Goldman Sachs

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."

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.

It's a bit silly that we are given such tiny desktop systems. I feel quite constrained on a standard 12GB desktop ("NDS") with a 1280x1024 display. My desktop at home is 32GB with 2560x1600 monitors. While at work, I have to juggle out-of-memory errors on my tiny monitors. Some of Goldman's IDEs can consume 4-6 GB all by themselves. We should feel empowered when we show up to work (where we spend most of our time), not constrained!

1. Don't let your technologists feel like second-class citizens by forcing them to settle for using crappy old monitors with a lack of RAM. Upgrade them, NOW! The friction needed to get larger monitors is absolutely ridiculous. At any other tech company, if you want a larger monitor (or more RAM!), you just bring one in! It shouldn't be such a big deal! Why is there so much bureaucracy surrounding this? (And similarly, why on earth are NDSs so expensive?) Nobody should even have to approve such a basic ask. Let me enjoy my work environment! I'd voluntarily take a $500 pay cut if you'd just let me buy my own monitor! But even that's not an option. It's so strange! (Bringing in your own unapproved electronic equipment is a "fire hazard," hahahahahaha!!! No, I'm not kidding… it's in the official bring-your-own-device policy.)

2. As of December 2014, technologists are no longer allowed to trade single-issuer stocks. It's a blanket restriction with no exceptions. I joined because I was interested in investing, particularly long-term value investing in high-growth assets that I understand. (I don't want to merely follow the markets in an ETF basket of assets!) It saddens me that I'm no longer allowed to do this; I may have accepted employment elsewhere had I known this was coming. I think a middle ground needs to be found, such as only allowing trading after quarterly earnings are announced, with a minimum hold time of six months. I think that's reasonable? You may not be aware of it, but this is creating very real attrition, but everyone is afraid to speak up about it for cultural reasons.

3. That's another problem. There's no good way to voice REAL dissent around here in a productive way. Goldman is very concerned about its image with its clients, so its security personnel would never allow, for example, someone soliciting signatures for a petition in the lobby over grievances like the above. There needs to be a much better way to anonymously voice dissent and foster discussions that don't violate confidentiality/data visibility issues. Glassdoor seems like the best place for the time being. See the problem?

4. Reduce the bureaucracy surrounding using and contributing to open-source projects. If you want to see yourself as a tech company, act more like one! Avoid the attitudes of a bank.

5. Entitlements are a mess, located in many different disparate systems. They need to be centralized in a very large-scale project. Ideally, Goldman should champion this and make it a product that is available externally, just like Symphony, in order to have the scale/resources needed to do it properly, in an open-source fashion.

6. Please see this review as an extremely candid and helpful "areas for improvement," similar to your yearly performance reviews, and not as an attack. All-in-all, I really love working here. Let's make it even better! Reach out to me on Glassdoor if you have any questions.