Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

I agree with your sentiment, but not with the "burning your bridges" part. Seems like the fear of burning your bridges keeps many people from speaking frankly about what's happening in the corporate world. And that's important nowadays because as they say, politicians don't run the world, Goldman Sachs does.

Looking forward to wikileaks bank-leaks.

The gentleman era of investment banking is largely mythical. There was a long period where they were notably less scummy and cutthroat than other investment banks (compare: Salomon Brothers in the 1980s) but they were always an investment bank.

The most visible (to a young person) sign of a bank's character is how it treats its employees. The 90+ hour weeks and terrible conditions in the "analyst" program (the term has nothing to do with analysis; it means "whale-shit") are not a new invention; that goes back to the 1980s. Before that, banking was dominated by the Mad Men culture: the hours weren't long but the politics was just as malicious.

"Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa."

I could be wrong, but I don't think the number of positions heading business units across continents is that large.

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 Google and Goldman Sachs are being criticized for.

When game theory is baked into your corporate culture, this is what you get. The company starts an inevitable slide from "Do No Evil" into "Make the Best Decision You Can With the Information You Have".

If I look down into my wallet and see no money there, and I'm hungry for lunch, and I decide to steal some money from a little old lady, that may be a perfectly rational decision to make. An outside observer may say I'm being evil, but they don't have a complete information picture about how hungry I am, or how long the line at the ATM is, or that everyone else is eating lunch so I have a duty to my shareholders to do the same.

It's interesting how the tone of this article is almost exactly the same as the one about the Microsoft employee that recently quit Google.

Something happens to companies as they get larger, where the culture of a company starts dying from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts, and then they start promoting the wrong people into upper management that seem to really poison a very good company culture. It sounds like Goldman Sachs is one of these companies.

The irony is that I think the shift in mentality came from Wall Street itself pushing the idea of "maximizing shareholder value", in the 80s. This lead to a bunch of financially positive but culturally negative (some would say sociopathic) decisions, such as closing plants that were profitable, but weren't profitable enough. I think Michael Moore had a movie on this called "The Big One".

Forbes has an article on this, calling it "The Dumbest Idea in the World":

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...

I read the biography on Goldman Sachs, and I don't doubt for one second that there was a historic culture that most of the employees were fiercely proud of. But as the author mentioned, a few mistaken promotions into power and the whole culture of a company can change through death by a thousand cuts. No doubt the same thing is happening at all large companies that started off with great roots. I saw this occur at Yahoo, where completely idiotic decisions were made in order to preserve revenues so that managers' bonuses were left in tact.

Is this something that can be avoided? I'm not sure... corporate culture starts at the top and works its way down. It's something that must be demonstrated by the leaders of the company at every level, and it filters down to the lowest ranks. So if you have a company with strong leadership, then I think it can be staved off for a while, but it requires a relentless focus.