Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaws | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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.

I would suggest one doesn't have anything to do with the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com