I think WFH is another point of leverage for employees. If something doesn't work out with the job it's easier to deal with it on your own terms, whether that's taking more breaks or silent quitting. This leverage is exactly what employers are afraid of and want to rollback completely.
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.
I've worked for an all remote company for over a decade. Dimon is largely correct. There is a huge amount of abuse and we pay a high cost for it. It's not that remote interaction is worse in terms of creativity and productivity, I don't think it is. It's about the discipline to spend the time on task when nobody is watching. It takes a rare character to keep that up over years, and I'm not one of them. (And being free to say that is why I don't put my name on this account.)
RTO is just a cheaper way of reducing the workforce. The 'star' talent will sign contracts that say they can work from home 1-3 days a week and as soon as they make enough seats empty, WFH privileges for the rank and file will come back as well.
Probably also doesn't care about: -attrition -smartest talent leaving -salary to output ratio -innovation
Mask is off, watch your best people go work for Chime.
Jamie Dimon earned $39 million in 2024.
He earns so much money, of course he loves to work and doesn’t give a damn about people who don’t even earn a fraction of his salary. He also seems to forget that people who actually work for him bring these high profits for the company. How about being thankful for having smart employees who help you to keep your business so profitable?
If I were to get paid as much as he does, I wouldn’t even leave the office; I would sleep there.
Been WFH for many years, but I can understand why some companies prefer (demand) in office. Sorry, but unless its written into employment law, no-one has a "right" to it.
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.
His call.
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.
> JPMorgan has 14,000 open positions.
That sort of speaks for itself.
In other news, old man yells at cloud. I don't care how many days he fucking works in the office.
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.
This is really interesting. On one hand there's no going back to exactly what we had pre-covid, on the other hand there's a big power imbalance here. Something tells me in the end most of us will have to RTO.
I'll play devil's advocate because I have the karma to burn.
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).
100% RTO (return to office) is coming back later this year with a vengeance, and it's going to mean a lot of layoffs without severance. It's what they're getting at.
The way i see it as a intricate dance between layoffs and attrition.
In a way both are forced.
Labor is the biggest fixed cost. Employees are liabilities to the owners
> “Don’t give me this s–t that work-from-home Friday works,” he said. “I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.”
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.
Well yeah JPM is spending three bills on its new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue and wants to fill it with 14,000 employees.
Yeah, why would he care? In fact they'll just lay you off and displace you with AI.
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...
lol what is this petition about? look like corporate version of strongly worded letter
just go work elsewhere at another company until the loss of top tier talent causes one of these companies to reconsider their position. no one stays as ceo forever.
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
What a small, small man.
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Dimon does not care because he isn’t affected and because JP Morgan Chase is too big to fail. He’s rich enough that he can own multiple residences, commute on a helicopter, and all that. And to him, this job is his whole life and he probably does not care much about sacrificing other things. Employees don’t have the same situation.
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?
When you are an employee, you are literally selling your labor, knowledge and experience in exchange for money and services (healthcare, etc). Think of yourself as your own for-profit business - a business of you.
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.