Post Covid Offices
By now we have hopefully broken the stigma of working from home and realized that not much productivity has been lost and in many cases actually gained some.... Any thoughts on how this changes the HF industry long term?
Some ideas:
1) Funds realize that support functions really don't need to have Park Ave desks
2) Many non-rain makers decide their family can have a better life in a tier 2 city like Philly, Boston, Austin, Miami?
3) Do the guys with miserable suburb commutes move to a cheaper city or just go to office like 2-3 days a week?
4) View on how commercial RE evolves
5) Who wants to be in NYC with the train wreck that is coming both fiscally and socially?
etc.
Nothing to add but following because very curious. Have to imagine the HF industry is likely the front office type role most amenable to these kind skills of changes given focus on alpha vs. facetime
What about things like breakfast meetings with other buy-side analysts to "talk shop" or swap ideas or find out what other funds pay, or broker meetings or dinners with issuers/companies? The analysis can be done from anywhere but the softer stuff like idea generation and having access to banks/sell-side analysts/advisors and the ability to meet other investors is a huge part of the job.
I don't think it's necessary or you can have a proxy analyst. But that would argue for suburbs model in office a few days a week or commuting city like Boston/Philly 1/week for higher quality of life.
I think most people already realize this job works fine remote, but that having a place for management and LPs to come visit is important. Many funds had a guy here and there working wherever - especially millennium where it seemed there was a guy in his home office or a one off team running a book is most big/mid-size cities. I think funds that value talking in the office and bouncing ideas verbally off a group will continue to do that. It’s not like we ever really had to be in the office everyday to research stocks - unless COVID is way worse than it currently seems to be, I don’t see meaningful changes in the long term. With that said perhaps prospective candidates who have a non-NYC city preference will find incrementally more openness to remote when they are seeking jobs - just if a given PM had a good experience working remote with his team during lockdown then perhaps they’ll entertain a remote employee where they wouldn’t have before.
Asked around and seems like a lot of guys are heading to Florida.
Individuals / teams or firms relocating?
At this point, I have just heard of individuals and teams who work for buyside firms that can easily set up offices.
But a few I heard about are big names, and presumably other guys will follow after they show that it's OK and no stigma. Writing is on the wall as far as NYC being at a social/financial tipping point.
All good points and would expand this to all corporations really. I bet many companies may start having the “what would you say you do here” conversations about their labor force.
Also have any major corporations failed at executing their operations more than usual since they started WFH? Like has some investment bank really fucked up a bond issuance or has some software company not been able to push updates to their customers or something?
I think a good point, somewhat orthogonal though, what are you proposing exactly? How does it tie back to offices and GTFO of blue states?
1) Seems like corporations will use the experience to cut the fat in terms of understanding who their most valuable employees are in terms of their ability to work autonomously. From my experience, the best employees actually became more productive under Covid.
2) If they are really fucking up what does that mean? I think the big issues will be in lack of onboarding new employees effectively and lack of investment in R&D (not that we do that anymore anyways in the era of financialization buyback parties)
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