Morgan Stanley is cutting about 1,500 jobs | Hacker News Reader

Morgan Stanley is cutting about 1,500 jobs

cnn.com

USCIS should immediately deny the vast majority of H1Bs Morgan Stanley is obviously abusing, and should make it a policy to do the same for any company announcing layoffs.

'Analysts' making $75k in Manhattan does not appear to me as a legitimate use of the program - that these low paid positions absolutely could not be filled with American citizens is bullshit. More likely they couldn't find educated US citizens willing to work 60 hours a week for $80k in NYC, with the threat of being tossed from the country if they didn't.

I'd say any visa worker being paid less than what a typical VP makes in the same Morgan Stanley office should be revoked, and fines should be paid. Finance companies tend to be the worst of these abusers, and every visa they fraudulently use means a great engineer is disallowed from working for a US company which has a valid need for real talent.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Morgan+stanley&job=&city=&...

"Morgan Stanley plans to take a charge of approximately $150 million to $200 million because of the layoffs, a person familiar with the matter said."

At 150M / 1500 jobs, does that mean each employee cut costs $100K? If so, is that severence pay or something else? I'm also curious what the distribution would look like. Is it like most people get almost nothing but some big cats get golden parachutes?

I doubt this includes executives with golden parachutes. They typically don't do those in bulk like this. This is more likely severance pay, immediately vesting RSU/options, any outstanding benefits owed, and any increased fees/taxes owed because of the layoffs.

Dont forget manager bonuses for cutting x jobs.

Wishing good luck to those affected.

I’m a developer at Morgan Stanley. The layoffs were largely targeted at technology and operations in New York and London, including a significant chunk of middle management. Word is that there could be more in January/March targeting lower level people and contractors. There will of course be more layoffs to come every December for people who are too old or are make too much money. Needless to say, I’m heading for the exits.

"We remain committed to controlling our expenses," CEO James Gorman said at the time.

Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman pay rises 7 percent to $29 million (2018)

Sure thing there, Jimmy. Remain committed to cutting your expenses. I feel bad you have to live on a measly $2 million dollars a month.

I guess if he can figure out how to cut 1500 jobs without affecting the bottom line, that saves the company $150m a year (assuming $100k average salaries) and so a few more million in CEO salary seems like a drop in the bucket.

But I'm guessing you could find someone else able to cut 1,500 jobs for a little bit less than $29 million a year.

What it really comes down to is sort of like the old "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM". A board of directors has no incentive to take a risk on an unknown leader when they can hire a "brand name" one for a mere $29m.

Same reason a company pays millions of dollars for a simple rebranding logo update or why Google pays $500k for top engineering talent. There are plenty of cheaper options out there that might be just as good or even better. But when the new company logo is a flop, you want to be able to say you hired the best. Not, "Well we saved a ton of money by using 99designs."

Good points. I feel very fortunate that I have never had to work at one of these megacorps (banks, tech, etc) where you're just a number on a balance sheet. It hits me in the gut thinking about 1500 people being fired over a bank pretending to be worried about the future.

Seems odd the cuts included tech jobs, given the increased pervasiveness of tech in finance.

Just means they hire contractors for those jobs now. No way 1,500 did a cumulative sum of 0 work.

It's likely a mix. Some jobs will get put onto other people, Some jobs will just go away and never come back. When they feel pain they'll fill the role with a contractor or cheaper person.

Could just be that the cumulative value of the work being done by those 1500 employees was less than the cumulative cost of employing them.

Just having tech infra/org/ops doesn't mean it is efficient and adds value.

Could some of those jobs be lost to automation?

Just out of interest, what is the main tech used in finance these days? Still a mix of Python, Java and C#?

Not sure Python ever had any significant inroads. It's always been Java and C#. All other languages are pretty outlier by comparison. Golang has seen a big uptick in recent years though.

That wasn't my impression:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/jpmorgans-athena-has-35...

https://github.com/goldmansachs

Having worked with and for many finance giants I'm speaking from my personal experience. Just like every other enterprise on the planet they tend to build their core tech around mature and easily staffed technologies. Both JP and GS are "mainly" java shops I know for a fact. Outlier projects with other languages aside do happen, but that doesn't mean it's the mainline tech. I'm not sure how you derived otherwise from the numerous java projects in their github. Also public repos are only tip of the iceberg.

FWIW bank of America in UK was a huge employer and sponsor of python people

Most of the prop shops I've been talking to have been Python & C++.

When my friend worked briefly @ Morgan Stanley he was shocked by the copious amounts of perl they were still using. This was ~7 years ago I believe.

Similar perl usage at BlackRock about 7 years ago. Also C++.

I worked at JP Morgan a couple years back, they were in the process of migrating a ton of their legacy systems to their own terrible proprietary Python offshoot.

Athena?

Why in the world would a finance company need to fork python rather than just a custom framework or something?

I always thought the pinnacle of trading & pricing/risk systems was SecDB [0] at Goldman Sachs? It was, after all, former SecDB devs who JPM hired away back in the mid-aughts to create Athena. Fascinating story hearing how trading houses have tried to keep up with GS by making their own version of SecDB -- the advantages are that decisive. The investment GS made in SecDB must have been major considering they made the 'slang' programming language just for SecDB, apparently.

[0] https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/276170/secdb-quartz...

Nothing doing. The Street cut big in Fall 1998 and look what happened next. Source: I worked on Wall St back then.

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