When I joined a few years ago, this was a place with a good reputation and I felt lucky to have landed a job here. That's gone now. Potential employees are now reconsidering because of the management's propensity to go back on its word (RTO) and layoffs and everything else that's gone wrong in the past year or so. We'll be having trouble hiring very soon.
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Understatement of the year
Schwab in in the business of divesting (itself of employees) and pillaging client assets.
They are actually breaking the law forcing people to quit by setting them up to fail. They would accuse employees of non-compliance on emails that they could easily fix but would rather gaslight employees into thinking the employees are causing the non-compliance, hence forcing them to quit to get out of paying severance and filing for unemployment. Surprised if they do not get sued for this one.
Losing its reputation?!? More like lost. That ship has sailed!
Once Chuck became less involved, you started hearing more of the “maximizing shareholder profit” BS, but that is not what the law requires - that is what hedge funds, and other institutional and insider investors (aka EC and Board) want b/c they own an over 80% stake. With all of the EC except Rick over the age of 60, the maximization of short-term profit is the golden ticket.
The fiduciary duty owed by the EC and BOD under corporate law is to act in the best interest of the company, not to maximize the short term profit of large investors at the expense of the company and its long term investors. But when you have powerful hedge funds and institutional investors (as well as the insiders themselves) that have the majority vote and want a higher share price in the short term, the company myopically focuses on short-term profit: making irresponsible decisions, corporate buy backs, cutting back on investment in the company and its employees, no innovation, less service, and diminishing the company's overall intrinsic value. Is that in the best interest of the company and its long-term individual investors?
Extracting all of the value from a company to fund your retirement is not the fulfillment of the executive's real fiduciary duty - quite the opposite. Their fiduciary
duty is to make decisions that are in the best interests of the company’s long-term success and profit so that the company can fulfill its fiduciary duty to its actual clients - the real investors it serves.
@2yyp+1rWyxj86 you are completely right.
Just like GM being a retirement program that makes cars on the side.
When Schwab charges very little for their services IE no commissions they have to make the money somewhere. And a huge chunk of it comes from managing a cash portfolio that is in the 100's of BILLIONS of dollars.
There's no time to think about the client or the associate and they're so worried about two or three basis points.
I think they are business of INVESTING.
Employment is just by-product of it.
If INVESTING messed up, which is right now, cascading or domino effect is employment.
Schwab is also losing its rep as a business. Can't imaging clients supporting their schemes of forcing out employees. It's a reflection of how they conduct business. How Schwab treats their employees trickles down to how they manage client assets.
The goal for years has been to make the company rent seeking. This means reducing costs, reducing knowledge labor, capturing boomer inheritance assets, automating and generating revenue through AI and cheap money management. We spent tones and got little return.
The EC really believes that each change will be successful to this goal. Remember, they believed everything would run in the cloud now. That client central would be a single interface for reps. That intelligent portfolios would be intelligent. That advisor would be cheap and making money. That interest rate spread would make us more money than physically exists in the universe. Chuckle at the absurdity of the last one. They literally thought customers would accept 0.01% in a 5% world. Lol.
We lost our reputation long ago. There's no interest in getting it back. There's still a few good people around, but overall even the good ones are in meeting-paycheck mode.
It's sad. But it also makes sense. We started as a discount broker changing the financial world. Then we sold out, bought back, had horrible leadership, got ok leadership, decided to flush everything or at least accept epic failure after epic failure. The next step is to give the EC another round of bonuses while blaming the Fed.
"Losing"? Try lost -- for a while now! It's more of a contest to see what new bottom Schwab can hit these days than anything else.
Glorified Government org with mediocre employees and below average leaders.
Reality is Schwab pays worst in class. That was offset by the great culture, job stability, and 35 hour work weeks... well the culture is cr-p, jobs are unstable. At least most are still able to slack and still be average..
It will all come. Crumbling down when we actually need to hire
WHAAAAAT OP?
We’ve had trouble. The impact is less because of hiring freezes and a desire to hire cheap.