Goldman Sachs

• Driven and smart people, mostly.
• Also, a lot of "street smarts" who understand the grind.
• Moving to modern tech stack and cloud.
• A lot of the annoying stuff is managed, so it's quite nice in helping developers focus on core competencies. For example, CI/CD, Kafka, Kubernetes. You just have to deal with that on configuration.
• "Good name" on resume. Not as great in tech (as FAANG) but still quite decent and will open doors to interviews in top-tier tech companies.

If you are a software engineer who wants to grow and be aligned with the business goals, avoid the back office (Operations). You'll spend your career debugging legacy applications, writing unit tests, and working on projects that serve very few and are used seasonally.

I happened to debug a program where the node version was no longer in use by the firm. I couldn't even get it to compile locally. The only hope was to keep the node server running with the bug or rewrite the whole program. There are some exceptions, but in general, this is what I observed. You'll find a lot of interns trying to move towards the mid/front office full time.

Based on my experience there, it seems there is less of a budget (and as a result, bonuses and promotions) allocated to the back office. Therefore, there is less drive to innovate/build cooler products. The main priority seems to be serving the needs of the front office and just getting by on MVPs, thereby racking up technical debt to the ceiling.

Where there is less value, there is a lot of room for politics and pettiness. This is very evident in the back office. There is a lot more room for bullying and bias. It's quite annoying, frankly, and a lot of people end up leaving after 2 years. There is quite an age gap in some of these divisions, and associates are few.

General Management:

• Feedback needs to be more transparent. The 360-degree review is a facade that creates a false sense of ranking, while the real power lies at the discretion of higher-ups. There needs to be a better balance.
• There also needs to be more opportunity to learn. People have the resources but no time.

Software Engineering Management:

• Phasing out Pure IDE should be the top priority in the company. For example, I spent about 20 minutes waiting for that UI to load. This happened 5 or 6 times a day, so 120 minutes equals 2 hours (I multitask, so this is obviously an overestimate). Sometimes I had to let it load when I go for lunch/break, just for it to be fired up when I returned. If there was an error loading or I happened to load the wrong DB, I had to repeat this. If you accumulate all this time, there might be a couple of years wasted per year for all these annoyed and aggrieved developers. Also, it stirs up unnecessary anxiety and irritation.