Staff in Goldman Sachs' low-cost office are working 90-hour weeks too
The highest paying jobs in banking are in cities like New York and London. As banks like Goldman Sachs continue to scale, not everyone can be paid New York wages. A popular alternative is the global capability centres (GCCs) banks are building in India. These employ tens of thousands of people across the major banks, but can be pretty intense places to work.
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A recent YouTube video released by Heena Panjwani, a former Bengaluru-based audit VP at Goldman Sachs, suggested that long hours are common in GCCs. When working on India-based projects, hours are normal. However, these staff also support teams in other regions like the US; in those cases "working hours would extend later in the evening... long hours are a given, you have to find a way to balance that and work around it."
Panjwani left Goldman in 2022. Her final role was as an early member of the consumer banking audit team in India; almost all of her colleagues were based in the US which meant she had to "sit and work more than 12 to 18 hours consistently." Not factoring in weekend work, this would mean she was working at least 60 to 90 hours per week. She said she left because the hours were "not sustainable."
It's not just audit working on global projects; one employee for a separate US bank told us last September that Indian employees were being given client-facing execution mandates that previously belonged to London bankers.
Relocation is an option in these kinds of cases; Goldman sponsored Panjwani for an L1 visa (in which you move to the US after working for your company abroad for at least a year), but the move failed to materialize for personal reasons. However, Panjwani said "the opportunities [for relocation] have come down" across finance post-COVID due to an increased focus on "virtual collaboration." Recent changes to US legislation, particularly regarding a reform of the H1B visa, have made relocation even harder to obtain.
Panjwani spoke very positively of her time at Goldman. She called it one of India's "paymasters," and said her office had a very flat organizational structure. Other bank staff in India haven't been so happy; one employee of a US bank in India told us in November that their bank took advantage of India's labour laws "to get away with things that would be illegal anywhere else," and unfairly laid off staff.
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