Goldman Sachs

The bottom line is that Goldman Sachs is not for someone who is passionate about software development. There are a few departments, like the enterprise platform for example, that are more focused on advancing the technologies in the firm, but most software engineer positions are tightly coupled with business teams, and they dictate what you do and what you work on.

The pros are:

• Goldman is definitely one of the better financial firms in terms of experimenting with a wide variety of technology stacks. In my short year there, I was able to experiment with HBase, Mongo, Vert.x, and Angular JS.
• Many opportunities to learn. There were a lot of talks with many interesting people (one of the talks was with David Benioff from Game of Thrones). Classes for different technologies are offered year-round.
• Great people, friendly.

• Bureaucracy, had to constantly fight with business to do things that would benefit them in the long run.
• Extremely out-dated code base, so you would be spending most of your time fixing other people's code instead of working on cool new projects.
• Slang (enough said).
• Bad management - most senior level managers are too complacent or have given up.

• Don't call yourself a "Technology" company if you treat your software engineers as second-class citizens in the company.
• Stop doing the top-down approach in terms of technology. So much friction due to technology compliance.
• You can't justify paying the CEO millions in bonus while cutting down bonuses on lower-level employees.