JPMorgan CEO: "I don't care how many people sign that f—ing [WFH] Petition"
fortune.com
fortune.com
Just like selling anything - if the terms don't satisfy you, then don't sell. Find someone else willing to accept your terms of sale.
You have the power folks... not the employers. Many have been led to believe the power-dynamic is reversed, and that the employer holds all of the power. That's absurdly untrue.
You have the labor, knowledge and experience (aka talent). Be your own advocate.
Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…
Why would you do that? That is by definition, a hostile work environment.
Find a place where you don't need to pull a bunch of shenanigans to get what you want.
Especially in the IT field, you have a massive amount of options. People tend to only think about FAANG and friends, but there's millions of SMB's out there that need IT of all levels, pay well and offer generous benefits.
I think they were offering that as a solution to the difficulty of finding new equivalent jobs quickly.
While it's true people can "just quit"... there's usually more factors that make that very difficult, like having enough money saved up to last until you get a new job, and actually finding a replacement job that pays enough to let them keep a similar quality of life as they have now.
It has never in all human history been easier to find a new job than it has been in the past few years.
Last year there were nearly 100k tech layoffs in the US, the year prior nearly 200k. Every tech opening is saturated with a few hundred resumes. Do you really think your company couldn’t hire replacements?
> Good luck hiring scabs when they don’t have the passwords…
Shame on your company if they don’t control security to prevent this. Shame on you if you are willing to withhold more than your labor in a strike situation. There is work stoppage and there is sabotage. If you are not relinquishing the only set of keys to the factory, that borders on intentional sabotage.
> And at the end of the day, Dimon stressed, employees have a choice in whether to work for JPMorgan at all. “It’s a free world,” Dimon said.
And isn't it interesting that your worker empowerment talk is aligned with what the billionaire CEO publicly says?
Why? Are we now saying anything a billionaire (gasp!) says is automatically wrong or nefarious? Come on people, I expect better from the HN crowd.
No you got it backwards: Jamie Dimon isn't wrong—he is in fact a highly effective business leader. You are wrong. He knows that the company is more powerful than the workers and the at-will employment is theoretically fair but in practice tilts the balance of power towards the company. And yet you have not realized that.
And that means the GP is wrong when he says, "you have the power folks... not the employers." The employers have the power."
He'd be right if there was a lot more worker solidarity and unionization, but that's not the world we live in. Right now worker power is too diffuse and unorganized to make a difference. Individualism divides and conquers workers.
Americans need unity, and from that needs to come leaders who have a concept of noblesse oblige. We need rulers that care for their people and are judged by the state of their poorest. Unfortunately, America is far too diverse (both genetically and spiritually) for this to happen. Diverse democracies never succeed (there are many books on this - one was even on Obamas reading list). People will pattern match the solution to “facism”, “Hitler”, “tyranny” - reject it - and continue to live in a time of technological miracles worrying if they’ll be able to afford a place to sleep. The knee jerk rejection is exactly what the capital class has engineered to continue leeching off the rest of us.
We could unionize but what’s the point? Our leaders should love us and we should love them. And wealth gaps as large as they are are anything but love - they’re a moral failing.
May be I get this wrong. This sounds like a bold statement. Switzerland, Canada, Belgium but also India are multi-lingual or even multi-ethnic democracies. They know tensions but they are not failed.
They almost never work, because they are a bad deal for the company and a bad deal for above average workers.
You’ll waste years trying to push a rock up hill, when you should have just changed jobs.
Unions make money off of your labor - and the more people they can convince to join the union, the more money they make. Put another way, a Union is a business and you are the product.
How much value does the average union provide a highly-skilled in-demand employee, such as those working at JPMorgan or FAANG companies? Very little if any at all, it would seem.
They are under-performers teaming up to peer-pressure (bully) over-achievers into averaging the fruits of their labour.
If you’re a high achiever the absolute last thing you want is to work for a company that is unionised.
I took a stand at a company where they asked for RTO. They fired me, I sued them, and the first phase of the trial just ended where the judges cut the baby in half and dismissed the "firing with cause" and offered a 3 months severance (to cover what would have been a notice period), but without asking anything more of the company. The lack of empathy for the worker was surprising to me, frankly. Overall it was basically pointless.
So, if you do try to offer resistance to RTO policies, make sure you're not entirely alone, and probably leaving on your own with garden leave is a better option than trying to fight them in court. (This was all in the EU, so YMMV.)
So you are fighting against work tradition even within your industry, poor productivity data supporting your assertion, and frankly a general work culture where most everyone else doesn’t work from home. Your deck is stacked against you.
I work from home, but if my company chose to RTO, I wouldn’t challenge it. I know from my team’s experience (same base group pre-pandemic) we are not measurably more productive WFH as in office. It would suck to add a commute back to my day, but prior to 2020 I did that for over 3 decades anyway.
I'm all for going to the office if they're willing to compromise. But no, it's their way or the high way.
People need to get over the “long commutes” complaint, that is not your employers problem unless they just can’t find workers due to their physical location. If they can find suitable local employees without a long commute, your long commute is a “your” problem to solve vs. employer problem to solve.
If you're comfortable hypothetically giving up extra free hours in the day for a company that's fine, but please don't try to make me feel guilty for wanting something else in life.
> is not your employers problem
Of course it's my employer's problem, If I'm unhappy at work I do a less good job. It's baffling to me, and forgive me for being patronizing in turn, that individual people can have the same mentality as organizations, where people are just replaceable cogs in the machine. Yes you can replace them, but the cost, monetary and of knowledge is greater than retaining them.
You are not giving those hours to your company. The company gets no more or less for your hours of commute time than they do from your colleague who can walk to the office in 5 minutes. That is an investment you are making (because of your location), along with your labor, in exchange for money. If the investment is not worth it to you—why would you do it?
The “get over” comment is really meant for the realization that your location in proximity to your office is really meaningless to your organization. No need to feel guilty if you don’t want to make that time investment or location change. You do you. Just realize that your company’s concern for your individual happiness will be limited to what it can do for the aggregate net happiness of all its employees. Your individual reactions and feelings and how the relate to productivity outside their net HR benefits are kind of in your ballpark to solve.
You might hate the metaphor, but we really are just cogs in the machine. I have had a long career and can tell you that I learned long ago that the organizational cost of an unhappy cog is much much more than the cost of replacing them.
Companies treat employees like just another resource, so I personally think it's fair when employees try to game the system back. If you can work less and get away with it, I think that's fair because companies do the exact same in the opposite direction.
If it were up to companies they would select for indentured servitude, if not slavery, because that maximizes profits, and that's the bottom line. Companies even admit as much, and they're going to fight to remove as much leverage from employees as possible.
What matters are deadlines and productivity. If you can be productive in less time than others then good luck to you. Wages are 'flattened' between people employed at the same level so why shouldn't the more productive workers benefit in some way.
But, that was also a failure of the company. They did not manage me well or even think about my productivity. I strongly suspect that I wouldn't have done anything much even if the role had been office based. The role and the company were simply poor and not a good fit for me.
These days I'm much more productive working from home than an office, but I'm in a place where what I do matters and I like that.
> It's about the discipline to spend the time on task when nobody is watching.
Again, if you're expected to deliver something, the discipline should come from risk of being fired if you don't deliver.
- drive 20 minutes
- get in, hit the breakroom, coffee and chat for 20-30 minutes
- work a bit, maybe a meeting
- IM bunch of people about lunch plans
- go to lunch for 90 minutes
- back at the office, another 15-20 minutes before settling in
- work a bit while keeping an eye on traffic to head home
- head home
At home,
- get up and work for about 90 minutes
- bike to school with my kid.
- work for 6-ish hours
- pick up my kid
- work another 90 minutes while she is doing school work
- parenting fun
- work another 60-90 after her bedtime
the core difference between at-office and at-home is that when I have to go to the office I do not touch my computer at home ever (often won’t even take it home with me) while when I am at home I will frequently work late at night etc
Mask is off, watch your best people go work for Chime.
I can see how it might make sense to accept that you’ll lose some of your best people, in order to significantly increase the average.
But yeah, really tired of CEOs criticizing their workforces when they make as much money as they do.
Pay me your salary and I’ll live in the office.
We never had WFH before - it was an experiment. For many businesses, the experiment didn't work. If you don't want RTO, find some other business that allows WFH. It's pretty much that simple...
It works fine.
We think of these mega-corps as inhuman, penny pinching, stingy monoliths - yet we then believe they're blowing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars a month on office space that's unnecessary. The math ain't mathin'..
They’re just as into vibes as the corner shop trying to sell you spirit crystals.
Show me one CEO with a building and I’ll show you one who doesn’t have one. ThE MaTh AiNt MaThInG
Speaking of "math that ain't mathin'" what about the fact that their best year ever was a year while they had a shitload of remote workers?
Nothing is failing. Bro likes the office. He thinks everyone should too.
It’s just comically stupid.
Dimon’s office is likely bigger and nicer than most of his employees homes, so of course he doesn’t mind working from there.
And then you might say well just buy a regular house?? Why bother going through the struggle of becoming a CEO just to work for one year as CEO then go live in a regular house? Does not make sense at all.
https://www.fancypantshomes.com/celebrity-homes/warren-buffe...
> For six decades, Buffett has lived in the same residence in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha, Neb. The “Oracle of Omaha” purchased the home for $31,500, which would be worth about $250,000 in today’s dollars.
> As it turns out, the house was the “third-best investment” he’s ever made, Buffett wrote in a letter to his shareholders in 2010.
The people I know who have done well in business don't have extremely fancy houses anyway. They vacation a lot.
> Why bother going through the struggle of becoming a CEO just to work for one year as CEO then go live in a regular house? Does not make sense at all.
People's priorities change. Maybe you're driven and got that kind of position and then think shit I can leave this and live well for the rest of my life.
The rest of these people are as addicted as heroin addicts.
Your comment seems to lack any awareness of the distribution of annual income.
If only compensation for the 0.1% stopped there. But unfortunately, the distribution of income pretty closely follows the Pareto principle.
I dispute that.
However, I also acknowledge that I don't have a solid proposal to deal with how to distribute vast revenue/profits within organizations that successfully raise them. Mostly I think it indicates they should be charging customers/clients less, but I'm not a proponent of any sort of simplistic "maximimum salary" rules.
I am of course speaking from a human context, which I realize is not the context normally used when talking about these things. You're utterly right: It's not salacious in the capitalistic context from which we have yet to find a viable escape.
Yes, one can argue that the world is (today) set up such that these numbers aren't huge, to which my response would be that today's world is badly mis-calibrated along the axis of income inequality.
If I were to get paid as much as he does, I wouldn’t even leave the office; I would sleep there.
I would think this could be a perk that companies could use to get an advantage in hiring. Although, maybe those who it appeals to on the whole may be lower performers?
Would love to see some real data on this.
I will say this:
>I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since COVID, and I come in, and—where is everybody else?
I remember when my employer was acquired from another company. Executives were on the 4th floor. After the acquisition they were gone and the 4th floor was open. I went up and found that the offices were palatial, private bathrooms, they had a bar, a lounge area... let alone all the personal assistants to do things for them. They had good parking spaces, lunch brought in for them, and so on.
I had a cube with a wall that they wouldn't fix, no window (I was about half a dozen cubes from a window in the middle of a room), no natural light, my cube was along a busy cube hallway where everyone looked into my cube as they walked down the hall.
So yeah it's different going in as an IC rather than executive, comparing them is hilariously narrow sighted.
Having said that after they left, the 4th floor was the best place to go to the bathroom. So I got that for a little while.
Very much an old company style.
I don't think amenities make or break WFH for the average person, the commute and the fact you're not home period probably rank a lot higher
- most of that space is for entertaining/selling to other execs
- the execs that work up there aren't actually there most of the year (they travel A LOT, like A LOT A LOT)
- execs, per my understanding, are basically on-call, with a few exceptions
i agree that old-school rank-and-file workspaces are spartan and depressing
That sort of speaks for itself.
Seriously though, if he's working 7 days a week in the office and can't get a hold of someone, I hope he's planning on paying them his salary. Hell, I'd come in the office 7 days a week for the multi millions of dollars he's worth. I'd do it for a year, retire, and live happily ever after.
I don't remember Dimon ever committing to making work-from-home permanent. From my brief time working with/interviewing for JPMChase, I never got the impression that they would ever do this. They were always very attached to their offices.
If this is true, then I think it's totally within his right to call it back.
It would be a whole other thing if he pulled a Sundar and said "wfh really works! wfh forever" in 2021 when vaccines were being rolled out only to cry "but my efficiency" in 2025 and roll it all back.
I also don't think Chase is going to lose much of their top talent over this. Most of the super highly paid/highly-talented people in tech that work there live near their central offices anyway, and the folks that worked for the business never really had a choice since finance is very tightly coupled to a few geos (NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston for O&G, London, Hong Kong).
In a way both are forced.
I mean, yeah, if you not picking up a phone call from Jamie freaking Dimon during working hours, that does seem messed up.
I also don't suspect these are low level people he's trying to get ahold of. One of the things I've learned about WFH is that the problems are not coming from individual contributor productivity - it's that a lot of the problems actually come from managers and executives. Either they lack the understanding of projects that are not in front of them, or they check out completely when needed.
Won't be surprised to see JPM participating in the WEF 2030 jobs of the future report and being part of those companies that would love to reduce the majority of their 200k+ employees with AI.
First it was Meta x2 then Microsoft, Salesforce, Klarna, and now JPM. More to come and as predicted in. [0]
Are you now getting what "AGI" really is? [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692
[1] https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-repo...
CEOs can be dumb and have their head in the sand but they are the CEO so no sense in punching a wall. they don't care.
The majority of workers won't work more than 3 days a week in office 10 years from now
But the real issue is that this company is immune to competition and consequences from a large number of employees fighting all this. All the large banks are propped up by our political, regulatory, and financial systems. You can’t start a new competitive and sustainable bank easily. Why would he listen when reduced competition and too big to fail protect him and the company from consequences?