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Comment by michaelhoney | Hacker News Reader

"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

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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.

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.

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 :)

> the GDP of the nation of Tasmania

When did the state of Tasmania secede from Australia?

I’m ignorant.

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?

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.

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.

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.

> American regulators seem to prefer regulating a fewer # of large banks over many smaller banks

I'm sure the remaining banks prefer that too.

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...

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.

Yep, this is a big factor for banks. No audit trail in face-to-face chats.

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

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 once flew from NY to Alberta for a key meeting where the stakeholders didn't come in to their own office and we did the whole thing over the phone. I once spent two days at a different client's office while they were WFH.

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.

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.

and coming from a company that doesn't support FIDO2 auth to protect peoples' money, yet insists on SMS 2FA.

Maybe if they aren’t on video conferences all day. I don’t see the point of RTO unless the team is very centralized.

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