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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Dimon kind of throws them under the bus, doesn't he:

"Work output by younger employees was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Office Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. That, along with worries that remote work is no substitute for organic interaction, are part of why the biggest U.S. bank is urging more workers to return to offices over the coming weeks."

Of course, if one were cynical, you might suspect he wanted return to office anyway and young workers are a convenient and safe group to blame.

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LOL - as a data analyst - I would love to know how they measured this and what their confidence interval is. It's interesting they didn't share any percentages. And it's interesting that they didn't talk about weekend work at all. A lot of people where I work are working shorter days, but also working a little bit on the weekends.

I realize JPM is a pretty big company - but the way this works at a lot of companies is - someone has a narrative they want to tell, does shitty analysis until they find some data point that fits their narrative, and then the company makes decisions based on that.

How do you boil productivity down to a metric that's easy to even discuss? Anyone can get more work done by performing it at a lower quality.

Even if this was just for bankers that have a list of tickets to close - are we just talking about sheer number of tickets closed? Is the quality for each ticket going up or down?

This is very on point to how large companies operate.

Yeah when you dig you'll often find out "decrease in productivity" is in the noise of the data. CEOs and managers enjoy control and surveying their minor kingdoms. I think it's more about ego than efficiency. I know that I am dramatically more productive at home. I hate the distractions at work. The random drop bys, the "do you have a second", the "15 minute (oops 1 hour)" meetings that could be done over slack or email. It's ridiculous. I know it really depends on your work and personality but by and large managerials are type A with egos and they are starting to feel less important so everybody needs to get back to the office stat.

Do you think he’s just lying about it?

When I was a younger worker I certainly did slack off on Friday and Monday when I could get away with it.

I’ve worked in more than one office where people started drinking on Friday afternoon in the office when the CEO was out of town.

>Do you think he’s just lying about it?

Not really. But the general impression from the piece is that he has various less-quantified reasons for wanting more people back to the office and slacker younger workers does seem like a convenient excuse -- especially if there's some truth to it (which is entirely possible). FWIW, if I were in my twenties at this time, I'm not sure I would trust myself to keep plugging away.

I’m in my 30s and I personally have a hard time being productive when the world is literally and metaphorically on fire and plague stricken. Being in an office would not change this.

Being in an office would make me more distracted imho. Between wondering if the ventilation is giving me covid from careless co-workers, to being more separate from family and home should another disaster crop up.

Edit: careless not carless ... lol

Right now I'd pay good money for corporate HVAC. I'm coughing myself to death in my own home right now

If this is because of high PM2.5 concentration (due to wildfires or otherwise), I suggest building a DIY air filter, such as the one in the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5APw_SLUU

When the Air Quality Index shot up to ~150 in my area (you want to keep it below 100, preferably below 50), I went to Home Depot and bought box fans and furnace filters and built my own.

You can check the air quality in your area on this site: https://aqicn.org

Thanks I do have a fairly good filter for one room in the house, where I'm holed up. Just when I have to venture out for food and stuff, I either wear a mask in the house or just cough.

The AQI in my area is closer to 300 :(

I’m in my early 30’s and honestly the world has been on fire since always. First the Balkan wars next door when I was a kid, then 9/11, then Afghanistan, then ISIS, then Trump, then Covid.

Fuck it, I can’t think about all that. Focus on what’s in your sphere of control and ignore the rest.

March pulled me back into a vicious news cycle after I learned to ignore the news 10+ years ago. It was terrible.

Now I’m back to mostly ignoring the news and life is better.

PS: this is the core teaching of stoicism, focus on what you can control and don’t worry about what you can’t

You're right in that most office workers take Monday to get going and wind down on Friday, but Jamie Dimon is the guy that lied in Congressional testimony multiple times, so that's equally likely.

It’s not equally likely unless you think 50% of statements Dimon makes are lies.

If you do think that, it would be an interesting and unusual claim worthy of analysis, but it’s certainly not a reasonable assumption without such analysis.

I think he's not a dispassionate observer of WFH trends. Lies have an underlying motive, and he's shown before that he is willing to lie in high-stakes testimony to avoid a negative outcome. Dimon's WFH assertion was made to analysts, and in his role as a leader at JPMorgan, presumably for a positive motive (market sentiment, boost morale, ensure a return to normalcy). This wasn't an off-the-cuff observation. By equally likely I mean he was in a situation with a clear motivation so the likelihoods are between truth and falsehood. In that frame, 50% is generous.

Edit: the above does preclude the idea that "truth" can have a motive behind it as well, but I don't particularly think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Lying? He's saying what he needs to say to print more money. He didn't say it was _only_ the younger employees, did he?

He's not a goal. He's got a narrative. Is anyone going to question him? And wreck their career?

Yes, I think we call that "lying".

I was simply noting that one person's lie is another person's "motivating speech."

I was also noting that not being 100% transparent typically gets called deception or propaganda.

Mr D singled out the younger employees but he was also careful not to say it was them and only them. Calling out everyone would be a bad move for moral. So he sliced his "facts" a bit in order to meet his ends. That's deception, and not fraud per se.

Except it’s not really deception - it’s just a true statement.

It’s only ‘throwing younger people under the bus’ if you use it to support a pre-existing narrative that he isn’t actually making.

We don't know if it true. We have to trust him. And that's not wise given his track record.

As a senior manager, he's a professional liar first.

He wouldn't need to be lying to be blind to data that doesn't fit the desired conclusion or to torture the data until they confess.

What kind of work are these junior employees doing that is this highly measurable?

JPMC is a huge institution so it's hard to answer. Certainly there are many roles in trading, working with clients, support, etc. that will have pretty quantified metrics associated with them.

How does anyone take quantified metrics seriously if trying to compare pre-covid market bubble data to in-covid recession/market bubble. The environments are completely different.

One can do differential comparison for day of week.

AggregateOverEmployeesByAgeGroup(AggregateDatesBeforeCovid(Prod(employee_i | day of week)/AggregateDatesAfterCovid(Prod(employee_i | day of week before covid)))

Then see if it is flat or if there is changes (such as it dips on monday/friday)

Yea, but the Prod function still entirely determines if it’s comparable.

Thats .. an adjustment. It really doesn't tell you if the work inputs allocated to young vs old groups shifted before and after covid. Also, I question the validity of the Prod( ) function as, like much other information work, the productivity yields on different timeframes and can be very difficult to correlate inputs vs outputs.

There were 3 things mentioned in the article. Younger vs older, Monday and Friday vs rest of week for younger, and creativity. You could theoretically measure younger vs older in the same job and also compare those two groups by M/F vs rest of work week. Compare those groups before and after COVID-19.

Agreed, this claim feels totally baseless.

They are almost all proxy metrics of course. For engineering you can look at commits, PRs, incidents, deployments, etc and most of those metrics actually improved quite dramatically the first few months after everyone worked from home. Many of the offices are hot-desked high capacity environments and I cannot get anything done in them, so the initial reports were completely unsurprising.

I can't speak to what is being said now as I'm not really tracking any of it. I don't believe it's pure bullshit. It could be that people are just picking up bad habits. It could be stress and distractions from all the stuff that's swirling around now. It could be an exaggerated stance to signal to real estate in the affected markets that JPMC isn't packing up and getting out of town. Who knows. I will say that the technical infrastructure has been very good, due in part to long term investments in remote infrastructure for years now and it's pretty seamless switching from the office to remote.

I personally will quit before I go back full time to the chaos of high capacity office environments. I'm not built for it.

I felt the same. I'm sure JD had particular results in mind. When you have that much juice you tend to get what you want.

It'll be interesting to see the social media reaction once it breaks that employees are being ordered back en mass, no opt out, etc.

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