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Comment by qwrusz | Hacker News Reader

For all we know GS could have closed a coffee shop in the building as employees wanted fresh air and go to Starbucks across the street anyway.

34,000 employees. Hundreds of job openings on their career site. 20 people being laid off is not news nor is this "how GS lays people off".

Also "front office" vs "middle office" employees go through very different processes when entering and leaving the company. By custom and by contract.

I highly doubt employees bonusing there would suddenly be laid off in November. That would be news.

The YoY compensation drop and -5% fall in total headcount are more informative about whats happening than a 20 person lay off notice.

Goldman Sachs Elevator on twitter is more accurate than this article.

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500 people over a relatively short period is noteworthy, even if one of those events only had twenty people in it.

Also those twenty people likely weren't in a union so I doubt they had service jobs like running the coffee shop.

Coffee shop workers/service workers are rarely unionized, even in the union-obsessed NYC/NJ area

what the hell does "union" obsessed mean?

A union is a group of people who unite for a particular purpose, often contract negotiation.

They meant to ask about "union-obsessed."

Yes, I thought the meaning of obsessed was clear. The poster was referring to people who are preoccupied with (presumably, `others'`) community contract negotiations.

New York has the highest union rate amount states[1].

[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf

... which is approximately the same as the union rate for the United States as a whole, 1950-1970.

Your point? That's more than 40 years ago. The Unionist movement in the rest of the US is essentially dead (outside of government).

By that the commenter means (I guess) that to be pro-union in the United States of 2016 (where obviously things work swimmingly well for wage earners, without the union-enforced wage and job protections commonplace in other countries) is sufficient grounds to have one's psychological well-being questioned. Indeed, it may be a sign that one is suffering from a bona-fide psychiatric disorder.

This is Goldman Sachs. I can tell you with certainty those 20 people were not part of a union.

The real number is also not 500. It's closer to +1000. Many layoffs at places like Goldman are handled in a way that they do not appear to be a layoff to outsiders nor are they disclosed in that way.

The coffee shop comment was a bit of sarcasm but who do you think is getting laid off here? Millionaire VPs? MDs? Goldman is struggling to hire and keep younger managers right now.

why are they struggling to hire and keep younger managers?

In 2009, the company I worked for was laying people off while it had job openings listed. They would even interview for some of those roles. But it was all window dressing as they never hired anyone for quite a long time. The openings are for when some real superstar comes along and can be exploited. That way, there is an open req they can use.

An open job req is useful in an environment of layoffs. Your boss comes to you and says "I need you to reduce headcount by three." If you have an open req, you can trade that in and only have to give up two employees.

I know D.E. Shaw did something like this in 2009.

I've seen a number of tech companies do this, even if they aren't laying people off. They just leave open reqs for every position, with no intention of filling them all.

It's a win for them in at least three ways. They get to project a sense of growth and selectivity via the posting, they get a collection of potential candidates, and they get to grab any true superstars they see (or any normal hires who underprice themselves).

The most distinctive experience I've had was applying to a position, getting radio silence and then a call two years later asking if I was interested. Further conversation made it pretty clear that they had finally turned a fake opening into a real one, and were contacting the applicants who had piled up in the meantime.

For all we know GS could have closed a coffee shop in the building as employees wanted fresh air and go to Starbucks across the street anyway.

Yeah, right.

Hundreds of job openings on their career site.

Really now?

20 people being laid off is not news nor is this "how GS lays people off".

But as far as naked attempts at misdirection go, this one's just ridiculous. We may be missing some context, and the significance of the layoffs does seem open to question. But I'm quite sure you're perfectly aware that this is not simply a matter of "20 people being laid off".

The whole point of the article is that "20" is not representative of the whole number.

Banks are pumping the brakes on hiring, they are losing good talent to other trading shops and investment firms, and they just aren't competitive when it comes to recruiting young people.

If comp is dropping and the firm is carrying out rolling layoffs, then there's not really much of an argument to be made that all is well at GS.

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