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Comment by johan_larson | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Goldman has no tech people among their top executives. I would have expected at least a CTO or CIO. I don't see this working out for them.

http://www.goldmansachs.com/who-we-are/leadership/executive-...

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Marty Chavez was, but got promoted:

> Prior to assuming his current role, Mr. Chavez was Chief Information Officer, responsible for the Technology Division

Profile on him from a few years back: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/business/dealbook/goldman...

Well, that's something at least. They have a CIO. And someone with a tech background can make it to the inner circle. Still, the CIO is not counted among the top executives.

Why are you assuming that someone with the title "CIO" has a tech background?

I worked at a place where the CIO was a lawyer who knew the business really well, but no real tech in his background.

Because it is in accord with my experience and my general sense that people should know what they are doing in the areas they are are given responsibility over. That generally requires experience, and at high level probably extensive experience. It's hard to see how a lawyer with no real tech experience can make good choices in the area of technology.

He wasn't great but he wasn't terrible. He had a very logical mind and tried to choose wisely as far as whose advice he took.

His only knock was that he believed the Cyber Security FUD too much.

Other than that, solid guy and I'd work for him avain.

Then who do engineers report to?

Presumably a VP of engineering

Probably not - you'd be surprised how low the the title of "Vice President" is in finance companies.

VP of Engineering isn't as devalued as VP of Sales even in companies where a couple of years of experience gets you VP. Subject matters.

I know people who are less than 5 years into their first jobs from graduation who are VPs in Engineering, in financial firms in London (City) and New York (Wall Street). Organisation/culture/industry matters more than subject, I think.

In my experience it's pretty rare to get the VP title in less than 5 years. In fact in my graduate intake nobody did it in that timescale. Good people would get it in 5-7 years.

2-3 years as an analyst, 2-3 years as an associate, boom, you're a VP.

In my opinion, not unreasonably for these two reasons:

Banks generally delegate responsibility for huge sums of money to quite a low level in the organisation, and their clients are usually much smaller than the bank is. There needs to be some kind of parity in the apparent seniority between client and bank. The CEO of an SME doesn't want to be dealing with someone who sounds junior when discussing deals regarding the total value of their company.

Banks are so large and complex that it's usually not far off the bottom wrung of the org chart that you're responsible for huge sums of money/risks/contracts. People in smaller organisations with similar monetary responsibilities (in absolute terms) are usually the senior ones with senior sounding titles.

For example, I was a lowly infrastructure engineer in a tier 1 global investment bank working in the platform engineering team not far off the bottom of the ladder, yet I was responsible for infrastructure spending decisions in the scale of 10-100 million dollars. A drop in the ocean for the IT budget of $5Bn dollars, but a larger monetary responsibility than the CEO of a mid sized company has. So yes, I was called a VP.

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