Working at Goldman Sachs Suuuucks, Leaked Internal Survey Shows | Hacker News Reader

Working at Goldman Sachs Suuuucks, Leaked Internal Survey Shows

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42 pointselsewhen39 comments

I don’t understand these kinds of work environments. It’s not just difficult to do quality work on 4 hours of sleep, a decent proportion of people will start to show the psychotic symptoms of paranoia and hallucinations after a few days.

I’m saying this as someone who did special operations selection and had to stay up for days on end. You feel like death, and the only reason to do it is to prepare yourself for awful situations, or to verify that even in an almost dreamlike exhausted state you can still perform a task that was repetitively drilled into you.

To me this raises the question, what are these graduates actually doing?

PowerPoint and excel.

Yes, and reading reports.

They manually scan financial reports for info so they can manually type them into excel, and manually run various formulas and ultimately past the charts into powerpoint so they can fill up a directory full of files that hardly anyone will read.

So it's like working in the middle office of a normal high street bank, but managed by psychopaths rather than depressives?

Why dont they automate it? Image (text) recognition is a solved problem.

it is really not a solved problem

Reading standard financial forms isn't a solved problem?

Worked on bank to bank middleman software. There is no 'standard' form.

How complicated are those forms? It sounds like GS would pay a lot for a software that converts 95% of the data into excel spreadsheets.

Tell me about it

...guy working on doing just that

And probably the big investment firms want to keep it that way, because they can exploit humans to do this work. While their smaller competition can't.

I thought the same thing when I was watching a friend do this work at 2 AM on a Friday night. Then I realized it doesn’t cost the investment bank a single penny to ask an analyst to spend his weekend doing cut and paste work, whereas automating the process would cost something.

The analyst will still work till 3 am, but will do 3x more spreadsheets. For the same pay.

As a friend who did IB at Goldman once put it: "It's a job a sixth grader could do in a work culture that would drive most adults to suicide."

Elite professional services businesses like investment banking, law, and management consulting have crazy hours and terrible conditions. But they all are in service to clients who actually pay the bills! The solution is to go work for the clients. Way more fun, interesting, and remunerating to be the shot caller at a corporation than the vendor providing a service.

Absolutely. This is true for any professional service business not only limited to the elite. If you work for a company that works for a client then you are basically working two jobs.

Yes, but... those jobs are even harder to get into than investment banking :-)

There are far more corporations requiring investment banking services than there are investment bankers. Otherwise there wouldn’t be enough clients to support a specialized firm.

The other thing is cutting your teeth and rising up in corps isn’t as bad as the banking / law track. Really don’t see why you would go the services track. Won’t encourage my children to go that way if they want to make a career doing private sector business things.

For the question "why would anyone want to work at GS as opposed to their clients", it's not a matter of the number of corporations, it's about the number of good roles.

A very large, say property developer, might hire GS for its fundraising needs, but a GS grad wouldn't want to work laying bricks. He might want to work as CFO or someone very close to the CFO, but those roles are much harder to get than working as grad for GS.

So it's not just about what the grad wants, it's also about what he can get.

This shouldn't be controversial. Anyone who's been in the industry knows that people move "up" from IB to their clients. Of course everyone wants that, but again such roles are harder to get than IB.

It's not that those roles are much harder to get as such. It's that the most effective way to get those roles is to work at GS (or an equivalent) first.

What's the difference between hardness and effectiveness in this context?

There are quite a few other routes in to these roles (start as a graduate, lateral hire from consulting/industry, internal moves, etc) and I don't think they really see stiffer competition or higher calibre candidates than you'd see for a front office role at GS or another bulge bracket IB.

However if you start at GS/another IB then you get plugged into a network where you see a lot more of these opportunities without having to go out to look for them as much. It's partially a numbers game so the more opportunities you see the better the chance of landing one.

I interviewed with Goldman. I think I lot of people here are missing the point. It has nothing to do with the work. It's hazing pure and simple. Goldman has insane security and I wouldn't put it past them to leak the document on purpose because they like the image of being an insanely driven place to work. Do you have any idea how valuable it is to people that formerly worked there? "Oh wow! You worked at Goldman. I heard that place is insane. How did you survive?"

Goldman gets two things. First they get the reputation that people who work there are super human but the bigger payoff is incredible loyalty of the people who make it. You're going to get paid shit when you start and as you begin to pull away from the pack you're both going to see your competitors quit and your compensation rise. By the time you make it you've won and been rewarded for it. Now when some nosy reporter comes around asking questions what are you going to do? Are you going to put it all on the line or are you going to say, "F-U" and hang up as quickly as you can?

Also discussed here a day ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26521912

Imagine moving to Florida for the nice weather, and then complaining that it's hot and humid all the time.

Imagine thinking that making a semi informed choice means you have no right to talk about the negative consequences that choice brought you or complain about terrible conditions related to your choice...

There's no reason for someone going to work at a major investment bank to be semi-informed.

I understand that investment banking has always been like this. Why now, the complaints or attention?

I think it's simply because one article gained a lot of interest and then other websites followed up on it. It IS an interesting topic, especially since the flavour of homeworking is added to it and how it affects the working culture, something probably a lot of people (here and elsewhere) have experienced due to corona and like to read about.

Additionally I thought a lot of students from elite education institutions were finally wising up to these practices and big finance was hemorrhaging talent to big tech the last few years?

The GME stuff was a big thing (2008 was too early) for “introducing” the younger side of vice target audience to the outrage directed at large finance firms. Young grads are relatable to readers who are recently stirred up by state of the institution.

Years ago, calling out the bad work culture in IB would get you branded a weakling, a loser, etc.

The broader culture has shifted so that people are not considered weak for refusing to put up with workplace abuse. It is no longer a career-killer to blow the whistle on your current employer.

>It is no longer a career-killer to blow the whistle on your current employer.

I'd be careful with that statement. During my time in the reputation management industry, I was working on a joint taskforce with our social media team on a case of whistleblowing. The said whistleblower was successfully deplatformed, then promptly labelled as a hate-entity, ultimately leading to them being fired by their current employer due to the perceived fear of association.

I would recommend anyone who wants to whistle to exercise caution and practice appropriate Opsec measures.

Was the taskforce's job to make that happen to the whistleblower?

I haven’t seen anything like that since the 90s. Back then it was pretty common with most people either burning out or technically retiring at the age of 35

I used to work in Goldman Sachs; I can say it's a ruthless company;

Ruthless = Immoral;

If it’s that awful.. I dunno, maybe quit?

Part of the glamor is demonstrating your dedication to work and productivity. These jobs have long been reputed to be all work, no life.

They want to cap it at 80 hours a week. Still not a life that most would sign up for, certainly not as societally useful as the long shifts for medical residents.

On the one hand I feel bad for them, on the other it’s GS they signed up for and I feel little sympathy for anything related to GS.

These are new grads who have spent 16 years at school. They have no baseline for what a healthy work environment looks like.

Turning in your first notice is a lot harder especially at an elite institution like GS.

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