171–180 of 268 posts
Very clever move to let his clients know they should keep tabs on him. It advertises his integrity and informs people he's leaving.
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Yeah, that reddit IAmA post is not very convincing. Considering it attempts to confirm every single /r/politics stereotype about the evil Koch Industries, I'm inclined to believe guilty_of_innocence's theory that it's a fake and a troll.
Maybe, since he was willing to name his employers, who happen to be despised in liberal circles. OTOH, there is a lot of PR spending on social media (e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/us/politics/obama-campaign... ), so it wouldn't surprise me if Goldman has hired people to smear Smith on forums like this one.
It reflects poorly on you that you'd rather accuse someone of being dishonest than take a little effort to check your paranoia.
Lots of discussions on "evil Goldman Sachs" or "the useless profession of finance" that I have seen also include the business of management consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc) as the similar career tracks. It is true that lots of elite students at US colleges are interested in Banking and Consulting when they graduate. They are interested because both careers are prestigious and lead to more things.
But the comparison is very limited.
There is a passage at the end of his op-ed when he talks about his first days in the values driven organization learning the ropes of what the work is, how to be productive at it, and how to take the client perspective always.
I worked for McKinsey from 2003-2006 and I had that same first-day experience and it was more or less my experience throughout. I talk to folks now and they still think/act this way -- values are super important, the client comes first, being smart is all about helping the client better and therefore the firm prospering in the long run. People bragged about "we turned down the work" ALL THE TIME because it isn't a good use of "the client's money/time/focus".
There have indeed been scandals where individuals (even the ex-head of the firm!) have done unethical things at McKinsey.
These are more famous because McKinsey is so super duper integrity focused and they are embarrassing, but they happen on a backdrop of client service.
And indeed many many public spirited, "business isn't really what I'm about" people come work at McKinsey and leave and go on to do other things.
The big thing about consulting firms like McK which is really great and different from banking -- apart from the values which may be good for their business -- is that they are places for GENERALISTS. You get there and work on a wide range of problems, with a wide range of analytics/collaborative/communication skills. This is what is great about consulting and why people go on from there to do great things.
In the "old" world of Goldman Sachs this might have been true too -- when they were investment bankers advising clients on what to do. You and client win in this scenario. But much of the firm's money these days is made from TRADING, where there is a loser on the other side -- apparently the client.
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Currently work at Google, obviously speaking for myself and not my employer. In my experience - yes, this moral decay is a necessary part of the current corporate world. Or any corporate world. Or really, any world without the possibility of failure baked into it. I've seen a lot of idiotic decisions made at Google, many of which have been complained about on Hacker News, many more of which are hidden causes of thing…
I really think that you're completely missing the point in defending Google and maybe Goldman Sachs by saying that their decisions are ok because they are made rationally. Rationality is emotionless and mechanical. It's about making a reasonable decision based on whatever information is available to you. However, rational decisions do not involve morals, culture, or feelings. This is exactly what companies like Googl…
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Some pointless pedantry: There is no singular title "Messr", because "Messrs" as the plural of "Mr" comes from the French "Messieurs". The French singular is "Monsieur", which is abbreviated as simply "M".
It's more often Mr, even in French these days...
Goldman has a kind of hilarious understated response, in which they note that this guy was a VP (there are thousands of VPs at Goldman) and that the group he managed consisted of him and him alone. Plus, this was a bad year for bonuses. Nothing like a slow career and a dwindling bank account to make you aware of how morally imperative it is that you switch careers! The people I know at Goldman are generally bright an…
According to the NYTimes byline, he is a "Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." That doesn't sound like a lowly VP. It's rubbish that he has nothing to lose: coming out so publicly against your former employer never looks good on a resume. And Goldman can respond in the tradition of politicians facing similar stories:…
http://dealbreaker.com/2012/03/goldman-sachs-was-less-than-t...
VP in IB doesn't map to VP in any other industry I've seen. The (many, many) titles become more confusing when employees refer to Managing Directors (highest rank) as MDs, as if that wasn't overloaded. ("gonna see my MD today...")
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HackerNews got me - moving to a tech firm
Sign of the tech bubble? Financiers jumping to tech companies? The chemists and high school teachers turned ninja hax0r can't be far off. Someone please warn me so I can short XLK.
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I served as a VP & President for a small non-profit club. Two takeaways: 1) You don't really have any power. You need to lead by example and empower other people rather than command. 2) The personality required to establish a project is often different than the personalities required to keep it going.
But on top of that, I wonder how much management could be eliminated. Management is, in most businesses, fundamentally a communication infrastructure. How much of it can be replaced through implementing IT through was that work for FOSS projects? My thinking is to have a relatively small group of high level managers, a group of project managers, and an HR department, and eliminate all middle management. I think teams…
This is a task that doesn't scale, because it requires knowing your reports well enough, as a person, that you understand their career goals, their likes & dislikes, their strengths & weaknesses, etc. so you can steer them into the right role. It's the tech lead's job to manage the (engineering half of) the project, and the tech lead frequently doesn't manage any of the people involved. I've found that managers can rarely manage more than 20 people effectively, and usually drop off sharply in effectiveness after 8-10 people.
Open source projects don't face this limitation, because your way of ensuring that everyone's happy is to assume that everyone who's not happy has quit. I suppose some big companies do this too - Yahoo seems to be trying out this strategy right now - but it really doesn't go over well with the public at large, and it wastes a lot of effort spent investing in new employees.
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For a long time finance has been the place where the most interesting tech was going on (not to say there isn't a lot of boring bog standard stuff as well). It's an industry where many firms have had to develop their own network transport layers, database engines, languages, etc. Where machine learning and big data have been standard practice for over a decade. Where understanding complexity and concurrency theory ar…
I'm wondering if any of that work has been made available, eg. as an open source project? There's a standard practice among tech/web companies to share innovation on the infrastructural level, but I cannot name one example of a bank innovating openly in that way. Perhaps they do publish academic papers about their innovations?
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Maybe, since he was willing to name his employers, who happen to be despised in liberal circles. OTOH, there is a lot of PR spending on social media (e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/us/politics/obama-campaign... ), so it wouldn't surprise me if Goldman has hired people to smear Smith on forums like this one.
Except it takes about 10 seconds to click over to byrneseyeview's profile and see that he's been on hn for years and is obviously not a shill. It reflects poorly on you that you'd rather accuse someone of being dishonest than take a little effort to check your paranoia.
I have often wondered, though, about his alacrity to side with the establishment, in defense of investment bankers, against net neutrality, etc., and what his motivation is.