Pros: Very knowledgeable, professional, and respectful employees and management, in a very positive environment. Ability to work from home when necessary and workplace flexibility – a must if you have a family. Good pay, in line with the market rate for similar roles. However, the media reports about several hundred thousand of compensation per employee are bloated. The numbers are severely skewed by taking into account a few higher-paying executives. Technologies used are more up-to-date than in other large financial firms/investment banks (but I'm speaking about my department only). Ability to propose/share your own ideas (to a certain extent, since I was a consultant). The company *does* care about its reputation. I did not have any full-time perks as I was a consultant, and still, I was very, very happy with the job. In general, it was a very, very positive experience, and I'd love to go back there either as a consultant or full-time if the company starts hiring back.

Cons: One word: layoffs. There is good communication between management and employees about the possibility of upcoming layoffs, but this is still stressful for everyone, both employees and management. I guess it is stressful for the company itself since they need to show the investors that they are cutting costs and cannot keep the good employees they would have otherwise tried to keep.

Pros: Great reputation, great resources, and a very nice and knowledgeable person.

Cons: It's hard to get promoted. The little dirty details of the system really matter.

Pros: You get to work with great, sharp, execution-oriented people. In front-office technology roles, you learn the business and people skills, not just technical skills. I'm paid well, and I appreciate the prestige and respect that comes with working at Goldman. The people I work with are a joy to work with. They are humble, fun, very sociable, and very professional. Everyone is very well put together and affable. Honestly, I absolutely love working at Goldman, so don't let my below nitpicks make you think I don't. The only way for us to improve is for us to be transparent about and focus on our issues. So I'm going to focus on the nitpicks. If you can live with them, then JOIN! Because I'm pretty much covering every nitpicky grievance I have. (Really.) I think things are largely moving in the right direction, and that's what matters most, as it tells me that we are aware of our deficiencies and we're actively working to improve them. No place is perfect, but Goldman is certainly among the very best places to work. I feel very happy, privileged, honored, and humbled to be a member of Goldman's "family."

Cons: There are lots of meetings and distractions to juggle as a technologist. There's always more to get done than there is time for. Sometimes projects aren't properly designed to meet the pressure of deadlines, and you end up building a Leaning Tower of Pisa. You usually have to perform support tasks (on that leaning tower) while simultaneously developing new features. After you've helped resolve issues, the same people come back and ask what the status is on the project delivery timeline… in a meeting you're spending time with them in, of course. Some in the business will ask why a bug existed and how we can stop them going forward, as though we knew about them to begin with and left them in. (Have they ever read the notes on any phone app update? Find one that didn't include bug fixes! Unfortunately, bugs happen. Please be understanding.) There's also a lot of proprietary in-house tech. Goldman often chooses to re-invent the wheel, instead of using an open-source library, or contributing to them, for that matter. In the end, it's a losing play that doesn't scale; better solutions are inevitably created when you collaborate with the world, and you gain knowledge-sharing gravity when you do so. Documentation is often lacking as well.