Goldman Sachs

You get to tell others you work at Goldman Sachs. You're close to Brookfield Mall and Battery Park. Some of the guys are pretty nice. I had a decent tech lead and also a passive-aggressive tech lead. Management is overworked and unreachable, which is on par for most places I've been to.

Imagine working in rows of thousands of others. You begin to recognize people that you've never seen leave their chairs.

Surrounded by elitists who think they're better than you because they built the codebase that's your job to fix. You have to use your ID to leave, and they take a sample of your pee to be sure that you can pee.

42 floors in a 2.1 billion dollar building, and there's no recreation lounge for contractors. The cafeteria is overpriced and incredibly mediocre. And what recreation lounge there is, is just some squash courts.

I forget the dress code, but there is one.

Oh, I forgot the worst part because it was so traumatizing. You don't actually work on a local machine. You work on a terminal that remotes into a server, so every key you type is late by 30 milliseconds. It's slow. So you have to go in to remote into a machine. I get that it's security, but it still sucks.

You're doing great. I loved the management of my team when I could meet with them, and they've got a really tough job.

I understand that remoting to a central server to code is a part of security for GS. Dress code is getting worked on; I understand that my complaints are about the updated dress code.

But c'mon. 42 floors and not one can be a dedicated recreation lounge? You can take my fingerprints and my pee, but no ping pong? Billiards? A private space for video games (not one that is literally out where others are working, so in order to play, you'd have to be a jerk to others)?