularly enjoy writing their own code and systems, so when they tried to outsource and discovered that they weren't correct, or on time, they brought it all back in house.

> you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.

That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue? Does Wipro, for example, publish its revenue figures for its IT outsourcing arm, and break that down further with key indicators? I can say with some confidence, that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, won't be the "drivers" of that revenue, and that's what the original article in this thread was talking about.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#219

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

sumedh wrote: post #142
DrBazza wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, and cost more than it saved. Time zones didn’t work. Language problems. Lack of communication. There’s a reason London and New York work well together. Time zones and language. And a relatively short plane hop.

> Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, Your one anecdote is pretty meaningless, you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.

How is revenue tied at all to efficacy? Your analysis is too shallow to have any meaning.

Re: Wall Street grudgingly allows remote work as bankers dig in

#220

Post by sumedh »

DrBazza wrote: post #218
sumedh wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, Your one anecdote is pretty meaningless, you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.

My "anecdote" isn't "pretty meaningless". The bank I worked for didn't spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a whim. They spent the money with the aim of saving more money by outsourcing technology work to India. It failed, and it failed miserably, and my former employer learnt a very expensive lesson. My colleagues in other investment banks reported similar stories in the 00s. That's far more than one data point.…

You are just adding more anecdotes which I already told you is meaningless.

> That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue?

All the big IT Outsourcing companies are listed on the Indian stock exchanges, you can go to their sites and read the annual reports to see what is driving that revenue. Majority of their revenue comes from the US. Also check the share price of those companies for the last 20 years, where your bank failed, other succeeded in outsourcing their operations.

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