JPMorgan has some lists. One is its new managing director list, which comprises 135 people in banking and markets, up from 118 last year. We will have a separate article on this, soon.
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The other is a naughty list, which is not being circulated but is said to exist. Both lists are referred to by Business Insider.
The alleged naughty list is a tech thing. Business Insider reports that JPMorgan has created a dashboard where it tracks engineers’ use of GitHub Copilot. A screenshot seen by BI suggests JPMorgan’s engineers don’t really use GitHub Copilot all that much: 70,000 JPMorgan people were “provisioned” users; only 24,000 were recently active there.
The lack of “recently actives” is a problem if your CEO is saying things like: “Our ongoing success will be based on our ability to wisely invest and move very quickly and nimbly, especially around product design and rollout, including incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in everything we do.”
JPMorgan’s engineers are understandably fearful, then, that their lack of activity on GitHub Copilot might be punished. The bank is adamant that this is not so, and says the tracking is really just to check on the effectiveness of its tech investments. To this end, Business Insider says there’s also a JPMorgan dashboard characterising engineers as “non,” “light” and “heavy” users.
Being non or light is surely not good when your big boss is also saying that AI will cut the work week to 3.5 days and that some jobs might be eliminated as a result. JPMorgan developers have reportedly therefore been sending private messages to each other about avoidance of being on the “naughty list.” They have also been opening CoPilot once a month in a display of enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be enough. JPMorgan’s AI tracking system is intelligent enough to differentiate between moving a cursor and using the AI tool. Developers have to do something more. They get scored more highly for starting prompts than for blankly accepting AI code. At the end of each quarter, their use is aggregated into a score and compared with the median for other developers in their line of business.
The only real way around all this is therefore for JPMorgan engineers to abstain en-masse and to bring the median use of their AI tools down. This is unlikely. “The general vibe feels like we have to be going 110% every day, all week,” one midlevel developer complained to Business Insider, observing that AI “seems to have stepped up how much we’re expected to do.”
Separately, if you don’t like talking to people, but do like working in a glass cubicle where your 56-year-old introverted boss monitors chats with other colleagues in other cubicles and sometimes interrupts, then you want to work for Singaporean hedge fund FengHe Fund Management Pte.
FengHe Fund Management has $9bn in assets under management and generated returns of 27% last year. Bloomberg reports that founder Matt Hu doesn’t like employees talking to each other for fear of group-think, but has them all sitting alone in the monastic glass walled cells where he sees what they’re doing through his screen.
This sounds intense but it seems to work. Hu is reportedly “energetic” and “jaunty”. He has “humorous anecdotes” to share. It’s just that he likes to work alone. He also leaves Singapore during Chinese New Year to escape all the social interactions that it brings.
Meanwhile…
It’s maybe best for banks and law firms not to be first movers with AI. Language models are trained to suppress uncertainty expression, because “I don’t know” scores zero on the benchmarks the field uses to rank models. (Bloomberg)
After monitoring employees’ key strokes so that it can train its models and automate their tasks, Meta is cutting 8,000 people next month and won’t be making 6,000 planned hires as it seeks to offset its spending on AI. (Financial Times)
Meta’s chief people officer Janelle Gale said: “This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here.” (WSJ)
Private equity firm Thoma Bravo invested $5.1bn in software firm Medallia in 2024. It just wrote that down to zero. (Reuters)
Two employees at National Australia Bank (NAB) died by suicide within weeks of each other and the Australian bank now faces an investigation into its culture. (HCA Mag)
HSBC hired James Willis from JPMorgan to build a precious metals trading operation. (Bloomberg)
Pierre Andurand’s energy hedge fund lost 52% in April. (Bloomberg)
Hamza Lemssouguer’s Arini Capital is also opening a Jersey office. (Financial News)
The jogging videos of Blackstone president Jon Gray have had 2.7m videos on LinkedIn. It’s because he’s sweaty. “You look like you’d be coming off a long flight. You’re a little disheveled, you’re sweating. It was just so real.” (Fortune)
Average annual hours worked in the UK have increased while average hours worked in the US have risen. In both countries is the average now about 1,330. But the average US worker is 23% more productive. (Financial Times)
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