In the inbox as if on cue. It's extra special this time by being extra long - time he could have spent wisely on finding flaws in Tech.
For a special touch, also included is a reminder of the next townhall in 2 weeks, so we can hear more rambles, hyperbole, and consulting fluff
Oh joy... I can't wait 😂
@23h ago by Trim Ryan, the loooooong essay about Loft, chatGPT’s poetic write up. Another boring Thursday stories from TR.
Post ID: @dv+1jxjy0t77
Most employees read TR's rambling BullSh!t emails purely for entertainment purposes. Not to be taken seriously or as advice.
Consider his babbling rambling Bull$hit as coming from a mentally ill-patient who walks around babbling to himself in an Insane Asylvm (Sh!tibank).
Just like the Townhall Vaudeville Circus Comedy Hour Shows. $hitibank is a fun house filled with smoke and mirrors BullSh!t.
You guys actually read those emails? I just delete them all and move on with my day.
@ah WoW! For a decade or so, Citi has appointed accountants, consultants, historians, CPA etc. in tech leadership roles. These guys are reluctant and terrified to change/adopt new technologies leading to excel, PowerPoint, Sharepoint solutions, powered by army of junior consultants, who in turn get converted to senior levels employees, after sometime and same cycle continues as it secures their position.
@b1 your writing is a delight to read! I used to always think Lofty was a sidekick to Whitacre and his bank of america minions that he brought over to Citi. Didn't know he was quite the workhorse, real or imagined skilled workhorse.
Thanks for the knowledge lesson. I'll look forward to more writeups from you!
@b1 protect Trim Ryan at all costs. Lofty description is spot on, King.
It was interesting and dare I say refreshing at the beginning. Now it is embarrassing and cringy.
$sh this is for you.
They call him Lofty. Not because he soars. Not because he floats on clouds of inspiration and crisp strategic vision. No. The name is a joke, or maybe a prophecy no one believed would come true. Jonathan Lofthouse. The man in the button-down shirt with the tiny embroidered polo player galloping nobly over his left ni-ple. A shirt that looks like it was bought on sale in a bin marked "Business Casual - Final Clearance" and worn with the confidence of someone who truly does not care what you think. Because he doesn’t. Not anymore. Not now that he’s sitting in one of the most powerful seats in global finance. Not now that he’s co-CIO of a bank with more layers than a Soviet-era onion and more legacy systems than the Smithsonian has exhibits.
He is not from the world of polish and poise. He is not a product of consulting firms and leadership accelerators. He does not speak in frameworks or draw bubbles on whiteboards to indicate vision. He speaks in code. Actual code. He is a technologist. The kind who doesn’t just know what a system does, but why it’s breaking. The kind who can spot a memory leak like most people spot a typo. He didn’t rise on charm. He rose on uptime. On war rooms. On being the one who fixed things after the people with laminated titles had left for their steakhouse reservations. While they were polishing their résumés and nodding along to “change management,” he was there, debugging the mess they left behind.
And the amazing part, the part nobody saw coming, is that he made it. He slipped past them. Past the Stu's and Shadman's of the world. Stu, the classic tech statesman, all gravitas and high-floor command, a man who could use the word "horizon" without irony and get applause. Shadman, the walking billboard. Suits so sharp they could cut glass. Slides so smooth they could be projected directly into the future. He never built anything. But he shimmered. Oh, how he shimmered. They’re both gone now. Gone with the reorg winds. And Lofty remains. Still wearing that same shirt. Still blinking under office lights that make everyone look a little too tired and a little too mortal.
But something has changed.
Lofty doesn’t care about building anymore. He used to. Deeply. He used to argue for the right architecture, used to fight for performance, used to chase clean, tight systems like some men chase God. But the machine wore him down. Too many meetings filled with too many people who didn’t understand the thing they were managing. Too many smiles from executives who couldn’t spell "latency" but had opinions about how to reduce it. Too many weekends cleaning up messes caused by someone else’s slide deck. Somewhere along the line, the love curdled. The passion calcified. Now he plays a different game. A harder one. He plays to win.
He writes code on weekends. Not because he has to. Because he wants to. Because he’s still watching. He scans Git commits. Pulls data. Builds little tools to measure who is working, who is faking, who is adding value, who is dead weight floating on the buoyancy of other people’s work. Click click click go the keys. Tap tap tap on the terminal. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. He doesn’t need to ask. He already knows. He is tracking the entire global dev community the way a hawk tracks field mice from a telephone wire. And when the time comes to act, he does not hesitate.
He does not pull the trigger in conference rooms. He does it at Armonk. The lodge. The retreat. The place with the stone fireplace and the wood-paneled walls and the soft murmurs of strategy echoing between bites of dry-aged ribeye. Armonk, where the real decisions get made. Where PowerPoints go to die and careers go to be reshaped, repurposed, removed. The dining room is softly lit. The wine is poured with respect. The meat arrives medium rare. Clink go the forks. Crack goes the fire. Shuffle goes the page across the table. And somewhere in that elegant silence is the unmistakable sound of a career ending. Snip. Ping. Gone.
Lofty doesn’t joke. He doesn’t charm. He listens. He watches. He nods. He tallies. He adjusts the mental balance sheet of human capital versus capital capital. You will not see him raise his voice. But you will see your calendar go dark. You will see access removed. You will see systems silently reassign. You will feel the click, the shift, the finality. Thwip. Like a file closed with no follow-up.
He is smart. But not as smart as he thinks. And yet just smart enough to get away with it. That’s the danger. He believes he’s the smartest in every room. And sometimes, unfortunately, he is. He believes others are coasting. That he is the only one pulling weight. That most people are clutter, noise, bloat. And now he has the tools and the title to prove it. To measure it. To cut it.
He does not lead with vision. He leads with certainty. Not the good kind. The kind that tightens things. That empties rooms. That measures loyalty in billable hours and performance in commit counts. And you may never see him coming. Because Lofty doesn’t make a scene. He just makes a decision.
And that decision is final.
He is not legacy. He is not culture. He is not the future.
He is the ending.
@ah can we ask TR to post this next Thursday?
@ah beautifully summarized. Who's the Brit Lofty?
The PwC consultants that have been brought in are absolutely clueless, because it's very likely they have not seen life beyond roadmaps and alleged strategy on fancy decks with each bullet, fullstop and comma neatly aligned, catchy phrases and all - much like TR's ramblings every Thu. The consultants I've spoken with - not one of them could actually fix a problem. Half of them are actually staff consultants learning at the client's expense. But hey...when the big boss is now your big client, who cares?
This shepwreck of nepotism, rewarding the clueless while dumping on the one's that actually want to do something, incompetency galore will one day sink if things keep going on like this. JF will leave the bank technology far worse than what she received
Tim’s weekly essays are starting to feel like a writing residency at the Do Nothing Academy. They are long, polished, and utterly detached from the five-alarm dumpster fire smoldering below. Morale is circling the drain, bureaucracy is metastasizing, and the tech stack looks like it was assembled during a drunken episode of MacGyver using expired vendor contracts and sheer delusion.
His “rip the band aid” initiatives are more like surprise amputations with a butter kn--e. The org chart now looks like spaghetti, with contractors everywhere, nobody managing them, and everyone seemingly reporting to someone who may not exist. Meanwhile, leadership has become performance art where PowerPoint flair and strategic vagueness get rewarded while every actual problem rots quietly in the corner.
To help steer this ship further into the rocks, Tim has summoned a battalion of consulting minions from PwC. Their combined operational experience would not qualify them to run a newspaper stand, but they have mastered the art of charging seven figures to rename common sense as “strategic frameworks.” None of them have ever built or operated anything, but they are here to restructure everything.
Now enter Lofty, our Brit in New York with two things on his mind: rapid ascent and rapid headcount cuts. AI is just the costume. The real strategy is to prune teams like a blind gardener in a windstorm, inflate KPIs, and vanish before the debris lands. If he plays it right, he will walk away richer than a Premier League striker with a Manhattan tax advisor.
Tim, for his part, is milking the two years he has like a cow that wandered into a boardroom. Cut costs, pad the bonus, and vanish into an “advisor” role so vague it could be a myth.
Meanwhile, Citi continues its greatest hits tour of self-inflicted wounds. The regulatory consent orders are still very much alive, with follow-up fines rolling in because nothing meaningful ever got fixed. Systems keep misfiring in ways that make headlines. One fat-fingered error nearly moved eighty-one trillion dollars. Eighty-one. Trillion. But rest assured, it was caught in time and nobody in senior management was inconvenienced.
Bonuses continue, naturally, based on vague indicators like momentum and “tone at the top,” which may be corporate speak for “we still like each other in meetings.”
One solid market wobble and this whole setup collapses like a finance intern after a three-can Red Bull lunch. Would you bank here? Would you even plug in your phone here?
We are not fixing anything. We are narrating the descent while applauding the choreography.