Marty Chavez always gives good interviews, and even now (perhaps especially because) he’s been out of Goldman Sachs for a year, he still has a decent amount of insight into the corporate culture of investment banking and the likely trends – ever since being advised in his turn by Armen Avanessians that “the forward point hardly moves”, he’s been one of Wall Street’s most reliable futurologists. Chavez still thinks that automation is likely to continue, although it may not eliminate any more jobs, as there are not so many well-paid people any more who effectively “listen to something on the phone, type it into a spreadsheet and then paste that into an email”. In his spare time from four board jobs and a professorship, he’s teaching his six year old how to code.
As well as his thoughts on the future of trading, Mr Chavez can reminisce like an old-timer with the best of them. It feels like his war stories are developing a certain … patina … in the retelling (was he really the only out gay man at Goldman in 1993 – the Firmwide Diversity Committee was established three years earlier? How “most macho of all macho corners” was Lloyd Blankfein’s commodities trading desk, really?). But if you accept that they’re legends and parables, there’s still wisdom there. Whatever the literal truth of the role of J Aron’s famed “strategies team” or “strats”, there’s definitely a ring of emotional truth to Mr Chavez’ words when he says something like…
“[D]oing math for the popular kids was my survival strategy since I was 10-years-old, so I got to Wall Street and I thought ‘I know exactly what to do here. I’m going to do their math for them, and they’re gonna love me. And I’m going to become indispensable to them”
For anyone at the start of the career, that advice is gold – if you want job security and management recognition, first best is to be a revenue generator yourself and a close second best is to make yourself indispensable to revenue generators. Math was the old way of ingratiating yourself. It may not work any more, but there will always be a useful skill in short supply. Your role is simply to find out what that is.
Chavez also emphasised the role of contingency and chance in anyone’s career development. Although he left shortly after the appointment of David Solomon as CEO, and had been talked about a little bit as a possible CEO candidate himself, Chavez absolutely disavows ever having had any ambition. “Many of the jobs I had at Goldman were a surprise, they were not jobs I had targeted or coveted”, he says, along with what might be the best and most old-fashioned advice possible for getting on in investment banking – “if you’re asked to do a particular job, there is a huge cultural value of just saying yes”.
Daniel Davies – Read more on efinancialcareers.com
