One of Wall Street's most influential CEOs has dumped a bucket of cold water on the idea of long-term remote work and a second year of virtual summer internships, as uncertainty looms about the threat created by the coronavirus pandemic.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called virtual training for entry-level finance-industry professionals "an aberration," doubling down on the private sentiments held by many senior Wall Street execs who fear that protracted remote work is costing a new generation of banking professionals precious opportunities for face time and hands-on education with managers and colleagues.
"It's an aberration that we're going to correct as quickly as possible," the chief executive told the Credit Suisse analyst Susan Katzke on Wednesday during the bank's Virtual Financial Services Forum.
"This is not a new normal," Solomon said, adding that the nature of remote work was in conflict with his firm's "innovative, collaborative, apprenticeship culture."
"I don't want another class of young people arriving at Goldman Sachs in the summer remotely," he said. "And so we're going to do everything we can to adapt, and we'll have to adapt to whatever the environment is, but to not put ourselves in a position where we've got another class of people coming in — 3,000 young people coming in — that aren't getting more direct contact, direct apprenticeship, and direct mentorship."
Every summer, thousands of interns and newly hired full-time bankers flock to Wall Street's investment banks to start their careers. A representative for Goldman Sachs told Insider that the firm had yet to make a determination as to whether its 2021 program would be remote, in person, or a hybrid of the two.
'It's had an enormous impact on how we operate'
When Katzke asked Solomon to describe the influence that remote work had had on his firm's workflow, he told her the effects had been palpable.
"In the short term, it's had an enormous impact on how we operate by forcing a significant portion of the organization to be remote," he said.
The firm had maintained, on average, an in-office presence of about 10% of its workforce at its sites worldwide over the past year, Solomon added, but that number has fluctuated at times.
Twenty-five percent of Goldman's staff was working out of its offices in London and New York in the summertime, Solomon said. Numbers were higher elsewhere — as high as 35% in continental Europe and 50% in Asia — but those levels retreated as cases surged in late autumn and into the wintertime.
Solomon is intent on maintaining an office-driven culture post-pandemic.
"More is going to be done digitally ... but at the end of the day, I'm a big believer in personal connectivity in a business like ours," Solomon said. "I don't think, as we get out of the pandemic, the overall operating mode, the way a business like ours operates, will be vastly different."
Wall Street is eager to put its year of remote work behind it
The pivot to working digitally has triggered big knock-on effects.
Those have been especially grueling for summer interns, who lost their chance to meet executives outside of their computer screens and make impressions in person last year.
Summer interns across Wall Street saw their start dates delayed and their programs shortened in 2020, though many, including those at Goldman Sachs, received full compensation for their internship cycles.
Some firms issued full-time employment offers to rising seniors interning with them last year earlier than usual, inviting them to join the firms permanently in 2021. Goldman Sachs was not one of those firms and made hiring decisions at its usual time last year, after students had concluded their internships.
But it's not just investment banking that has felt the shocks: Even the notoriously hawkish private-equity recruiting cycle backed off.
Headhunters told Insider last year that their search firms had collectively elected to hit pause on an increasingly feverish recruiting frenzy that involved some recruiters courting new investment-banking analysts just a few weeks after their jobs had begun, for roles that might not begin for an additional two years. The cycle now won't begin until sometime in 2021, as opposed to fall last year.
Meanwhile, Solomon's views on remote work are shared by other high-powered Wall Streeters, including Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
"Banks are basically an apprenticeship model where you learn by sitting next to people and going on a trip with them or seeing mistakes being made. Very often you need a lot of collaboration in the room," Dimon said at Goldman Sachs' 2020 US Financial Services Virtual Conference in December.
"You're not going to learn that way by sitting at home," he said.
