Why founding a 3-person startup with 0 revenue is better than working for GS
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After the work-for-yourself jingoism?!?!
Bloggers get rich by getting your attention, not by helping you.
[1] Famously did not abide by his own philosophy, which does not make it a single bit less insightful or valuable.
At least GS employees don't have any pretensions to holiness.
I'd much rather work with people who are honest with themselves about their motivations than who try to push the suffering under the surface with bullshit rationalizations like that in the post.
We're here to communicate, not bicker over popularity contests.
(I do know people there who are very nice also)
I'd imagine that at Facebook, engineers are treated as first class citizens. I dislike Facebook as a product, and I'm not sure I trust Zuckerberg, but I really respect the company. Roughly 200 engineers running a tech product that millions of grandmas use is no mean feat. I bet they don't treat their engineers as mere cogs in a machine.
If GS was the frying pan, then, in my view, he jumped into the fire at Facebook where he is now working for an adolescent-minded, untransformed individual, who traded his personal integrity for the fruits of lust - "success, sex, money, fame" - under the guise of "helping connect people"...
Goes to show you that the old Buckaroo Banzai saying holds true for Antonio as well... Whereever you go, Antonio, there you are. Still a wannabe human being... with much growing left over to do.
The Movie does not count as a valid reference.
Also, to bb75, isn't that a little black and white? Facebook doesn't give all its money to charity so its as bad as GS?
And the guise is working pretty well. It's really connecting people.
In this case, Antonio made an argument a year ago about why starting a startup was better than continuing to work for a Wall Street bank. He made no claim that continuing to run a year-old startup was better than working for a large tech company. That of course depends on many other factors about the startup, about the large tech company, and about whatever offers were made. Nobody on this thread knows any of those details, but that apparently doesn't stop anyone from rushing to judgement.
GS' bonus system has a screwy bonus system that isn't very predictable, and most people live well above their salary, relying on the bonus.
So instead he thinks you should earn nothing, and that way you ... Wait, no, you'd still be living above your means.
Sheesh.
It's romantic to imagine hoofing it alone, but be realistic- living costs money. It always has, if you consider money to be a replacement for labor- even if you drop out of "the system", you still need to work to provide for yourself to see another day.
Income: twenty pounds Expenses: nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings. Result: Happiness.
If he can find a way to live on ramen, he may be happy.
I suspect he plagiarized this whole anecdode from the autobiography "My Life as a Quant", in which Emanuel Derman is talking about his experience at Salomon Brothers, rather than GS:
http://www.ederman.com/new/docs/my_life-excerpt.html
"The level of fear that permeated Salomon was more evident, too. Friends of mine who wanted to leave the firm were semi paranoid that their bosses would discover that they were interviewing elsewhere and then fire them before they left. I never heard anyone at Goldman speak this way; despite the natural tension between employer and employee, most Goldman workers never imagined that exercising their right to look at other jobs would naturally lead to being fired.
There were other signs of Salomon's take-no-prisoners culture. In the 1980s, the Bond Portfolio Analysis (BPA) group had written a series of renowned reports for clients on valuing swaps and other recently invented derivatives contracts. Each report's distinctive light brown cover bore the names of its authors printed in a darker brown. Then, over the years, as one or more of the original authors left the firm for other banks or trading houses, BPA would reprint the report, having removed the departed authors' names. Eventually there were old but popular reports still being distributed that apparently had no author at all. This Orwellian rewriting of history struck me as particularly petty and ineffective, an affront to the notion of research."
From "My Life as a Quant"...
If so, what else did he make up? Did he directly experience any of this during his brief stay as a junior member of GS? Or is it all just a bunch of crap he's been reading in books like "Liar's Poker"?
His article does sound a lot like other ones though. I doubt he's deliberately copying them, but he's not entirely unique.
Minor correction to that: theoretically ADHD kids given stimulants should become more calm, not more hyper.
That'll become increasingly obvious now that (soon) banks won't be allowed to prop-trade : there'll be a migration of a lot of the 'value add' to the buy-side (true hedge funds, mainly).
This seems to be a riff on PJ O'Rourke's remark about giving money and power to governments.
I think meth and sugar actually makes ADHD kids more calm because it allows for the easily triggered mental satisfaction obtained from normal everyday interactions, which ADHD kids crave and require constant attention and running around in circles to obtain, something we naturally get without drugs. But moving on with the article. :)
This is just a rambling, unedited screed from a blogger who can't find satisfaction in his life.