“But that’s very different from having the latitude to wake up and say, ‘You know, it’s raining. I don’t feel like going to work.’”<p>Pretty much sums up the CEOs thoughts in a single sentence. People that aren't in the office don't "feel" like going to work.<p>I don't "feel" like sitting in an office being unproductive, distracted and running from meeting room to meeting room anymore. If your culture is keeping people at the office for 70 hours per week and you're afraid that vanishes if suddenly those lazy people don't have to sit there anymore... then maybe your culture isn't worth much.
When I worked at GS in London in 2019, they were moving out of three different (and rather nice) buildings into a single (and rather depressing) office. During the time that construction took place the presence in London had grown significantly, resulting in there being too many people for the available space.<p>So some teams were told that a certain number of people had to work from home several days a week, and everyone in Engineering was hot-desking... so you might not be sat with people you are working with. Couple that with the fact that most people are working mainly with people in other regions (or just on other floors - it's a big building) over Zoom, and it's hard to see much distinction between in-office and remote.
Honestly, for the IB work that GS does, I can definitely see why Solomon would want everyone to show up. Given my zero hours of experience in that field, they could probably execute deals remotely, but managing a hybrid environment in this situation would be a fiasco, especially from a cultural perspective. I can also see him thinking about this from a fairness perspective; either everyone is remote, or nobody is.<p>That said, it's a worker's market right now in many industries, and many companies are going remote. Honestly, I think this puts GS in a vulnerable position, as other IBs could just double-down on remote/hybrid work a thing and steal employees that way. Unless the industry agrees with GS in that everyone should be on-site, no exceptions.
Kind of telling that the employees really do not like working together: "employees could resume working together in person, as Solomon emphatically wants them to do, without further shutdowns. Yet as of late morning on that Tuesday, only about 5,000 of Goldman’s 10,000 HQ workers had shown up" I'd bet the number was closer to 4k if anything. This is clearly a structural cultural mismatch.
tldr; Tech people can ogle at finance salaries / comp - just remember, it's a deluge of mind-numbingly dumb spreadsheet crunching and slide checking with incurious people who will make you wonder how the financial system is still standing. Oh yeah, and they glorify spending 70+ hours a week in the office.<p>Source - tech guy who's lived with finance bros in NYC for more than a year.