Barclays Announces 4 Days Mandatory In-Office + No At-Home Meal Expenses

Referencing the NYC office, don't know if this is the same across all of Barclays' other locations. Policy kicks in October 3rd. The kicker is that the removal of at-home meal expensing includes weekends.

Naively thought that some of the post-COVID improvements in lifestyle/perks would be permanent. Seems now that the labor market is less favorable towards IB juniors, seniors across the street are saying “lol sike” and flashing us all a fat middle finger.

Really fucking tough pill to swallow following garbage bonuses, sky-high rent, increasing mortgage rates, unprecedented inflation, and yet another looming recession all joining forces to bend us over. If you really think about it, seems the only longstanding improvement to banking post-COVID is slightly higher base salaries, given bonuses were dialed back to keep all-in comp flat.

Thoughts? Any other banks announce similar belt-tightening moves recently? Any thoughts re. how this’ll affect talent recruitment/retention going forward?

34 Comments
 

Not sure I agree with this. My bank only runs the expense log if/when the deal closes, and even then expenses are capped at a certain point. How many deals have you been working on that have died for some stupid reason, or taken a year to finally get across the line and the bank has already long met the expense cap?

I think the bank pays for at least 70% of these meals, and it's probably even higher than that.

 

Yea, fuck this bank. Terrible summer, terrible bonuses, bank bringing in tons of crappy senior level people from other banks making the work and culture terrible. Senior management is so incredibly un-self aware it’s comical (head of IB saying they want to be “#1 in junior comp” and then paying the worst A1 BB bonuses).

If I was a summer I would not have accepted a return offer - know several people who accepted other offers. Cannot wait to get out of this hell hole.

Barclays tryna be Goldman but pays 40% less and carries nowhere near the brand name.

 

What type of bank did you end up at then? FT market has been brutal. Were you able to leverage for an even better BB or EB?

 

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