Goldman Sachs

• Can take good vacation
• Paternity leaves
• Nothing as such

They still work on 20-year-old technology. Only a handful of people get to play with new stuff like Docker, Kubernetes, etc.

Most of the folks are there from their university and haven't seen how the world outside works. So their view of distributed systems is so narrow.

They throw money at any problem to solve it. Hire contract workers to deal with state machines rather than actually solving for one.

Extremely extrovert-oriented place. You need to be "famous" in the firm to succeed.

• Listen to lateral hires; they have seen more services and more traffic. Your traffic is 2 qps, while your lateral hires handled 3000 qps.
• Respect and pay for talented folks.
• Stop pushing "get famous" advice for every 1-on-1.