JPMorgan employee questioned Dimon's RTO mandate, fired, then told he could stay | Hacker News Reader

JPMorgan employee questioned Dimon's RTO mandate, fired, then told he could stay

fortune.com

64 pointslibpcap66 comments

  Less than an hour after Mead’s call to Welch, at 5:14 pm, Monaghan texted Welch and apologized, saying he owed him a beer and a handshake. “I agree with your message, if not the delivery. We good?” Monaghan said in the text.

What a complete snake. Fires Mead for speaking truth to power, but then when a bigger dog tells the VP to back down, Monaghan wants to pretend that nothing went amiss?

Edit: also, apologizes by text! Could not even man up enough to verbally apologize.

I would have told them to go pound sand.

Indeed, the problem is blame always travels down the corporate ladder.

Being targeted by upper power-structures means your career is unofficially over regardless of what clowns say for PR. Guy should resign while it is on his terms, and go someplace less hostile.

Rule #13: "Never reach out to a drowning man", as in their desperation they can push you under as well. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prcJg7ZzXh4

Why resign? It seems more beneficial to phone it in at work and let the employer keep paying you while you find another job, or at least collect more money until they fire you again.

Agreed. That VP is going to be butthurt about how you made him look the fool. The opportunities there are going to disaapear, but you are safe from obvious reprisals for many months. Best to lay low and exit as quickly as possible

Presumably because he didn't actually want to go to the office and go through the motions. Must be nice to have so much money that you can play risky games with your future like this.

What risk?

The situation being discussed is an employee who is terminated, and then rehired. At this point, the employee has 2 options:

1) quit (aka resign) - no more income from employer, and disqualifies employee from unemployment benefits.

2) do the bare minimum at work - income keeps flowing, and employee can look for another source of income

I see a downside for the first option, and no downside at all for the second option.

The employee in question was terminated because they didn't want to go to the office. They had a third option, which was to go to the office and look for another job in the meantime, and not get fired in the first place. That's what most people would do.

>do the bare minimum at work - income keeps flowing, and employee can look for another source of income

This is right, but if they demand that you go to the office then you have to do it. Trying to trick them into thinking that you're going to the office when you're not is asking for trouble. If you need the money then you should just go and not make too much noise about it.

Be nice friend... as money comes and goes... if one lives a low-burn lifestyle, than one never has to worry about investment passive revenue dropping you into the red. =3

Rule #1: Quickly identify a failure to resolve critical paths to completion.

Some projects are simply doomed without the right people, resources, and market conditions.

See "Law of holes" corollary:

"Nor would a wise man, seeing that he was in a hole, go to work and blindly dig it deeper..." ( The Washington Post dated 25 October 1911 )

This isn't about a doomed project, it's about a guy who quit because he didn't feel like he needed to go to the office. As far as I'm concerned, if you need the money then you should just go to work.

You mention "passive investment revenue" which is usually code for "invest hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to maybe get enough ROI to pay some bills." If someone is emboldened to quit his job over probably petty reasons because they can fall back on such "investments" they may still be reckless.

> it's about a guy who quit because he didn't feel like he needed to go to the office.

What are you referring to? The linked article is about a man whose employment was terminated for asking Dimon a question about how coming into the office helps when everyone he works with is not in the same office. And then he was rehired.

There are some managers that will assert authority through public firing of problematic staff for insubordination. However such measures are rarely ever necessary, as most corporate cultures are not that difficult to manage.

The old adage "It's Not What You Say—It's How You Say It" is very true when working within a team. =3

Right, I misremembered. Anyway, if you really NEED the job then you don't ask questions like that to the CEO lol. Everyone knows that asking is risky even if you're right.

"You can be Right, or you can be happy..."

...it is good marriage advice too. Have a wonderful day =3

> Dimon then complained of employees wasting time during Zoom meetings, and how headcount for JPMorgan Chase had ballooned by 50,000 in the last four to five years. “We don’t need all those people. We were putting people in jobs because people weren’t doing the jobs they were hired to do in [the] first place,”

This left me scratching my head. If you work with people from other offices, with RTO you are now not only wasting time on Zoom calls, but also annoying everyone else around you. And the second part is pretty revealing for the strategy actually - why don't they just get rid of the people that aren't performing? Probably because that would involve severance payments (at least in some cases). Much better to do RTO and let them quit on their own if they don't like it...

> why don't they just get rid of the people that aren't performing?

The other secret is that outside of really bad performers, no one really knows how well people are performing in a large company. And even if those people are performing well, are they doing a necessary job? This is why so many promotions come down to if your boss likes you, aka ‘team fit’.

> no one really knows how well people are performing in a large company. And even if those people are performing well, are they doing a necessary job?

Attempts to measure and quantify this have been unsuccessful thus far.

Elon and his team seem to have succeeded at figuring this out at Twitter. Or do you think Twitter was a unique case?

Elon didn't remove bad performers, he pivoted from social network to political platform. They removed moderators not because they were unnecessary or performed badly, but rather because they were actively harmful to the new mission.

He removed a large swath of tech people too, so many that several posts here on HN doubted that the platform would stay up in the long run. In reality the platform did pretty well, even during "intense" events like the US election.

It crashed multiple times after his cuts and that was while dealing with a largely reduced flow of traffic.

Twitter has survived death, but it’s only a fraction of what it used to be in terms of traffic, revenue, and profit compared to before Musk

> It crashed multiple times after his cuts and that was while dealing with a largely reduced flow of traffic.

It crashed multiple times before he bought it too though.

> Twitter has survived death, but it’s only a fraction of what it used to be in terms of traffic, revenue, and profit compared to before Musk

That fraction of traffic being somewhere around 3/4 to 4/5 the hits, according to a quick search, does that sound about right?

That the dire predictions on HN, reddit, etc., about twitter's destruction after those aggressive layoffs turned out to be wrong. We were assured that it would imminently implode and/or explode. Not that revenue or traffic would be reduced due to content/policy/marketing/etc, but specifically that the site would essentially cease to operate due to lack of technical expertise. I think it's fair to say those predictions were wrong, and not wrong because traffic was so significantly reduced that the problem went from imminent implosion to more-or-less operating as usual, but because they were really just baseless speculation driven by wishful thinking.

Layoffs were around 80% of the total workforce. It's impressive that they managed to stay up & running with 4/5 of the hits. The real Pareto law: you can run at 80% capacity by cutting your developers to 20%.

All jokes aside, either Musk's people were incredibly good at reducing waste or the majority of developers and PMs at Twitter were doing nothing useful. I can't see any other explanation.

Diverting assets from the publicly trader company you run, to the privately traded company you also run, does wonders for the balance books as well

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-ordered-nvi...

That's irrelevant from the tech point of view though. They still cut 80% workforce and managed to stay up serving 80% of the traffic, which is a notable achievement (and an open question about how well companies channel their talent into deliverables)

AMZ is also known for periodically culling 10% of the worst performers. Out of all my contacts at faang type orgs, I get the feeling that AMZ is pretty tough to "game" by underperforming / "silent quitting" people (exceptions and all, ofc)

Twitter, like many tech companies, was composed of a small core worth a small fraction of its valuation plus a large number of speculative bets. It's easy for an owner who doesn't care about the valuation to simply stop doing the speculative bets; it doesn't require any kind of clever employee performance analysis.

It’s not that simple, even in a company that was as notoriously mismanaged as Twitter. When he came in with his trusted lieutenants from SpaceX and Tesla, they had some sort of game plan to data mine HR databases, corporate email and so on. If I were to guess, Palantir must be involved somehow. Probably the same playbook they are applying at DOGE right now.

In comparison, the “RTO to make people quit so we don’t have to pay severance” model of JPM, Amazon and others is a blunt instrument that is as likely to cause top performers to flee.

I remember an interview with is it Wozniak where he said he took classes in business under an assumed name. And the professors lesions were often wrong or hopelessly outdated. Outdated like thinking business is like a 1940's toaster manufacturing plant.

Unfortunately Eddy is only managing to stamp 260 units an hour and his defect rate is too high at 2.2%. The average is 350 stampings and a defect rate under 1%. We need to get rid of Eddy.

Compare with a software guy that spent a month on a feature most of which was fighting broken tools, back and forth with the customer because marketing completely failed to understand what the customer needed. All the while getting pulled off to fight fires. It's amazing Eddy got it done at all. Then Eddy's bosses boss notices that Eddy only manages to close 1-3 issues a month vs the usual 6 to 10. Tells Eddy's boss that Eddy has to go and Eddy's boss freaks out because Eddy is his fixer.

> We don’t need all those people. We were putting people in jobs because people weren’t doing the jobs they were hired to do in [the] first place,”

Sounds like Dimon admitting that he failed at being a good leader, but for some reason, the solution isn’t to get rid of himself.

You made the decision to hire those people! Why are you punishing them for doing jobs you hired them to do??? I think this is executives mad at empire building middle managers who request bloated headcount to increase their scope

Don’t ask questions at JPMorgan…

> When Welch got to the meeting with Monaghan, he says he found the VP standing in a small conference room, along with another executive, Jeffrey Todd Merrill, Vice President – Global Dedicated IT Support, who was seated. (Merrill was Welch’s boss from 2018 to 2021 but is no longer.) Welch says that Monaghan told him he had “just dragged our whole organization through the mud. Go and clean off your desk and get the fuck out of here,” Welch recalls.

Such a strange reaction, did these guys really make this call on their own?

If you can't ask questions and make observations, or you're told you're not being paid to think, you're being paid to take the fall for some executive director or above. Huge red flag.

Hopefully the NY DoL and AG will deliver them a fresh proctological exam.

The employee in the linked article works in Ohio. New York’s government would have nothing to do with this.

Also, absent a contract stating otherwise, there is nothing illegal with terminating an employee in the manner described in the article, except in Montana.

My observation does not pertain to labor law, but rather to work environments, and how interpersonal dynamics work when there's a large power differential, if the more powerful person acts in particular ways.

As long as I have some personal freedom, I will avoid employment where I can't ask questions and receive honest answers, or where I'm told I'm not paid to think.

For context VP is not really a senior position in JP Morgan anymore. There is such a thing as a Senior VP too, but even that is usually gained by time served as opposed to suggesting someone with real decision making power.

Obviously the VPs in this case may have sway, but it sounds more likely they overstepped, creating a particularly unsavoury mess.

There is no official senior VP title at JP Morgan. The next rung on the ladder after VP is Executive Director

Yes, the average VP at JP Morgan makes less than $200k. The VP title at banks does not mean what it means at other companies.

That’s pretty typical for banks, as I understand it. VP is a low-level management position.

AFAIK, they split VP in two seniority levels, and they also split tech jobs into two tracks, manager and IC. So now, in practice, you get 4 flavours of VP. Same for EDs and, I think, MDs.

Such weak men running these companies. Their ego is unbounded.

Just from the humiliation this man went through, he should have asked for a severance package, compensation, and then sue them for many reasons, primarily for mental anguish that he asked for the obvious as a newly divorced parent who wants the best for his children.

US employers do not owe any of that to their employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

Isn’t this illegal? Discussing work conditions and policies is protected by labor law.

Also something about Dimon’s aggression doesn’t sit well with me, considering the position of JP Morgan is entirely dependent on the public since banks rely on regulatory capture, are too big to fail, tied to the federal reserve, and so on. He pretends he and the company are above their employees in an undeserved way.

There's been a resentment brewing in the leadership/ownership class for a few years about this. My theory is that the isolation of lock down kind of drove a wedge between these guys and their employees, and now they're majorly out of touch and fundamentally aren't interacting with the regular people who work for them, resulting in cruel policy like RTO and mass layoffs even at well functioning and profitable organizations. Just a lack of respect or knowledge of what their employees actually do.

I wonder if this is all just to protect Dimon’s ego. He was quoted saying he was unhappy that he was going to the office everyday and no one else was there. Or is it just to protect the value of their office buildings?

> Or is it just to protect the value of their office buildings?

I have a very strong belief it's the latter. Every corporate entity is doing wierd shit with Listed Property Trust investment on their own buildings, and if it can't rent refuse to rent below rate because it affects the asset value, and associated loan-to-value costs. Nobody wants to be the grown up admitting they bought at top of the peak and the office is worth 10x less. (fictional amount for illustrative purposes but I read that city buildings are selling way below buy cost)

That recently leaked memo where he go on a tirade is also just asinine. He's conflating bureaucracy with WFH, and talks about how there's 14 committees to accomplish something. He's the CEO. How much do you want to bet that complaining about the 14 committees even to Jamie will just result in 1. you being marked as a troublemaker, 2. resulting in 15 committees.

There's still zero evidence that WFH reduces productivity or that RTO increases productivity.

> There's still zero evidence that WFH reduces productivity or that RTO increases productivity.

Depends on the team and the job, which is what I appreciated about this employee's question. He brought up that for his team, there were 7 people scattered around the globe. RTO didn't make sense for them.

I manage two teams with 10 direct reports total. 9 of them are in NYC. Having some days in office absolutely has benefits. Personally, mandating 5 days in office doesn't make sense to me. People come in 3 or 4 days and that's great.

There isn't zero evidence that working in person has benefits. That's silly.

Do you believe RTO leads to productivity increase? Why? Is there data to back that up?

I can’t imagine how I would have learned the programming trade if I hadn’t been in the office with more experienced engineers guiding me. I feel for all the young engineers out there today who have to deal with reluctant audio-only calls with senior team members or — worse yet — people who insist on all communication happening over text.

I also find it amazing how many people focus on “my productivity” and “my ability to focus” rather than on the team’s productivity. Professional software engineering is a team sport.

I don’t think 9-5 for five days a week is the right answer, but I also believe that frequent time in person is crucial for an excellent team.

How is learning to program from someone sitting next to you breathing down your neck better than learning to program via a Zoom code pairing session?

I’ve been writing software in and out of offices for 20 years, and I honestly don’t understand what do you mean.

Complete anecdote, but my personal life experience is that offices only cause me to get more easily distracted and forget what I'm doing (which costs me time and productivity), whereas at home I can actually concentrate and not lose track of my own mental models, leading to better results.

It's kind of sadly become necessary after having some traumatic brain injury, since I wasn't quite like this a decade ago.

It really depends on what you're doing and what dynamics the task at hand requires.

https://archive.ph/I5eM2

http://archive.md/20250215175832/https://fortune.com/2025/02...

Nothing says big bank more than being yelled at by your ex-boss, with a different ex-boss in the room, while your real boss has no idea what's going on, and being maybe, but not really fired.

Bank VPs have no discretion to fire people - they'd need to work through it with HR. That would take weeks to months, unless it was really egregious, or came from someone 4 levels higher. Dimon could have told HR to fire him and it would happen instantly, but some mid-level idiot VP can't just fire anyone, especially not their own direct report.

I'm guessing the Director (Mead), who was on vacation, got a rude awakening and had to clean up the mess. Director is still not a big title at a bank the size of JPMC either.

But, I'm assuming she got the story many times from different people, had to come back and tell the first two VPs how stupid they were for yelling at someone and throwing them out of the building, and then talk to the guy's direct manager (Cundiff) and straighten things out.

Guessing the other two VPs got a shouting at for generating far more risk to the firm by swearing at and fake firing an employee.

Headline is a bit butchered, it should read “was fired”:

> JPMorgan employee questioned Dimon's RTO mandate, was fired, then told he could stay

All's well that ends well.

Did I miss something? The RTO mandate is still there, isn't it?

As in the fired employee was retained.

Sounds like a VP is under a tremendous amount of stress, and took it out on this one employee. This is not professional behavior in the least.

The good news is that he manned-up to his mistake by acknowledging it and apologizing and trying to make amends. I've seen many execs never acknowledge their mistakes for yelling, swearing etc, so I give this guy credit. People make mistakes, and unless this VP has a history of doing the same thing, I would take him for his word and it feels like the firing is water under the bridge.

His VP apologized when their skip level boss got involved and forced him to.

He wasn't doing this voluntarily.

yeah this is not atypical in finance orgs. sounds like it's a culture clash of "analyst in tech ops" getting the first-year IB associate treatment. apologized and offered to buy him a beer, seems fine to me and hardly worthy of any sort of article or reporting.

> Sounds like a VP is under a tremendous amount of stress, and took it out on this one employee.

It doesn't really sound like that to me.

> But his day soon took an ominous turn, when he received a text from Garrett Monaghan, a Vice President – Branch HelpDesk. “I don’t know what the fuck you just did, but come to my desk immediately when that town hall ends. Please,” according to a message that was viewed by Fortune. Monaghan was Welch’s immediate supervisor in 2022 and 2023 and, though he is no longer his direct boss, they both work in Technology Employee Support Services, or TESS, a division of JPMorgan Chase.

[The VP eventually, hours later and presumably after the issue being escalated above him, begrudgingly sent a dishonest "apology" (why would he have told him to GTFO if he 'agreed with his message' as he claimed).]

This was not just a momentary unprofessional loss of temper. He took an employee's honest question as a personal affront "for making the VP look bad in front of the boss", and arranged a lynch mob so he could throw his weight around and humiliate a subordinate.

This has the character of a devious sycophant with a personality disorder. He may or may not be under stress, but I would bet that has little bearing on this kind of behavior and also that it is not the first time he has done something like it.

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