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morgan stanley to freeze hiring
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Firms do this all the time late in the year. Don't read too much into it.
DominiConnor
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As Ken says, this is not news, hasn't been for months.
It's not even very significant, all firms go through headcount freezes, both in good times and bad.
It may be part of something we vaguely see going on in the market, but it's hard to say for sure, and my model is too complex for me to have great confidence in it, but...
The drift term in bonuses is towards 'longer term incentives' which make changing job harder and more expensive. It follows that you want to change job before your employer tries to lock you in, which brings forward the date at which you may move.
Also the recession has screwed up the plans and aspirations of many people, and they want to move to improve them, but have been wary of entering a market that is not as good as it has been.
People are gaining confidence in which areas and which firms will prosper and which may fall back, that's a very dense issue, by that I mean it is useless to say "FX" is good", (or bad), but you need to work at a higher resolution to make good decisions. That too will cause more people to leave jobs to get better or avoid being dragged down.
I tend to think of the liquidity in the market as a 2nd order autocatalytic reaction, which basically means that job churn in one place causes job churn elsewhere and the curves of such reactions tend to be either speeding up rapidly or slowly barely happening at all.
That means that people setting strategy for a bank have no bloody idea what the staff churn will be this winter. Some have asked me, and I fear that my answer that "it may be very high, but there is a chance it is also very low" isn't satisfactory to them.
Also, most employers don't hire quants. They hire smart people who can do X,Y and Z, maybe they might take some W if you're good at it, and maybe the Z can be picked up on the job, but quants are not fungible. That adds to the uncertainty of lower level managers since they cannot know what holes there will appear in their team.
On top of all that, there is a notch in the demographics, caused by firms seriously cutting back on newbie hiring in the last few years. That means a shortage of people with a bit of experience.
It's not even very significant, all firms go through headcount freezes, both in good times and bad.
It may be part of something we vaguely see going on in the market, but it's hard to say for sure, and my model is too complex for me to have great confidence in it, but...
The drift term in bonuses is towards 'longer term incentives' which make changing job harder and more expensive. It follows that you want to change job before your employer tries to lock you in, which brings forward the date at which you may move.
Also the recession has screwed up the plans and aspirations of many people, and they want to move to improve them, but have been wary of entering a market that is not as good as it has been.
People are gaining confidence in which areas and which firms will prosper and which may fall back, that's a very dense issue, by that I mean it is useless to say "FX" is good", (or bad), but you need to work at a higher resolution to make good decisions. That too will cause more people to leave jobs to get better or avoid being dragged down.
I tend to think of the liquidity in the market as a 2nd order autocatalytic reaction, which basically means that job churn in one place causes job churn elsewhere and the curves of such reactions tend to be either speeding up rapidly or slowly barely happening at all.
That means that people setting strategy for a bank have no bloody idea what the staff churn will be this winter. Some have asked me, and I fear that my answer that "it may be very high, but there is a chance it is also very low" isn't satisfactory to them.
Also, most employers don't hire quants. They hire smart people who can do X,Y and Z, maybe they might take some W if you're good at it, and maybe the Z can be picked up on the job, but quants are not fungible. That adds to the uncertainty of lower level managers since they cannot know what holes there will appear in their team.
On top of all that, there is a notch in the demographics, caused by firms seriously cutting back on newbie hiring in the last few years. That means a shortage of people with a bit of experience.
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