I know we have all gone through a lot of changes. I have noticed that since Sept 2020 the culture at LSEG has progressively gotten worse. People are sometimes just plain mean. Anyone else witnessed this decline?
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The 3 businesses had 3 different ways of working. It was never one company.
Hypothetical conversation between DS and the heads of the 3 businesses. About trying to get to a common culture.
MR: I am the master of the CM universe. 90% of my growth comes from Tradeweb which I have no hand in running, but look ma, no hands!
DM: I'm the lord of Post trade. I don't care about revenues. I clear volumes, and revenue happens to generate itself on the fly. Why sell when the customer is using my stuff anyway?
D&A old president: OK, I bring in 70% of the combined business now, I'm growing quicker than before and I can accelerate, here's my plan and investments list. No sh money money?
DS: Hmmm, she sounds smart. Risky. Please leave. We'll run the show without you. We already got rid of your predecessor and his entire team.
D&A biz heads: Guys, we're dying here. Can you find us a boss?
CM and DS: Not till we manage you for a year and have some fun. Then we'll find someone who doesn't scare us and will make him your boss.
Result: D&A gets a random prez with zero relevant experience. And 3 of his 5 businesses don't have a head.
Culture, someone asks? :-) Talk about high hopes!!
It may have started going south when DS decided to give himself a 25% pay rise at the time when the company stock tanked 20%.
Couldn't agree more. Of course things had to evolve, it's not like Reuters was a brilliantly run business. But it had a soul. There is nothing left at LSEG. I've really enjoyed my many years here. By and large the colleagues have been fantastic, the projects decently interesting. Of course there's always some degree of corporate nonsense going on. That's the same everywhere. But the while I was hopeful the pivot to LSEG would bring a breath of fresh air, it's been the complete opposite. It's like the worst of both worlds.
I'll probably push my emergency eject button next year.
The joy's just gone out of it.
This is a masterpiece. Thank you.
Escapee from Risk and Data here.
As a nearly-two decade veteran of TR-legacy businesses, where do I start?
I can think of quite a few turning-points where a good culture turned utterly vile and toxic. I was the proverbial frog being boiled alive, but I can name a few based on lived experience.
It wasn't always so bad. I started back in the days of Reuters, and I don't remember forced ranking being a thing. Reuters was _nice_ to work for. They had pot plants. Allocated desks. Decent cafeteria food. And leadership, while staid, weren't arseholes.
Forced ranking was DEFINITELY a thing after DW nearly broke the company by botching the launch of Eikon before swanning off to break Ebay. That came in with the Thomsons.
After a while, Thomson Reuters seemed to accumulate loads of toxic senior and mid-level managers who were badly-behaved but not very good at their jobs. Mostly ex-bankers and Big Four arsewipes. TR simply weren't interested in finding and getting rid of di--heads, and things steadily got worse.
The place grew by acquisition and turned into a massive silo farm -- not bad if you want to be left alone, but it did mean that the rotten apples in leadership could build fiefdoms and backstab each other, and that certainly didn't help.
The Thomsons turned out to be hopeless at anything finance-adjacent, so they spun off the risk division, not just once -- but twice. Each time, it was sold off to private equity. I experienced life in both, and in each case, life got worse as the PE sc-mbags ran the typical PE slash-and-burn playbook to maximise their profits at everyone else's expense.
In both cases, the culture putrefied. The brutal annual Thanksgiving "round" became more of a thing. Colleagues turned into competitors and would sabotage each other to stay out of the drop zone. "The Devil take the hindmost" became the general rule both at Misys/Finastra AND Refinitiv/LSEG.
The pandemic came and went. Hot-desking was introduced. We got new offices which had the ambience of a public toilet - and massively under-provisioned for a full return to office -- and let's face it -- nothing says "Fu-k you" to your employees quite like forcing hot-desking upon them.
(THAT punch was telegraphed a mile away. It was already widely known when we were clearing out our desks in South Colonnade that the new office was only configured for 60% of the existing headcount. This was before they mothballed two levels in Canada Square, mind.)
Operations -- never a forte in TR-legacy businesses -- suddenly started su-king really badly. Greedy leadership outsourced all business processes to the cheapest cut-price BPOs they could find. Getting anything done became literally impossible. Internal IT collapsed due to bad planning and ineptitude. Simply doing your job each day required fighting dozens of logins, dozens of redundant copies of different systems, ZScaler, utterly incompetent tech support... broken network, broken cloud tooling.... Other groups, like Sales were overflowing with complaints of not being paid properly or getting cheated out of commissions.
Leadership all-hands were a joke. Lies, spin and bullsh-t galore. One day that will live in infamy was when they made the mistake of opening up the Q&A to the audience, and then that big American lady got absolutely monstered by the audience. That was my big "Holy cr-p these guys su-k" revelatory moment.
Around that time, the tempo of outsourcing noticeably increased, and managers got increasingly shameless about "managing out" scores of people for having the temerity to live in expensive location like London -- or even the English East Midlands rust belt (cue entitled and tin-eared HR whining about UK becoming a "national market").
Salaries stagnated. Complaints about LSEG becoming an industry pay laggard skyrocketed. Leadership got grilled about it in all-hands, but they and HR ran around with their pants on fire, lying about renumeration at LSEG being "competitive" (it's not -- LSEG is notoriously stingy, and nobody who cares about their pay two years after they're hired should stick around).
At that point, my luck finally ran out, and some douchebag ran the HR dark-pattern playbook on me and I quit. They probably did me a favour. By that point, the place had gotten so toxic and dysfunctional, that I had to quit literally for my own sanity.
As a veteran, it is very hard for me to tell what the inflection point was in this bacchanalia of greed, executive entitlement, malice and ineptitude, but the pandemic would be my best guess: the world suddenly changed for the worse, and after the PE sc-mbags got their $15 billion payday, the money had to come from somewhere. Corporate autophagy, basically.