Goldman Sachs

Smartest people to work with.

I always wanted to work with people who are either smarter than me or can keep me on my toes. This is the right place if you care about meritocracy and learning new things on an ongoing basis. I've been working with the firm, and with the same team, for five years now and am still learning, building on both my technical and functional knowledge.

Another Pro: GS takes care of its high performers. They'll price you out of the market if you are good. While money is not the be-all, end-all, it feels good to be taken care of.

Work-life balance. If you want to succeed and be first among equals while competing with other really smart people, the price exacted is your family time. There's a lot of lip service about work-life balance from senior management, but this is a capitalist environment: those who are willing to pay the highest price will beat out the rest.

Get rid of the "quartiling" process for appraising employees. It is not fair. I've painstakingly recruited really good people for my team, only to be forced to push someone into the fourth quartile during reviews, impacting their year-end appraisals. This happens while being surrounded by teams where these fourth quartile personnel would be superstars.