J.P. Morgan wants to hire technologists. The U.S. bank spends $9.5bn a year on technology and grants places to 10% of the graduate applicants to its technology program compared to just 2% of applicants to its graduate jobs in the front office. Luring technologists isn't easy though - banks don't have a great reputation as employers and there can be more exciting opportunities elsewhere. This is why J.P. Morgan is building its very own magnet for hip young technologists in New York City.
Known as '5 Manhattan West,' it's something we've written about before. Such is its eagerness to create a hipster technologist paradise, that J.P. Morgan has created more of a hipster technologist parody. There are scooters for getting around on. There's an acoustic guitar area. There's an electric guitar area. There's a "micro-market" dispensing coke, and there's furniture you can draw on during brainstorming sessions.
J.P. Morgan clearly thinks all this is working because Bloomberg reports that it plans to "more than triple the size" of Manhattan West, which currently houses around 700 people. The bank is reportedly in plans to acquire another 300,000 feet of space in the building, up from the 125,000 it occupies currently. If successful, the implication is that around 1,700 more technology staff will be housed there. They'll be working on, "big data, robotics and cloud infrastructure," in between the guitar breaks.
Separately, now that banks and technology firms are indistinguishable, there's only one way of establishing which genre of company you're working for: emails. Business Insider spoke to a former J.P. Morgan banker who left for a start-up and he says emails are the big difference. In banking, you have to craft your emails in case a managing director reads one and judges you. In start-ups, no one cares. Emails are full of mistakes and shot from the hip. So, how do you write yours?