When I wasn’t busy turning down unwanted business, I was making pitchbooks, engaging with traders, or seeing clients. I spent the majority of my twenties in that world, which remained mostly unchanged during that time.
Office life feels foreign to many of us these days. But on Wall Street, it’s an institution. In-person chatter, whether in an elevator, trading floor, or golf course, are as integral to the business culture as the business itself. It’s been that way for decades.
So even though I knew it wasn’t for me, leaving the industry and all that came with it was more difficult than I’d expected. It became part of my identity, whether I liked it or not. Hence the tears.
Tech companies, on the other hand, are in constant motion. I’ve worked at Dropbox for almost seven years—just longer than my finance tenure—but the days of riding scooters around the office feel like five jobs ago. Transitioning to remote work hasn’t been the easiest, but Dropboxers are accustomed to change. That adaptability and progressive mentality are so ingrained in our culture, that going Virtual First feels in many ways like a natural step for the company.
While tech is perpetually focused on what’s next and new, Wall Street—in my estimation—acknowledges the inevitability of change and does adjust; but if they had it their way, they’d be pretty ok with the status quo. Change isn’t met with the same level of enthusiasm or even acceptance.
As it turns out, the disruptive force of the pandemic can’t be ignored by any institution. In these uncertain times, tech is busy imagining new work models, treating the current status quo during shelter in place as a way station en route to a fundamentally redesigned work future. But there are industries for which the present shift to remote work itself feels like a futuristic, previously inconceivable state. And that’s arguably a bigger transformation.
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“It all happened really quickly,” a source in the business tells me. “I insisted on working from home—I think it was the Wednesday that second week of March. By the following Tuesday, we were all told to stay home.”
“We were generally later than the technology firms on working from home,” another source says. “Everyone made sure to have their remote access just as a precaution. Then the firm started to put employees on different floors to have some distancing. But once New York became obviously highly infected, they sent everyone home in mid-March.”
Simultaneously, the markets were crashing. Unlike the job I transitioned to, where writing articles and even editing video can be done on any laptop, lifting and shifting market-driven financial work to a home office is more challenging. On a hectic trading floor, work happens across multiple giant screens that look like they belong on a spaceship. Information flows so fluidly in what Cal Newport calls “hyperactive highline workflow,” that it’s hard to know where one conversation ends and the next begins. During the transition, employees relied mostly on institutional knowledge and phone calls to get through the period of chaos. “It was probably the craziest month of my life,” a source says.
The markets did stabilize and New York City’s outbreak was tragic, but eventually contained. By early summer though, it became apparent that remote work would be the new normal and firms needed to adapt for the long haul.