Goldman Bankers Threaten To Quit Over Requirement They Report To Office 5 Days A Week

A lot has apparently changed in the span of a year.

After a group of Goldman junior bankers found themselves at the center of a firestorm of media attention after leaking a presentation to the press expressing their displeasure with the intense burnout from their 100-hour weeks (memorable excerpts included “I’m in a really dark place mentally” and “I went through the foster care system and this is arguably worse”), Goldman’s bottom-of-the-pyramid grunts are back in the news for reportedly threatening to quit over management’s demands that they work a “5-0” schedule – that is, that they show up to work every day at the office.

A report on their complaints (which have been shared on the anonymous corporate messaging board Blind, which uses corporate email addresses to verify employment) was published Wednesday by the New York Post.

Junior bankers at Goldman Sachs are threatening to quit over demands that they show up to the office five days a week as the pandemic wanes — and some gripe that their bosses have been quietly checking attendance.

What’s more, a few of the workers have even bandied about the “b word” – “bullied” – claiming that their bosses have browbeaten them by quietly checking attendance and using these records to penalize employees who don’t do a sufficient job of showing face.

One anonymous source griped that the policy flies in the face of management’s insistence that it has been trying to put its “people first”. Another went even further, lambasting managers armed with attendance spreadsheets as “f***king b*llshit.

“In GS, the top management says it’s employees choice but internally they track which team has most in office attendance,” one Goldman employee wrote on the corporate message board Blind, which verifies users’ place of employment with the help of their company email accounts.

“It’s f**ing bulls**t from top management saying they are people first,” the miffed Goldman underling added. “In our team meeting, manager showed us the excel where the MDs are tracking which department has not met in-office commitments,” the staffer wrote, referring to the high-level managing directors.

Apparently, when managers determine that a junior employees’ attendance hasn’t been sufficiently high enough, they use their unofficial “attendance sheet” to “bully” that employee into showing up.

One employee pinned the blame for the policy on CEO David Solomon (who has made no secret of his distaste for work-from-home culture).

“David Solomon sucks,” one user griped on Blind. “Nobody wants to be in 5-0 and plenty of companies are willing to allow hybrid/remote.”

Goldman called its workers back to the office in February after repeatedly delaying the return. Meanwhile, some of the bank’s rivals – including JP Morgan – have embraced a “hybrid” approach (despite CEO Jamie Dimon’s early misgivings about remote work).

Of course, Goldman’s junior bankers are richly rewarded for their early-career sacrifices, as the bank’s former employees routinely move on to positions of power and influences in governments and corporations around the world.

But if these bankers feel so strongly about their right to work in pajamas they should maybe try to find a job in tech?