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.
Why do the landlords have control over tech ceos?
JPMorgan are the landlords. They just finished building one of the biggest skyscrapers in NYC for their use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/270_Park_Avenue_(2021%E2%80%...
Someone needs to at least be able to portray a return on that investment.
Institutional investors in Big Tech also have investments in commercial real estate?
Amazon is full RTO in my city and there are now lines down the block for the food trucks this week at lunchtime.
I’m sure every business owner is conspiring together to get those captive office workers back in city centers where their wages can be siphoned.
There is nothing preventing anyone from bringing a lunch box with them to work?
This is definitely the case in Seattle, where every news story about Amazon RTO seems to feature a restaurant owner or business association praising Amazon and ignoring that they’re really just stealing from the employees who lose 1-2 hours to commuting each day.
Amazon employees are universally complaining about it, while Amazon is the only FAANG that is actively hiring right now (they must have higher turnover).
Weird to hear that they’re complaining. On LinkedIn, I often see Amazon employees talking about how RTO has been great or that there’s a positive side to it. Maybe they’re just managers? Or maybe the silent majority is too afraid to speak against it publicly? I feel like Amazon looks very bizarre to an outsider, almost cultish in accepting this new reality of RTO, all just to shill almost universally Chinese made low quality products.
Either way if this didn’t spur them into unionization I don’t know what will. Not that I’m pro union either - I have concerns about how many of them run. But I feel like losing 1-2 hours daily is such a big cost that it’s worth dealing with that.
No one is going to trash talk their company on LinkedIn, that’s just a quick way to being unemployable. I’m just talking about techies anyways, and the grumbling I hear in social conversations.
It is difficult to get tech workers making > $200k/year to unionize. At that point, it’s more grumbling about first world problems than about oppressive working conditions (yes, working from home is better, but no, RTO isn’t some sort of unreasonable request for the compensation involved, but people will still complain of course).
Personally I think RTO is unreasonable regardless of compensation, since it isn’t required for the job and improves nothing. It probably hurts the company more. To me taking away 1-2 hours of time everyday from people is a huge change in working condition.
That theory has always seemed to me like the tail wagging the dog--a relatively small tail (commercial real estate) wagging a big dog (trillion dollar companies). If you look at the balance sheet of these companies, real property is significant, but almost always far from the largest investment they have made.
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.
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…
Yes employers do care about commute. Commute time is one of the leading predictors of turnover, and it has a more dramatic effect on employee happiness vs higher salary. Also, it's de facto culture for programmers to work a little everywhere, on and off the clock (I'm not saying that's right, but it's reality).
A certain well known big defense company used to subsidize rent if you agreed to live closer.
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.
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
That really doesn't seem plausible. Why would JPM bother propping up commercial real estate? I think the answer is much simpler. Jamie Dimon is very opinionated and conservative and wants people back in the office because thinks they're slacking off at home.
Our entire banking system is built on trusting that companies and individuals will keep paying their loans.
If enough people don’t want commercial real estate, then those empty buildings will, at least for businesses, eventually start to default because they have no money.
At least that’s my “off the top of my head” theory.
It doesn’t change the fact that the US’s car-centric, NIMBY, segregated behavior has resulted in a world where in-office work is about as unpleasant as can be and greatly desired against.
Commercial real estate bottomed already. The market isn't going to collapse. Besides they obviously didn't make any similar hedges when it was residential real estate in 2007. Nor does it make sense for them to spend hundreds of millions on real estate so they can not lose money. There is no 4d chess. It's just old people making bad decisions.
>Commercial real estate bottomed already
I think you are under estimating the problem with Commercial real estate, along with rental around the city that has on adjacent Commercial real estate pricing. Which also has a knock on effect on other financial instruments.
The situation wont change or pops the Commercial real estate value to where it was. But it should hopefully buy some time for the market to solve itself. And this isn't just JPM literally eery bank and finance sector are forcing other sector ( other than tech ) to end Remote work.
There's a good Money Stuff episode about this btw. They talked to someone whose job is to assess commercial properties on behalf of investment funds. There's a lot of obvious tricks that places use to make their occupancy seem better, but the guest's take was that only S-tier malls and office buildings are worth the asking price.
My local B-tier regional mall for instance has about 50% occupancy, and a lot of that is pop-up stores that seem to be entirely transient. They have an anchor Wal Mart, a bank and a mobile phone store, but no other noteworthy tenants. Around the holiday season it felt pretty empty. It's amazing they can afford to operate such a large building under the circumstances.
There's 2-3 other similar malls within a 30 minute drive. All of these malls are still being held by REITs or retirement funds at inflated valuations waiting for a recovery that isn't coming.
>There's 2-3 other similar malls within a 30 minute drive. All of these malls are still being held by REITs or retirement funds at inflated valuations waiting for a recovery that isn't coming.
And this could cause a melt down that could be worst than 2008 housing bubble. May be it is inevitable. But there is still some time to fix it.
There is also the problem with asset valuation as you said that goes to loan and those loan goes to other places, as I said the whole knock on effect on many other areas. And I would not be surprised if Jamie Dimon can smell something is coming.
Basically everyone on HN wants Remote work, and remote work is the future of all work. ( I have on numerous occasion read this on HN and see very little challenges to the claim but up vote only ). If I were to ask between a market crash and Remote work which one would they choose, I am not so sure if everyone is still on Remote work.
I'm not saying they're single-handedly propping up real estate, but they benefit from "number goes up" in the economy. If WFH becomes a durable trend and a bunch of commercial properties get written down it's going to have a big impact on a lot of investors. Many large companies either have real estate investments, or their owners are diversified into real estate. It makes sense for companies collectively to push in this direction not out of nostalgia but to avoid a massive correction.
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.
This is stealth layoffs. Full stop. How many people in upper management will still work remotely?
JP Morgan has 60,000 developers for context (I’m biased and only care about developers)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
In America??? That is funny and also sad that it is funny…
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.
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.
Well, they did just spend an enormous amount on building a new tower on Park Ave.
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?
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.
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.
I have bad news for the kind of company ‘monero-xmr is interested in.
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.
Also easier to do shady shit when you don't have as much documentation or potential recordings of your meeting discussing nefarious schemes.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
According to linked article on this submission RTO is confirmed to be from early March https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42659215
"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
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.
My point is that JPM has been a net negative in the world. I have no doubt that they have innovated in financial markets. They have also innovated in their adherence to the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase#Lawsuits_and_le...
Yes indeed. Jamie publicly mentions often how onerous regulations are and how much it’s impacting their ability to operate and innovate.
If I had a magic wand, I would reduce concentration of capital in the banking sector. American regulators seem to prefer regulating a fewer # of large banks over many smaller banks, which tend to be harder to control and oversee and are more prone to failure.
Way off topic but I see merit to Glass Steagall act which barred consumer banks from engaging in investment banking activity. The issue is that for it to work, Europe and Asia would need to adopt the same legislation.
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.
It absolutely does matter when you are building systems that are “sub scale”. JPM solutions can directly impact the cost of borrowing for entire nations, which drives the quality of life for millions of people. Innovation at this scale is measured in single digit % improvement over quarters or years. Not for everyone (including me). I’m not doing their It organization justice but you can’t bring a “move fast and break stuff” standard to this operation.
That's great, but where does requiring your entire workforce to return to the office five days a week in the years since a global pandemic fundamentally changed the way white-collar work is done fit into that?
I believe this decision suggests that the worlds top banker of the worlds top bank, whose assets under management are greater than the wealth of most nations on earth, seems to believe that the fundamental change in the way white collar work is done post pandemic, is either not conducive to achieving a culture he desires or to garnering the level of performance he is targeting for his company. My first reaction is not to belittle someone so demonstrably competent, even if I disagreed with the decision, but to try to understand it.
I personally don’t have the answer. I’m curious what were the core criteria that drove this decision and how many, if any, are unique to a banks culture of risk mitigation.
I would suggest one doesn't have anything to do with the other.
Control over capital to a highly centralized degree makes their (Jamie’s) job easier. I’m not sure I would blindly call that “demonstrably competent”. The banking system is also held up by the government and the reserve system and regulations that make competition low, so it isn’t like some theoretical perfectly competitive space.
In my experience, very little changed about how my work is done. I spend most of my time interacting with source control and a debugger. I just started doing that from home instead of in an office, and traded 2h of daily commuting for a lot more loneliness.
> the GDP of the nation of Tasmania
When did the state of Tasmania secede from Australia?
I’m ignorant.
Took a hard left at Tasmania there. Is their GDP a common measure in the banking world?
Reply was to me and I live in Tasmania. I definitely would not recommend Tasmania as an exemplar of financial innovation :)
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-mor...
Yep, this is a big factor for banks. No audit trail in face-to-face chats.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe if they aren’t on video conferences all day. I don’t see the point of RTO unless the team is very centralized.
and coming from a company that doesn't support FIDO2 auth to protect peoples' money, yet insists on SMS 2FA.
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.
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