Sacked or Just Offline?

In this day and age, somebody being offline on his Bloomberg can only mean one thing, right?

When I meet with a friend of mine last weekend (who happens to work in Derivatives in a large investment bank) he mentioned that he had been given information about another round of layoffs being announced the following Monday. When wondering whether he could potentially affected, he assured me this would not be the case since he had been doing well over the course of the year, and was continuing to do good business. He rated the chances of him being part of the alleged 15% of the workforce to be let go as fairly slim.

A few days later, I thought I would check with him that everything was fine and tried contacting him via Bloomberg (so it looked like work). He was showing as 'Offline', so I decided to follow up the next day just to make sure. When he was still showing as offline, I started getting concerned since this clearly could only mean one thing: his optimism must have been poor judgement.

As I was about to contact his wife to check whether he was OK, I started remembering that the to-be-announced-layoff was not the only thing we had talked about over drinks, but clearly the only thing that was present in my mind.

It occurred to me that aside from that he had mentioned something about embarking on his long-delayed honeymoon the day after we met up.

Whilst I had already pictured him down at the local Job Centre, it turned out he was enjoying himself in sunnier climes, a few hours flight away from the corporate bloodshed at home.

And that's a much better reason to be offline.

Unfortunately, it's just not necessarily the first reason that springs to mind nowadays.

Originally published on HereIsTheCity Life, the original can be found here.

An Apple a Day

keeps the doctor away, an entry a month the readers. If only the max no. of characters was 140, I'd be done by now. Ugh, now.

Crunch Time for Soul-Searching

When bankers got together they used to talk money, cars and houses. Nowadays, they talk about 'What If' they lost their jobs. Or is it more a matter of 'What When'?

When the number of people losing their jobs goes into the hundreds of thousands, it is not surprising that people in your immediate circle of friends, if not yourself, become affected.

Recently I was taking stock of how my friends fared, and concluded that almost two-thirds of my banking acquaintances had lost their jobs. Given that bad news and disastrous results in banking come out more often now than bad results for Tottenham Hotspurs, it is understandable that my fellow bankers, those who still have jobs, are nervous.

At recent birthday drinks with a finance friend in Canary Wharf, unsurprisingly, the No. 1 topic was the employment situation, the likelihood of more redundancies, and how people perceive the threat of themselves being in the firing line.

And since nobody - not even the boldest optimists - consider themselves safe, a lot of thought is spent on what to do when the pink slip finds its way to you.

After a quick poll, it's clear that very few of my friends are in banking because they love it. It has been an industry that paid over the odds in the past, and therefore attracted bright individuals by the mere fact that salaries were so much higher than anywhere outside of banking.

It is obvious that the banking world is becoming smaller and it will not accommodate as many as it used to. For all of us who never have done anything but, it yields the question of what else there is to do. And unfortunately, retirement is not an option since most of us joined the industry too late to have reaped in the big bucks.

Interestingly enough, I recently met a former banker who has set up a recruitment agency placing former bankers into other industries. Her USP was: "What do you really want to do?" Her argument was that if you ignore your bonus, other industries don't pay that badly in comparison.

If banking has never been one's passion and the absence of bonuses means that the pay gap is narrowing, that suddenly sounds like a decent proposition.

And with bonus season upon us, I suspect the soul searching will continue.

Published on HereIsTheCity Life on 2nd December 2008, the original can be found here.