SVB Employees Blame Remote Work For Bank Failure (axios.com) 233
Long-time Slashdot reader BonThomme shared this article from Axios:
In a story in the Financial Times out Thursday, current and former Silicon Valley Bank employees cited the bank's commitment to remote work as one reason for its failure....
The banking industry has led the return to office charge for a while, and SVB was an outlier in its commitment to something different. The company's career site touted its flexible culture. "If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it's that we can trust our employees to be productive from wherever they work," the site says. The executive team at SVB was spread out around the country, with CEO Greg Becker at times working from Hawaii, according to the FT.
Yet, SVB included remote work as a risk to its business in its 2022 annual report — in part because of the IT issues posed when employees are dispersed around the country, but also for productivity reasons.
The FDIC, which now runs the bank, told staff they could continue working remotely — except essential workers and branch employees, per Reuters.
Axios ultimately blames SVB's run 11 days ago on its panic-inciting public communications about needing to raise capital, combined with its oddly high concentration of tech clients and a portfolio of long-term U.S. treasuries as interest rates rose. "It's certainly possible that if more executives were working in closer proximity those missteps would've been avoided. But it's hard to really know." Yet they warn workplace policies could change simply because the Financial Times ran a piece blaming remote work.
"Companies looking for a reason to bring workers back to the office may find it in this piece."
The banking industry has led the return to office charge for a while, and SVB was an outlier in its commitment to something different. The company's career site touted its flexible culture. "If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it's that we can trust our employees to be productive from wherever they work," the site says. The executive team at SVB was spread out around the country, with CEO Greg Becker at times working from Hawaii, according to the FT.
Yet, SVB included remote work as a risk to its business in its 2022 annual report — in part because of the IT issues posed when employees are dispersed around the country, but also for productivity reasons.
The FDIC, which now runs the bank, told staff they could continue working remotely — except essential workers and branch employees, per Reuters.
Axios ultimately blames SVB's run 11 days ago on its panic-inciting public communications about needing to raise capital, combined with its oddly high concentration of tech clients and a portfolio of long-term U.S. treasuries as interest rates rose. "It's certainly possible that if more executives were working in closer proximity those missteps would've been avoided. But it's hard to really know." Yet they warn workplace policies could change simply because the Financial Times ran a piece blaming remote work.
"Companies looking for a reason to bring workers back to the office may find it in this piece."
Decision making that has little to do with logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Man a news article that has the ring of truth, how did that get past editors?
It's amazing how little decision making has to do with logic or even desired outcomes, as it does with the psychological problems of the people in positions to make decisions. The comment about the article providing an excuse that those affected won't be able to argue with is so spot on, it's positively painful.
I can't count the number of times over the years I have seen stupid fads embraced for no good reasons other than lemming like pack behavior, and the ability of a few to get the press to spew garbage.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Insightful)
Remote working makes sense, saves money, increased productivity and worker satisfaction. That is an opinion backed by real world facts from my job.
One simple example on how remote work increased employee productivity is fairly obvious. Those with kids will have to take a sick day to say home with a sick kiddo, but if you work from home, you can still take care of a sick kiddo and get 100% or more of your daily deliverables. Why? Because while they may kip out and fuss with the kiddo for a bit, they aren't taking an hour and a half lunch then a forty five minute bathroom break, then stand around the coffee pot complaining about how bad the commute has gotten.
Far from remote work being a "Stupid Fad" for my workplace, we've increased productivity, increased engagement, decreased stress, and with the fact we don't commute and eat out, we effectively gave everyone a 8 to 10% raise for zero cost.
No, I think SVC either didn't manage effectively or this is simply sour grapes because some employees were held accountable in the past for their lack of production.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Insightful)
'This is as stupid an excuse as blaming the bank for being too "woke."'
It is literally the same excuse.
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I would argue cause/effect more than the same issue.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Insightful)
excuses.
electronic communications do not work as well with remote workers
but office to office communications do
really.
consider.
major investors allowed to remove their investments with impunity.
bit coin suffered this
svb suffered this
remote working corresponding to a bank failure is bogus.
why is remote working being touted as a problem.
given a generic bank run
Re: Decision making that has little to do with log (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you blame them then for making virtue signaling hiring decisions instead of hiring competent people?
Because very publicly obvious the people in charge had exactly zero idea what they were doing⦠which leads to the conclusion they were definitely NOT hired based on their competency.
Re: Decision making that has little to do with log (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know which executives made bad decisions at SVB? Or are you just assuming it was the people you think were hired as "virue-signaling"?
You may want to read the Bloomberg article linked in this post. [slashdot.org]
Re: Decision making that has little to do with lo (Score:4, Interesting)
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Noted liberal publication Bloomberg. /sarcasm
Re: Decision making that has little to do with log (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you blame them then for making virtue signaling hiring decisions instead of hiring competent people?
You're begging the question. First prove that the hiring decisions based on virtue signalling is what lead to incompetent people running the place.
Here's a little hint for you: a band like that doesn't just swap out senior leaders leaders as well as internal processes checks and balances to suit political ideology du jour. The kind of decisions and management practices that led to SVB's failure take decades to make, long before idiots started calling things they don't like "woke" and long before anyone even gave a shit about diversity.
Yeah, SVB's leadership were idiots. Who were they? 5 white dudes. Oh noes there's a wooomaaaaahn as Chief Risk Officer. Yeah she's been in that job for 2 months, even if she were supremely incompetent she wouldn't have had a chance to do anything at the bank, much less sink it.
These are the people who set policies, the typical picture portrait of republican style non-wokeness, do I do disapprove that the CEO dares not not have completely white hair.
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It went under by making supremely bad high risk investments.
SVB went under by investing in long-term U.S. Treasury Bonds.
Nobody considered those "high-risk." In fact, they were considered one of the safest possible investments.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Decision making that has little to do with log (Score:2)
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Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Insightful)
This is as stupid an excuse as blaming the bank for being too "woke." It went under by making supremely bad high risk investments.
And probably other poor management decisions / behaviors. From TFS:
The executive team at SVB was spread out around the country, with CEO Greg Becker at times working from Hawaii, according to the FT.
"At times working from Hawaii" seems to mean (a) he doesn't always work, (b) doesn't work much, or (c) doesn't live in Hawaii and was vacationing there, so how much work was he actually doing?
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Informative)
They did not have any problems with 'high risk' investments.
Their main problem was liquidity, because they had too much money (55%+) in long-term US treasuries.
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The Daily podcast covered this. [nytimes.com]
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Insightful)
Risk includes investment concentration in a rising interest rate environment to be fair.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Informative)
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The bonds were not risky, in a financial sense. Stocks are risky. The problem is that they needed cash fast and bonds are inherently a buy-and-hold item, especially when interest rates are fluctuating.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Informative)
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Liquidity risk is absolutely a form of financial risk that any competent bank will track and manage, as is the market risk associated with any investment. SVB failed to manage the market risk associated with the rising interest rates and their effect on the market for bonds and mortgage-backed securities; that created the liquidity risk that they wouldn't be able to survive a run on the bank. A competent CRO would have noticed these risks and raised the red flag before the Fed got there; instead, SVB also c
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Re: Decision making that has little to do with log (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Insightful)
Remote working makes sense, saves money, increased productivity and worker satisfaction. That is an opinion backed by real world facts from my job.
For some work, remote work makes sense, and for some people, it is much better that they are not around others.
But you appear to be taking your situation, and extrapolating it to all situations.
Far from remote work being a "Stupid Fad" for my workplace, we've increased productivity, increased engagement, decreased stress, and with the fact we don't commute and eat out, we effectively gave everyone a 8 to 10% raise for zero cost.
The interesting aspect of all this is that there are jerbs that fit right in with remote work. But there are a lot of jerbs that just don't. In my own case, I do half my work at home, and the other half on site. It is not possible to do it any other way unless I did it all on site.
I'm a CEO of a 501c organization, since COVID, we've gone completely at home for the Board of directors. Works great. For functions - it isn't impossible to do zooms, but a very poor substitute.
No, I think SVC either didn't manage effectively or this is simply sour grapes because some employees were held accountable in the past for their lack of production.
That could be - we won't know until more information is available. But it is apparent that a fair number of people don't like remote work. Which kind of flies in the face of the standard Slashdot response to anyone daring to question remote work as the future's work situation.
Now all that being said, it isn't beyond the pale to come to a conclusion that many people who hate being around others might just really want to never be around others - a great reason for them to never go to a workplace. Remote work might be a very good solution to have a job, and not be around others, as is their wont.
But it doesn't apply to all people, and it definitely does not apply to all work. Many people enjoy interacting with each other in person, many people have a different desired career arc.
If remote is your goal in life, it's great. For others, myself included, it is a real mixed bag.
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem I see is that while some people don't like remote work because they really like being around others they are not okay with just them going back to work. They want to force everyone else to be there also to make them happy. I have talked to extroverts that are very unhappy because if they go to the office there are very few people there since most of the people they work with are introverts. They can't seem to understand that most of the other people find being in the office draining and less productive.
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The problem I see is that while some people don't like remote work because they really like being around others they are not okay with just them going back to work. They want to force everyone else to be there also to make them happy. I have talked to extroverts that are very unhappy because if they go to the office there are very few people there since most of the people they work with are introverts. They can't seem to understand that most of the other people find being in the office draining and less productive.
Some perhaps, but it seems strange to me. On the other hand, I have no problem at all with having misanthropes or agoraphobics never show up at the workplace ever.
Seems a little odd that extroverts would actually want those people around them. Some of the responses I've received for noting that there are different people and career arcs have shown me the writer might be a bit of a pill to interact with. Me? if a person is actually happy with never being in a workplace around others for the rest of their l
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Generally, they don't believe that being alone at work is better than being alone remote, they believe communication face to face is easier and more effective than remote.
This of course would require that the other party be in person to actually communicate with.
It's a complicated nuanced situation. On the one hand, yes, if you are away you don't have to deal with extraneous conversations about stuff that does not matter. You can even background some stupid meetings that folks have and get work done instea
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, I love remote work. I work with people all over the world and work on some of the most interesting problems humanity has right now. The software I write directly helps makes medicine and bring down the costs. Sometimes the work feels more like research due to reading scientific papers to add those features to the software.
I love the work and I love that I can make a difference and I don't need to be in the office to do that.
Social inepts want a captive audience (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked for people who have no lives outside work. It's horrible and they are one reason to prefer remote work over their coerced company in an office.
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That's really great, it's nice you are in love with remote work. However, that has zero relevance to what I said, as I said nothing about the value of remote work.
Everything I said, had to do with how bad decisions get made.
SVB is a prime example of how nonsense becomes decision support.
A. Company suffers from rectal cranial inversion.
B. Company has problems resulting from rectal cranial inversion.
C. Executives manufacture Scapegoat/Patsy/Fallguy
D. Eating Press promotes scapegoat.
E: Other rectal cranially
Re: Decision making that has little to do with log (Score:2)
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Ok, to be devil's advocate I will offer an alternative rationale, although I do generally agree with your opinion:
Often times with remote work, especially with heterogeneous tasks and responsibilities individuals become largely siloed so their task gets done efficiently and effectively, but there is little effort made to unify those silos to ensure the company mission is addressed. This is particularly true when companies focus on employee satisfaction as a metric rather than company performance metrics on
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Remote working makes sense, saves money, increased productivity and worker satisfaction. That is an opinion backed by real world facts from my job.
Focus on the key words in that post.
Do you get the picture here? One person's perception of the world.
Tell me how the person that assembles your Tesla can work from home?
Or the captain of the container ship filled with your orders of rubber dog sh1t from Hong Kong can work from home and safely pilot that ship in the middle of an ocean storm?
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"... the OP wasn't calling remote work a stupid fad..."
The OP was saying the article, which was implying that remote work is a stupid fad (already on its way out), "has a ring of truth".
Asshole.
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Because while they may kip out and fuss with the kiddo for a bit, they aren't taking an hour and a half lunch then a forty five minute bathroom break, then stand around the coffee pot complaining about how bad the commute has gotten.
Cool story, bro. What changes someone who takes 90-minute lunch breaks and 45-minute bathroom breaks and stands around the coffee pot griping with coworkers into an honest, diligent worker when they are at home? One can still take 90-minute lunch breaks and 45-minute bathroom breaks from one's house, and there may not be anyone around the coffee pot to chat with, but the company has no way of knowing how much time someone spends on social media from their phone or a different computer.
Exactly this. One of the big issues with remote work is monitoring becomes really spotty. And I'm not talking about intrusive monitoring, but just having some idea of what the employee is doing. We've had employees who were real slackers while in the workplace. They would have really loved to work without any oversight.
Yes, commute time is wasted time. That is why I took a job that is a 15-minute drive from my house.
A bit of differential, although you are basically correct. A young lady who worked for us had a 40-45 minute commute each way. I asked he if it was an issue for her. She said she rather like
Re:Decision making that has little to do with logi (Score:4, Informative)
In other words: you could replace "remote work" in this sentence with "water coolers" and it wouldn't make a difference. Except the last part: people will use this as an excuse to dismiss remote working as inefficient.
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The article says literally nothing about how remote work might have contributed to SVB's collapse. It only states that some people blame it for the failure.
The actual reason for SVB's collapse was their failure to anticipate the rapid rise of interest rates. https://www.npr.org/sections/m... [npr.org] As a result, a large portion of its assets, though considered low-risk, lost value, forcing SVB into a death spiral. The bank actually had sufficient assets to cover its obligations, they just weren't liquid enough.
So n
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Perhaps if their risk assessment manager, protege of Janet Yellen, had been more interested in risk assessment instead of woke bullshit, they could have avoided this.
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Indeed. Most decision making by "management" is not based on insight at all.
Scapegoats everywhree (Score:5, Insightful)
Banks can't have you lose confidence, and the management of SVB wants new jobs. So you should expect to see everyone and everything blamed for their failure except the fact that they were overstretched and management made liquidity errors.
Bonus points are to be had for using this to shoehorn anything that some don't like - "wokeness" (left undefined), work from home, green policies ... I'm sure if my neighbour was invited she'd put it down to the council not collecting the bins every week.
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Bonus points are to be had for using this to shoehorn anything that some don't like - "wokeness" (left undefined), work from home, green policies ... I'm sure if my neighbour was invited she'd put it down to the council not collecting the bins every week.
In this case they went for "remote work" as the excuse.
We need crash test ratings ... for banks. (Score:3)
Five star for Glass-Steagall compliant stress tested banks. Lower FDIC premium and unlimited protection for depositors.
Four for pre 1918 Dodd-Frank compliant ones. Slabs of haircut for depositors. 0% upto 0.25 milion, 1%bupto 5 mill, 2% upto 10 mill, 5% above that. etc.
Three star for post 1918 Dod Frank. more haircut , more premium too.
Disclosure in K and Q for all stocks where they park their money. Shareholders need to price the risk into the share price.
We need to reach a state where we can let a 200 Billion bank die, taking depositors with it without causing alarm or run on the other banks.
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Like NTHSB gives crash ratings for cars, FDIC should give one for the banks.
Five star for Glass-Steagall compliant stress tested banks. Lower FDIC premium and unlimited protection for depositors.
Four for pre 1918 Dodd-Frank compliant ones. Slabs of haircut for depositors. 0% upto 0.25 milion, 1%bupto 5 mill, 2% upto 10 mill, 5% above that. etc.
Three star for post 1918 Dod Frank. more haircut , more premium too.
Disclosure in K and Q for all stocks where they park their money. Shareholders need to price the risk into the share price.
We need to reach a state where we can let a 200 Billion bank die, taking depositors with it without causing alarm or run on the other banks.
I find your references to 1918 puzzling. The SEC has only been around since 1934. The Dodd-Frank act became law in 2010 and was partly repealed in 2018. Perhaps you meant pre 2018 Dodd-Frank?
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FDIC should give one for the banks.
There's already a rating given to corporations. Actually there are multiple different ones to choose from. The problem is they only look soo deep, and it was only 2 weeks ago SVB was downgraded.
Lower FDIC premium and unlimited protection for depositors.
There literally is unlimited protection for depositors. The $250k figure quoted is a guarantee, not a limit. Case by case analysis of a situation determines what the limit is for any given financial problem, as it should be. The guarantee has zero to do with the bank and everything to do with customers, customers who
A message (Score:5, Insightful)
This will not win me many friends or mod points, but it needs to be said:
FUCK OFF, YOU HOMOPHOBIC, RACIST ASSHOLES.
This is directed at all of the jerks that are going to appear in comments claiming, without a shred of evidence or logic, that the bank failed because of policies at the bank that they don't like.
The pattern is exemplified a WSJ editorial that actually said this [wsj.com]:
I'm not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.
This isn't analysis. This is starting from the conclusion, and working backwards from there, but without even pretending to find a reason. It's just bigoted speculation, in print.
We also have assholes here at /. doing the same thing, without even getting basic facts correct:
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
If these idiots were actually concerned about 'distraction', they should have started with the CEO. His bio lists a bunch of stuff that doesn't directly involve SVB:
Greg was named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal's inaugural Power 100 list in 2023. He is a Class A Director for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and since 2016 has been a member of TechNet's executive council, which he chaired from 2020-2022. He is also a member of the executive board of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which he chaired from 2014-2017, and serves on the One Mind at Work Guiding Council.
This story blaming remote work looks like it's also working backwards from the conclusion, but at least it's not as steeped in racism and homophobia.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg actually did a bit of journalism, and looked at documents where the executives at SVB ignored a recommendation to buy shorter-term bonds back in 2020:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
But the real facts in that article are just going to get lost in the noise ...
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I'm not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.
Wow they actually said that? About a bank who's senior leadership is made up of 5 white man and one woman who replaced a man only 8 weeks ago? (Unless that is they thought HR or Marketing are the ones making the big decisions, in which case kudos to those women for the power they wield from their irrelevant positions).
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Everything you just wrote is a lie, based on assumptions. And we have a pretty good idea about what you've based your assumptions on.
BTW, the rant that you're regurgitating about the SVP wasn't even based on the correct person:
https://slate.com/news-and-pol... [slate.com]
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that anyone can look up
You should try that. There's a link in the post you replied to, and other links in the first post in this thread.
Re: A message (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why is it obvious?
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crickets.mp3
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Why is it obvious?
Because doing risk management for a bank with 55% of its assets in T-bills and US government debt should be easy. There is pretty much only 2 risks on t-bills, inflation and government collapse. In the case of the US, government collapse is pretty unlikely so inflation is the one main thing you look at. Compared to doing risk assessment of more complex balance sheets, keeping SVB solvent should have been easy. The dozens of risks that other banks have to keep in mind weren't really a problem for SVB. T
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Because skin color and sexual preference aren't the actual values that keep a society cohesive. In the scope of things they are actually pretty low on the priorty list.
Do I have more in common with a hispanic gay man who grew up in my neighborhood or a white straight immigrant from another country with another language?
I would ask you what makes race and sexual orientation the most important norms of society?
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I'm not in the minority though, because I live in America and the vast majority of people here agree with some version of what I am saying.
You have turned what are pretty much personal issues into societal prescriptions.
Humans are in fact tribal but you are making the case that the things that make us tribes are skin color and sexual orientation and really you don't have evidence for that claim. What I am saying is things like upbringing, location, and community are the primary motivators are tribalism. Y
Clowns (Score:5, Insightful)
These venture capital clowns hate WFH because they love controlling (and worse) young employees (particularly women - or girls as they see it) at the work floor and hanging out with their bros at the workfloor. It makes sense that they blame their own failure at WFH which they hate. Productivity has nothing to do with it and nearly every study ever shows that productivity is better when people only spend 2-8 days per month at the office.
These are people that call themselves 'securities experts' (their words, definitely not my words) that managed to bankrupt themselves with AAA mortgage backed securities and T-Bills, even without the underlying assets having any issues. There are plenty of issues with their securities, both on loans to overvalued startups and mortgage backed securities that may or may not survive a potential housing crash, but they actually never even got to that stage. They managed to off themselves at near all time high easy cruising.
They simply forgot that they actually need cash at hand, and then hit a wall when interest rates went up a bit. A monkey could make money from rising interest rates while being a bank, but these people were so deeply incompetent that they couldn't.
This would have been caught in stress tests hadn't SVB's lobyists successfully lobbied for excluding themselves from nearly all types of requirements, auditing and stress tests [theintercept.com]. The leadership of this bank should do a japanese style head down apology to the public for bringing shame to humanity and shouldn't be playing blame games. They are lucky if they get away without seeing prison, and should thank us on their knees for that.
Then you have the companies, startups and so called 'investors' that have so little risk management skill that their company would have went down within a week if this bank failed. A computer glitch or administrative issue could have taken them out. They actually were lucky that their bank was taken out by FDIC because any other type would have straight up killed them. For any startup or organizatoin that would have come into issues for not having access to one of their bank accounts for a couple of weeks: fire anyone involved with decision making on finance, risk and operations. CFO, COO and in some cases the CEO should be out the door for being completely incompetent.
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Oh sorry did I hit a nerve mister anonymous coward? This is my take after a couple of decades with these silicon valley bros. All the biggest RTO fans that I have seen are the guys that have been behaving like pigs with the female workers. If you don't care about an unhealthy dose of control over your workers you don't care if people work from home.
Failed at the most basic level of accounting, fina (Score:4, Insightful)
What a smoke and mirror show⦠this bank failed at the absolutely most basic level of accounting, finance and risk management. They played the greedy investment game and completely and utter failed to have even basic loss stops, risk management and basic accounting.
It surely cannot be the fault of the virtue signaling executives, it must be remote work⦠not failure at basic finance.
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Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Certain right wing media has been blaming its failure on everything from working from home to diversity officers. How about just blaming it on what it was - a bank with lax oversight that lost a LOT of money on bad investments and suffered a run as people scrambled to get out.
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https://nypost.com/2023/03/14/... [nypost.com]
It appears there was only one actual banker on the board. So yes, it is easy to make the case that concerns over diversity took precedence over people who knew what they were doing.
It's quite similar to the wonder kids at FTX.
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They lost a lot of money on "low effort" investments, not "bad" investments. Reality is that there are no low effort investments when you are properly managing risk, but for some reason they failed to manage risk, practically at all.
That doesn't mean I am blaming their risk officer... it seems more like they were a lazy bank that put energy into easy money and didn't really get the fact that the environment was changing drastically-- at all levels.
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Because the right wing media is hammering all day long the message that the ultimate evil in the universe is wokeness (ha, you thought it was still socialism?). Hammer, hammer, hammer. All ills in the world can be pointed there, if you believe them. I think it passes by a lot of people who don't hang out on those propaganda sites, but they've been pushing the idea of a culture war for a long time now despite it being a nothing burger that only serves to generate more viewers for more advertising dollars.
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If this one single person, who was only there for 2 months, was the sole cause of the problem then wow! They gave too much power and trust in one person who managed to retroactively create the problem's cause before she was even hired. And yet they point to this one person, who wasn't even hired at the time, and claim it's "woke", and therefore this person causes a collapse.
They're trying to hard to make "woke" a scapegoat in their fantasy world. The argument doesn't work but they're figure if they repeat
Poor communication (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's certainly possible that if more executives were working in closer proximity those missteps would've been avoided."
So if 50 executives were all in the same room they would make less mistakes?
Nah bro. Doesn't matter if they're all remote or in the same room. They need better communication in order to make fewer mistakes.
Being in the same room forces one way of working which we are adapted to. But it also removes a lot of the impetus to organize better. We still make mistakes but we excuse them as unavoidable. When really we just need to work differently - smarter - and those mistakes become avoidable.
Communication is the heart of all collaboration. Focus on it, and you get better collaboration, with fewer mistakes.
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How? (Score:2)
Did the article give one specific reason How having employees (and executives) in the same room would have made a difference?
I'm guessing not. As other posts have said, take what you want to achieve, and blame the failure on that policy. WFH or "Woke" it is all the same.
Show me the *proof* that if 2 or more execs were in the same room, they would have done one thing differently regarding their unbalanced portfolio that was dependent on treasury bonds. Show me the proof that some middle-manager 4 levels down
It's here to stay (Score:5, Insightful)
Remote work is here to stay, period.
We'll never go back to the way it was, never, and most people are fine with that. Companies can either fight it or embrace it, and the ones that fight it will lose.
The fact is that most people, if given a choice, would much prefer to work from home, and no amount of corporate-speak or cajoling by managers will change that.
I personally get more done from home than I ever did in the office, and I suspect that holds true for the majority of home-workers.
For those that just can't live without the thrill of an in-person office environment, feel free to keep going in to the office until they decommission and close it (which they will do eventually).
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Assuming you are accurate in your self-assessment, it may still mean that other people on your team are less productive for your absence. If you get 20% more done remote, but 4 of your teammates see a 20% drop in getting stuff done, ultimately the company comes out behind.
However, your self-assessment is also likely to be suspect. Contrary to best efforts "productivity" is not something that is comprehensively quantified. So you get so many commits, or lines of code, or stories closed, whatever metric yo
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A study by Standford of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increase productivity by 13%. That is averaged over the entire field of study, so you can conclude that the outliers that may have lost focus from WFH are a minority.
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The problem is that some of those 'holes in the hull' are transient by nature associated with early career. A new hire needing to learn, but will be productive, but is challenged to get traction. I also think that this is a gap that studies can't even begin to evaluate given the short period of time (yes years, but it's been a weird few years with all sorts of other things mucking up all industries, it's hard to say *which* factor played a role versus another.
As to the Stanford study, I can find another s
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Yep. There are just a lot of really inflexible people that cannot accept it. But the numbers are solid and these people will end up on the trash-heap of history.
The results are in! (Score:2)
I call BS (Score:2)
Oh, now I know this was planned. (Score:2)
What better way to plant FUD in manager's / C-suite / business owners about remote work than pinning the blame for a notorious bank collapse on remote work instead of where it really belongs -- being shady and badly ran, with weak governance?
This is too perfect. This is crafted, not spontaneous. That's my two cents.
Gotta be remote work, not lack of risk officer (Score:2)
It's got to be the remote work, not the lack of a Risk Officer for months and a strategy of investing in bonds that was highly vulnerable to any rise in interest rates - i.e. an assumption that free money would continue forever.
Riiight.
Where's the proof? (Score:4, Insightful)
This article seems like it was paid for by people looking to get people back in the office. This writer says that people blame remote work but gives zero evidence to that claim.
The actual article (Score:5, Insightful)
Contains wonderfully stupid nuggets like: “Ideas like hedging interest rate risk often come up over lunch or in small meetings.”. As if risk management at a major bank is an ad-hoc process that depends on lunch conversations. I should hope not.
Yeah, sure. Anything to not admit they screwed up (Score:2)
Of course it is never the people that made bad decision, circumvented safety mechanisms and generally had no clue what they were doing. Nope, must be something else.
To commute is to pollute. (Score:3)
Physical commuting by employees whose presence is not required is an enormously polluting waste of resources to be aggressively discouraged. It's not merely a waste of personal time and that cannot bear enough repeating.
So who paid what for this article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be clear here; there is a massive amount of money endangered by the move to working from home owned by a lot of very powerful people. They have large investments in office blocks in downtown areas - and those blocks are worth a lot less if there's no demand for them to be filled by white collar serfs. So they are desperate to sell the idea that WFH is unproductive, problematic etc. The UK's Daily Telegraph has been a leader in this field, with a steady flow of articles doubting WFH, but this appears to be a new front...
Over extended on govt bonds (Score:3)
What is wasn't was being woke or WfH.
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"Get Woke, Go Broke."
Empathy or Greed, choose one.
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I keep hearing this phrse, is there an example of a company that in fact "went woke and went broke"?
Disney, Nike, Gillette and all those other "woke" brands seem to be doing just fine? Is there a good example?
This is also imo the classic mistake of thinking these places actually care about this tuff and aren't just responding to the demographics their marketing departments feed them.
Re:Get Woke, Go Broke! (Score:4, Interesting)
I keep hearing this phrse, is there an example of a company that in fact "went woke and went broke"?
I mostly started hearing it ("get woke, go broke") around the time Dick's Sporting Goods decided not to carry firearms. Initially, it was true that they were losing money for that decision, but over a longer term, the decision actually paid off [hbs.edu].
Ironically, it's a lot easier to find examples of "anti-woke" companies who have hit financial rough patches. The coffee company that was started by right-wingers who had a grudge against Starbucks is having financial difficulties [seekingalpha.com]. Then there's that MyPillow guy, and Trump's Twitter alternative which now seems kind of superfluous since Musk took over Twitter.
Re:Get Woke, Go Broke! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Get Woke, Go Broke! (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the sub prime lending crisis driven by race based rather than financial decisions on mortgages?
Yes, like Wells Fargo [justice.gov] which ignored any regulation to determine eligibility because it knew it wouldn't be on the hook for any failures, nor performed any due diligence. Just like Congres intended.
Or did you mean the banks which put double or triple mortgages on the same home? Or when banks falesly made up mortgages? Or when banks gave mortgages to anyone with a pulse [nbcnews.com]? You mean those race based decisions?
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Just like Congres intended.
Yes, Congress intended [theatlantic.com] (along with the Clinton and Bush administrations) for banks to write mortgages to bad candidates, and encouraged that by setting -- and then raising -- quotas for how many risky mortgages Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to buy. If the Feds did not want banks to write bad mortgages, the Feds should not have bought so damn many of them.
But don't worry, with such policies having contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, politicians will wait perhaps 15 years [nypost.com] before repeating the same mistakes.
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Re:Very unclear (Score:4, Interesting)
They're summarizing a report saying that the bank blames remote working. The Axios article itself comments that it is a dubious argument to make.
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So where's the report? I couldn't find one actual citation in that hot mess of an artcile.
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The article is poorly written and doesn't explain what exactly is the problem with remote work.
It does show that some people don't like remote work.
Which kinda flies in the face of the people who seem to feel threatened by the very idea of working in person, and are pretty loud about it in here.
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