This is borderline psychotic and not normal at all in PE right?

Just started at a UMM couple months ago and everyone here is just robotic, weird, super hardo, and dead inside. They have an absurd rule that employees must follow: 

You know on Microsoft teams you have your status? Green, yellow, but you can set to purple and leave a message? It is required for all employees if you are gone for 10+ minutes, you must set your status to purple and leave a message for why you are away, required. 

At around 7-8pm everynight, the entire team is purple and messages will say: 

At Gym

Taking a Shower 

Cooking dinner for kids 

Helping kids with homework 

How insane is this? I want to leave finance altogether...

39 Comments
 
[Comment removed by mod team]
 

Setting the bar at 10 mins is a bit much, but I think it could actually be beneficial to do this for every timeslot you'll be away that's longer than... at least 30, maybe 60 minutes.

  1. It will encourage people to stay organized with their calendars, because the easiest way to do this is just to put those purple blocks in your Outlook cal, rather than manually changing your Teams status every time you step away or come back
  2. If everyone at the firm regularly does this AND regularly spends some time away from their desk every day for things like dinner with the gf, kids' bedtimes, gym time etc., then it would actually help promote a culture of work-life balance. Because you would just constantly be seeing that other people in your team take some time to have a life, and don't have to feel bad about taking some time out of the day for yourself too.
 
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Some of the responses here are kinda weird lol can’t tel who’s trolling

The only objective answer here is that that is absolutely batsh*t out of control insane. To the point where I don’t really believe it.

I work at $2-4B MM PE that is fairly hardo in reputation. And the thought of doing that is laughable / unfathomable. Theres no scenario in which I would ever do that. It doesn’t even make sense. And I wouldn’t even have time/energy to be updating something like that.

Would love to know which firm lol

 

You'd be surprised. My old VP in banking at a euro BB would message me if I was on yellow for more than 10-20 minutes. And we had a spreadsheet tracker in our group to highlight what we accomplished each day. Huge micro manager. Was why so many of us left 1 yr in

I honestly thought that kind of behavior was normal until after I left

 

Agreeing with others in this thread, this is Big Brother type behavior. If they truly can’t trust you for some reason and need to know where you are at all times, then sure. But otherwise this just looks like a control tactic and other than maybe sprinting towards the end of a deal to sign, there isn’t really a huge need to always have this. We all need some boundaries. 

 

This has got to be a troll post. How do you get anything done when you’re constantly worried about making sure your status message is right? Do you have to say “talking with coworker XYZ about ABC” when problem solving something together?

 

I get it for team if they need people at their desk asap -to ensure coverage for an absolutely critical function that absolutely requires someone present. But that would’ve been weird for every role I ever had. I get when a meeting is dragging into another but aside from that. Seems lame.

Only two sources I trust, Glenn Beck and singing woodland creatures.
 

Obviously this is wild but, the high level theme here is very commonplace in the industry which is the intentional creation of a terrible lifestyle to get people to leave so you don’t have to fire them / tell them you aren’t giving them the carrot you dangled for years — part of the game

In general if you aren’t the person raising the money and you aren’t the absolute number one superstar of your group / level then usually the person raising the money would rather you leave than overstay your welcome

“It’s always been a pyramid this thing of ours”

 

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