Wall Street shrinks headcount as dealmaking and trading slump

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/wall-street-shrinks-ranks-by-21-000-amid-deals-trading-slump

69 74 3 years ago

badcppdev• 3 years ago

Replace the lot with ai. They want to replace us anyway, without paying royalties mind you, so they might just as well start with themselves.

dangus• 3 years ago

Just slap the word “AI” on it and magically you don’t need employees anymore!

My business relies on machine learning blockchain Web 3.0 to do all the work.

falcor84• 3 years ago

My AI dawg heard that I like AI, so now my AI fully relies on AI to do all the AI for the AIs.

gumballindie2• 3 years ago

Here's a better one, check this out.

"Our customers are all AI and they pay with a crypto we made." - I call this the commerce centipede, based on South Park's HUMANCENTiPAD.

Basically, if these companies automate end to end, both product and customer they've enabled the endless money cheat. They can even build their own little parallel government where the board rules as benevolant benefactors.

red-iron-pine3• 3 years ago

forgot cloud.

an older buzzword but still gets eyeballs

game_the0ry2• 3 years ago

I get this is a flippant comment, but this is not about AI, this is about a slow down in business, not about replacing people with AI.

Punchline is - economy is bad and getting worse.

curiousgal• 3 years ago

I would argue that it has very little to do with the economy. Interest rate is high so companies don't have access to cheap funding to finance their mergers and acquisitions hence the slowdown in M&A deals on Wall Street.

moneywoes3• 3 years ago

I recall too PE funds like Bravo salivating at how they’ll save 10-20% in Eng costs from AI

Somehow doubt that will occur for finance functions

yardie3• 3 years ago

Hi former Wall Street employees the planet could really use your help. Tech, Capital, and Web3 may be in a slump at the moment but industrial, environmental and infrastructure can't find enough people. The pay isn't as sexy and you may have to relocate to unsophisticated parts of the country. But if you've noticed, the Earth is heating up dramatically and this is a problem that can't be solved with a spreadsheet.

lpapez• 3 years ago

Neither is it a problem which can be solved with magical techno solutions alone.

The primary way is to solve it is through systemic and habit change, so I would say if these people wanted to help the environment, they're better off getting into politics.

thebooktocome3• 3 years ago

Something tells me these Wall Street types aren’t going to be too interested in the pervasive industrial re-regulation necessary to make a dent in atmospheric CO2 levels over the next century.

tootie3• 3 years ago

You don't have to engineer magic solutions to be part of the solution. Configuring Salesforce and automating payroll for a climate company is still helping. There's an industry around changing minds as much as there around reducing CO2.

browningstreet• 3 years ago

Fossil fuels are more than 70% of our GHG emissions. We need to replace fossil fuels faster than we currently plan to.

How will Web3 help with that?

UPDATE: Indeed — Apologies, this is what I get for reading on my phone in bed without my glasses. I mashed the passage together and misinterpreted the suggestion.

vector_spaces• 3 years ago

I read it as "Some things, including web3, are in a slump; why not do these other things"

Good lord though at "unsophisticated parts of the country"

alexeldeib• 3 years ago

Tech, Capital, and Web3 may be in a slump at the moment but industrial, environmental and infrastructure can't find enough people

I don't think that was their suggestion, it was a pragmatic appeal to hiring chances in case a call to action on environmental issues alone isn't compelling.

JumpCrisscross3• 3 years ago

pay isn't as sexy and you may have to relocate to unsophisticated parts of the country

This isn’t a pitch that will attract top talent. There is work in novel energy and industrial opportunities that hold potential to create billion-dollar companies. They may require travelling to exotic domestic locales, but you’ll meet people outside the mainstream and may be able to commute in from somewhere desirable.

MattGaiser• 3 years ago

What skills would they have that would be useful to any of those fields? They have spreadsheet type banking skills.

I wouldn't be useful for those fields either as a software engineer. I have coding skills, but cannot really do anything else.

carlmr• 3 years ago

I have coding skills, but cannot really do anything else.

I don't know how you think that could mean you'd be useless. Coding skills are useful in a lot of places, especially so when there are few programmers around.

In my previous job there was a team doing calibration. They hired a software guy to do some scripting work. After half a year he automated all the calibration work and essentially made 30 engineers jobless. You basically only need somebody to record enough data and let the script auto-calibrate everything.

Not every job will have such low-hanging fruit in terms of automation potential, but in places where a software engineer hasn't looked there will usually be a lot of processes that can be automated.

yardie3• 3 years ago

SCADA endpoints get smarter and more capable everyday. Many are running a simple API server. You'd fit right in because the codebase for hardware is approaching the modern coding practices of the web.

I just met a family friend who changed careers from banking and mortgages to installing EVSEs and PowerWalls. He's also making $500k, 3x his previous salary.

mhh__2• 3 years ago

Virtue > Skill

moneywoes3• 3 years ago

Do you have any reading for these industries and their problems? Maybe a taxonomy?

efields3• 3 years ago

Not a wall st employee, but I'm ostensibly staying put at my family-supporting job for a couple more years while some money stuff works itself out, but if things go according to plan (lol), in two years I could make 25+% less and maintain our current lifestyle. I could go chase that green job that will pay less. I would have to relocate my whole family, do a lot of paperwork, figure some shit out with schools and a kid that might need a little extra help, but it's possible.

I _do_ think we need to be changing our consumption habits, lifestyles, and careers to better ensure humanity's survival, but every single person is thinking like I am in that previous paragraph. I _could_ do the above, but for what… to do web app dev work for a company that's only kinda getting off the ground?

We've made employment in the US so precarious, even for the college educated people with skills and half a life of career left in them, that this calculus is just too much to take on. You need a small army of smart and capable people with some financial stability and social cushion to do this stuff.

Big problems demand big changes — I get it — but if you want big change in the US, you need to move political mountains that have not been moved for quite some time. I don't think the spreadsheet jockeys are would be good at that (just a guess).

LatteLazy2• 3 years ago

So people can take a huge pay cut and give up their social lives to go and do work people pretend to care about by won't actually pay for? And meanwhile the rest of us stay in our high pay jobs in nice areas enjoying all the infrastructure and environmental services that we refused to pay market rate for?

Wow, that's just brutal.

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

I think we're in for a bloodbath for white collar work the rest of this year. Trends I've been seeing:

1. The end of startup runway.

It's been about a year since VC money pulled back and there were a lot of startups that only had 12 to 18 months or runway left. I'm starting to see them go out of business in waves.

2. Late followers starting layoffs.

People I know at big corporate giants like insurance companies, retail chains, etc. are starting to get laid off. This took much longer than the big tech layoffs but seem to be starting in earnest.

3. Severance packages and savings running out.

This hasn't really happened yet for most people I know but will in the next 6 months.

frankfrank13• 3 years ago

Agreed. I also have to wonder if this is the beginning of the end of inflated tech salaries. I guess the two cases are

1. Paying $200-600k a year is fine, as long as you're hiring the best

2. Why pay $200-600k a year when the recently laid-off person will do it for <$200?

Are companies still confident that they're doing #1 accurately?

drivebyhooting5• 3 years ago

TC deflation from 600k to 200k would be a disaster. Personally it would break my family.

asynchronous• 3 years ago

Agreed, tracking my LinkedIn search notifications I’ve seen the open positions for tech start to plummet, to where last week my specific job description (cyber engineer) has now had 0% new positions.

Gortal2782• 3 years ago

+ student loan repayments returning, which i expect to lower consumer spending elsewhere in the economy.

vagab0nd• 3 years ago

This is all public information. Why hasn't the market reacted?

EDIT: I was convinced what you said (or similar) was true and missed the better part of last year's gain. Going forward I will be very careful when people confidently claim that "things will be much worse". What I learned is that it is always the unpredictable stuff that tanks the market. So I might as well put money into the index and not wait or worry about it.

moneywoes3• 3 years ago

Seems to pale in comparison to the number of tech layoffs ( ~220k in 2023)

efields3• 3 years ago

With the reductions in headcount, severance costs drove up expenses across the six largest US banks. Expenses tied to personnel and compensation jumped 6% to $95.5 billion.

It's almost like… the bankers were paid too much?

Wait wait wait… the folks involved with moving money around decided that they're not worth as much as they've been compensated?

You mean to tell me moving money around professionally isn't as valuable to society as maybe the last 40 years postulated it was????

gruez• 3 years ago

Wait wait wait… the folks involved with moving money around decided that they're not worth as much as they've been compensated?
You mean to tell me moving money around professionally isn't as valuable to society as maybe the last 40 years postulated it was????

As opposed to tech people working in adtech?

piva00• 3 years ago

As opposed to tech people working in adtech?

No, not at all, I think we can say the same about those people. Or even more broadly, tech in general, we are only paid these absurd sums of money because our work can scale very easily/cheaply to our employers, as an individual I produce millions of US$ worth/month to my employer but as value to society I don't know why I'm being paid multiples of what nurses, and teachers earn. At least I'm not in adtech or finance, lessens the disgust a little.

I think a lot of us are very aware of that fact.

otikik• 3 years ago

valuable to society

That was outside the scope of this project.

efields3• 3 years ago

:high_five:

red-iron-pine3• 3 years ago

"listen the requirements state that the project is there to make these people rich. if there is no L1s or L2s, we ain't doing any work for society. we have deadlines, dammit."

LatteLazy2• 3 years ago

If they were, more people would become bankers and drive down wages. That's the nice thing about free markets: if you think someone else is getting a better deal you can get it too!

mhh__2• 3 years ago

Who is society and how do we ask they what's desired?

game_the0ry2• 3 years ago

I get where you're coming from, but I am going to push back a bit.

Most of the folks getting fired are low level scut workers that are trying to get by and maybe even thrive (most wont), sort of like most of us.

The folks that truly deserve the hate for the direction financial services has gone in are the c-suite execs and their board of directors, with a little going to regulators that are bought and paid for.

CraigRo• 3 years ago

Most of the people who are going to be let go are pretty talented and hopefully fairly flexible. They'll find work, maybe not at the salaries that they were getting before, but this has happened many times before.

Wall Street shrinks headcount as dealmaking and trading slump

Related Stories