JPMorgan reportedly ending remote work for more than 300k employees
forbes.com
forbes.com
It's like if the landlords that own malls were allowed to ban online shopping.
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.
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.
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.
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 sure every business owner is conspiring together to get those captive office workers back in city centers where their wages can be siphoned.
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.
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).
I don’t really see it. Amazon techies wouldn’t have much in common with Amazon warehouse workers, and I’m not seeing any other people they could share solidarity with. But think if you are an SWE say at a traditional manufacturer, your needs and interested are going to differ a lot from someone working the assembly line.
The people making 200k a year are still workers. They may have savings and insurance that make them feel more secure, but they still need to clock in every day to afford to be alive. Their activities in their day to day life are constrained by "will Amazon fire me for this". If they ever suffer some kind of injury that prevents them from doing their day job they would quickly discover that their position is just as precarious as the delivery driver who brings them their cheap plastic shit from China.
We might live in different universes but in mine LI is exclusively used in positive tones and for praising. Saying anything negative about any company, and especially the one you work for, is the greatest taboo. You can occasionally criticize something about an unnamed company for virtue signaling. Like really, LI is for people looking for a jobs so who would to hire a person publicly complaining about their employer?
Someone needs to at least be able to portray a return on that investment.
I see their point but as an employee I would never work for them unless completely broke and desperate - and even then only temporarily, just to have time to find a better job that allows WFH.
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.
Also I'm pretty sure employers don't generally pay for, or care about, the commute times of employees…
A certain well known big defense company used to subsidize rent if you agreed to live closer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The issue for them is that usually it's the best employees leaving when done this way and the company is then stagnating.
tell me about the innovations you've pioneered, Jamie
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.
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.
I'm sure the remaining banks prefer that too.
> 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.
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.
When did the state of Tasmania secede from Australia?
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...
I see zero point in coming into the office
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.
Remote work is fine for 2-3 days a week, full remote is absolutly worse than 2 days of social interaction.