GS secret sauce: "teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients"
Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
31–40 of 268 posts
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I've been contracting in the finance industry in London for seven years (at four firms) and although financial companies are some of the biggest users of open-source software, it's almost unheard of for firms to contribute back to open-source projects. There are a few progressive companies but unfortunately I've not worked at any of them.
Many firms have a strict policy of disallowing any source (open or not) from leaving company premises. Email servers and proxy filters have detectors that will raise an alert if source code is emailed or sent out over HTTP. It's easily a sackable offence and this discourages developers from contributing changes back to open-source: there are simply too many hurdles to jump through in order to do it.
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Sure, here's one example http://www.aplusdev.org/
But the real influence of banking is driving the development of stuff like RDMA over Infiniband, which eventually makes its way into other industries. Everything that "web companies" know (and take for granted) about scalability, performance, resilience, security etc etc comes from either investment banking or pr0n.
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#34"Why I left reddit"
'It changed man. The culture wasn't the same as when I joined five years ago.'
These 'I said GOODBYE SIR!'s are interesting, but I'm not sure how much reliable information can be gleaned from them. What ever happened to not 'burning your bridges'?
This is a resumé.
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#35I have ranted for a long time about the corruption at Goldman Sachs, mostly to deaf ears. :) This is the tip of the iceberg, as far as I am concerned. My bigger concern is how involved GS is with our government. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19gold.html?pagew... As it turns out, the human race is extremely intelligent and wherever there is an opportunity to make money (corrupt or not), people are probabl…
Sigh. Learn reddiquette people - downvoting is for irrelevant comments - not necessarily comments that you just disagree with. http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette If you disagree with me, that is cool - just leave a comment telling me why. If you think my comment is irrelevant for some reason, also let me know why. Edit: More appropriately -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Didn't mod you, but I think you're looking for this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sigh. Learn reddiquette people - downvoting is for irrelevant comments - not necessarily comments that you just disagree with. http://www.reddit.com/help/reddiquette If you disagree with me, that is cool - just leave a comment telling me why. If you think my comment is irrelevant for some reason, also let me know why. Edit: More appropriately -- http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Didn't mod you, but I think you're looking for this: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks, that is more relevant :)
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#37GS secret sauce: "teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients"
GS should never have IPO'd. It never belonged to the partners, they were only custodians of it. Then it became just another bank.
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#38GS secret sauce: "teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients"
[deleted]
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#39I keep thinking about this article and the recent Google one as well. And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? Is it possible, over the long run, to have a tech firm, or any other firm, that empowers employees to do what is best for everyone and to hell with the rules? Or is this merely a matter of a few good leaders who get it, and everyone else eventually overcoming…
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…
Completely agree on the effect you are describing. I've encountered it, too. I think it can be easily countered through regularly context switching, though. That is, switching your thinking over to that of an end user.
Re: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
#40I keep thinking about this article and the recent Google one as well. And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world? Is it possible, over the long run, to have a tech firm, or any other firm, that empowers employees to do what is best for everyone and to hell with the rules? Or is this merely a matter of a few good leaders who get it, and everyone else eventually overcoming…
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 am not denying that corporate culture takes on a life of its own, and that the system's rationality and the participants are not closely linked.
What I am asking is whether great places to work inevitable decay as the company gets large, and if that is the case, what is the point of a startup? Why not seek to make an idea that scales down rather than scales up? Is it all about personal wealth? But for those of us who want to build great businesses, in every sense of the word 'great,' how do we get around this problem?
I have my own ideas but they are largely untested.....