Thread regarding T. Rowe Price Group Inc. layoffs

@wn I am extremely fortunate then. I have a pretty seasoned team with decades of institutional knowledge embracing and championing AI. myself included. Irony is I am close enough to retirement that my main goal is cultivating the same combination of experience and ambition and forward thinking in the junior staff.

@qn US isn't over-resourced, just wrongly resourced. Too many sub-par RMs sitting in role for too long, living off past glories driven by the performance of others. Won't work quite the same way from this point on...

Seniors find it harder to get re-employed elsewhere, so there's a strong tendency for them to band together to protect their own positions, using poorly-reasoned, baseless arguments to push juniors out. I've increasingly witnessed exactly this kind of dynamic inside my own company.

Honestly, I think arguments framed around age — senior versus junior — miss the point. There are plenty of seniors with no real knowledge. The real issue is this: I do occasionally see talented juniors who combine solid domain knowledge with strong AI skills, but I've never seen a senior who can really use AI well. Too many seniors haven't realized that the value of experience is eroding at incredible speed — it gives off the feeling of a sinking company.

@OP It’s a sh-t company no doubt about it. May it and its leaders have karma slap them in the face.

@gz to your point on RM teams, the ratio of RM team to AUM and revenue is a good indicator of which country/region is over resourced. Hint hint, it’s unlikely the teams in the US.

@gz agreed! I still see a lot of fat to cut in SOME functions and regions, NOT ALL. To be a part of a decimated unit whilst looking at others with more resources than needed gives me a heavy heart.

@d8 I agree with eq below which echoes some of what your saying. I’d go further than you however in saying that some teams could literally be halved in size with just one senior and one junior. In this modern AI age with the level of support some teams have from other parts of the business (for example RM teams) in a worse case scenario you could have just one senior RM and no junior for Institutional or half the RMs in Intermediary. So cutting a team of 2 and 2 in your example to just 1. The level of value add I’ve observed from some of the junior staff has been low. You just need someone senior enough to know how everything fits together but not too senior that they have no idea about the details.

My gut feel is that the company isn’t done with restructurings. Management look at other asset managers and it’s obvious certain teams are still bloated. Also AI whether useful or not is being used all the time by companies as an excuse to cut roles. Sorry but that’s just the reality of it.

@d8 the problem is when you have a barbell of senior too-good-to-get-in-the-weeds and junior way-too-inexperienced-to-autonomously-contribute-meaningfully in the team. A key stakeholder group for us locally is a team like this where it’s painfully obvious what the outcome will be. They probably don’t even know it yet but odds are they are prime for another shakeup.

This is just a hypothesis, but—when there are too many leaders, there's no way proper bottom-up communication can actually function, is there? Take teams with multiple leader-types, like several team heads. What happens? One of them ends up being a remora, just coasting along. You really don't need that many leaders. The deeper problem is that work gets chopped up into tiny pieces, tons of little teams get created, and each one has two leaders and only two subordinates—aren't there way too many teams like that? This honestly feels like the root of everything to me. Too many leaders per team, and decision-making ends up in total gridlock. What you actually need is one genuinely capable leader for each proper function—that's all.

There used to be hiring standards - if you want to work here, pass a background and dr-g test and, more importantly, demonstrate that you know enough to make an impact here fairly quick. Now good people are being tossed aside for people that could not have gotten a job here on their own. Considering they are moving to having a large labor presence outside of the US that will be managed by an external entity, I wonder how that will affect quality and can adequate supervision/quality control take place? I have heard these staffing firms routinely fudge resumes, and can a real background check be done on people in foreign countries? It just boggles the mind - especially when those still working here have to come in office to "collaborate", but a growing faction of the workforce is offshore. Nothing makes sense anymore.

@OP Agree with a lot of what you say. The external industry environment has changed dramatically and the firm is finding it hard to adapt. The external battle has become internal too. I still think there are many good and well-intentioned people trying to do their best, but stifled and somewhat struggling with the prevailing atmosphere. Very sad, but also somewhat inevitable, as it was so good for so long and time caught up with us. I know a lot of people waiting to leave as soon as the right time or opportunity arrives, and we end up recruiting many people that are already out of work. Ed Bernard's well-articulated virtuous cycle is going into reverse.