
Goldman Sachs Recasts Its Reputation to Woo Tech Talent - carlchenet
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/goldman-sachs-recasts-its-reputation-to-woo-tech-talent
======
chrisbennet
I would think that the applicant pool would be limited to those who hadn't
heard of (what they did to) Sergey Aleynikov.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov)
.

~~~
icebraining
Why? I don't intended to copy my code from my employer's machines to personal
servers just before I leave, do you?

~~~
byEngineer
Good. Because if you do by any chance you will spend many, many years in
prison. You like that part too, right?

~~~
melling
The guy was making $400k/year and taking his software to another firm where he
was going to make well over $1m a year. Perhaps there was a good reason the
company was so aggressive?

~~~
dreamweapon
_The guy was ... taking his software to another firm where he was going to
make well over $1m a year._

That's the takeaway Goldman would like you to have -- that he was "making off
with the crown jewels." Unfortunately, it was basically a concoction: turns
out the code he took was quite innocuous, and offered no special business
advantage.

Yet out of either incompetence or vindictiveness, Goldman proffered the line
that he had taken the "crown jewels". And that he should be hauled to jail,
and have his reputation ruined and his marriage destroyed for it.

~~~
melling
I don't know the importance of the code he stole. Can you post links? You're
just providing your opinion. All I know for sure is that a very smart
programmer who worked at a firm where he knew his systems were monitored, felt
the need to take the code with him to his next job. He did try to cover his
tracks, right? Seems like a lot of effort and risk for "innocuous code".

~~~
dreamweapon
_You 're just providing your opinion._

Umm, no. It was the opinion of the court that ordered his conviction reversed,
as well as of the court that rejected the appeal to have his charged re-tried.
From WP:

 _On June 20, 2014, upon reviewing the evidence, Justice Ronald Zweibel
published a 71-page opinion in which the court ruled that F.B.I. “did not have
probable cause to arrest defendant, let alone search him or his home.” The
arrest was “illegal,” and Mr. Aleynikov’s “Fourth Amendment rights were
violated as a result of a mistake of law.”_

Really now -- it's not too hard to find information about important events
(before simply making up facts about them), these days. You should give it a
try sometime.

~~~
melling
And what I said stands. The rules are well-defined and easy to follow. The guy
knew he was doing something wrong. In general when committing a white-collar
crime, better consider where you're doing it. Building a git repo and sneaking
it out of the company could lead to a lot of pain.

But hey, if you're an honest person, maybe you'll be a good fit.

By the way, I'm not arguing for/against what happened to him once he crossed
the line. I'm merely pointing out that he did knowingly cross a legal line,
which as we know can get quite messy.

~~~
dreamweapon
_The guy knew he was doing something wrong._

It seems you don't quite understand how our justice system actually works. We
don't just put people in jail because we feel that they "did something wrong."
We have to _prove_ that their conduct violated specific statutes. The courts
found that in Alyenikov's case, it did not. Not only that: _even as alleged_ ,
it did not violate the statutes under which he was accused.

~~~
melling
I'm arguing that he knowingly committed a crime and you're arguing that the
actions and punishment were too severe. Not sure how we're going to come
together on that one. My only advice is don't commit the crime in the first
place l because it might turn out to be more than you bargained for.

Also, please follow up with the others who are correcting you. You seem to be
confusing the facts.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609023](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609023)

That's why its best if you use links for references in your claims. It's
really starting to sound like some guy committed white-collar crime and got
off on a technicality.

~~~
dreamweapon
_I 'm arguing that he knowingly committed a crime and you're arguing that the
actions and punishment were too severe. Not sure how we're going to come
together on that one._

No, I'm just pointing out to you that _the courts found_ that he did not
commit a crime, and that the FBI acted too aggressively. What you do with that
information is up to you. We certainly don't have to be on the same page about
it.

------
scott00
The two stats from this article that scream "avoid a tech career at Goldman"
to me:

    
    
      - total tech employees: 25% (8k/32k)
    
      - total software engineers among new partner class: 7.7% (6/78)

~~~
gadders
This is true, but I'd also say that even if part of the 25% you can still get
a £100k+ salary.

------
jaydub
Here are my unsolicited 2 cents on why not to work on Wall Street:

Solve real problems.

Don't be a second class citizen (e.g. if the firm is financial, software
engineers aren't going to be CEO and that says something).

Make sure you have upside. Don't work in a job where your function is to
maintain some legacy system and if it breaks its as if you lost the firm
millions but if its running smoothly no one cares.

~~~
dreamweapon
A lot of startups aren't exactly solving "real problems" either, you know. And
startupland has its own stratification, hierarchies, and pretensions -- not
too mention great unwashed masses of second-class citizens: those who came to
the party late and missed their chance at a meaningful equity stake and/or a
fluffy job title, etc.

 _Don 't work in a job where your function is to maintain some legacy system
and if it breaks its as if you lost the firm millions but if its running
smoothly no one cares._

Good advice. But at the end of the day, a lot of these ad exchanges, dating
apps, half-baked recommender systems etc that most startup engineers get to
work on just aren't all that different, in spirit, than the sprawling back-
office order processing systems that most financial programmers get to work on
(save for the comparatively minor fact that that they might be in badly-
written PHP or JS as opposed to badly-written Perl or C).

There are plenty of pour souls in both camps, toiling away in the bowels of
other people's messes -- while those responsible for creating those messes
have long since made their millions, and moved on to greener pastures.

------
uniclaude
Something that must also be quite important for graduates is that when working
for Amazon or Google, you are among the most important type of employees for
the company. What you do really matters to the business, and you can hope to
be rewarded in consequence.

Some might get the impression that when working for GS, as long as you're not
a trader or such, you'll only be writing code next to the millionaires making
money with it.

~~~
jevgeni
Speaking from the trenches here.

Banking, especially non-consumer banking (i.e. IB, prop trading operations,
etc) is divided intro three tiers: front, middle and back office.

Front office are the people directly dealing with "clients" (or better
"counterparties") and get shitloads of money and an aura of being business
savvy and knowing where it's at. Basically it's sales, trading and some
higher-tier management. Contrary to what one might think based on the "Wall
Street" films, these people don't need to be smart or sophisticated. I know
quite a bit of traders, who only finished high school.

Mid office are the people who do the actual nitty-gritty work, that one would
actually associate with a working banking institution: research, risk
oversight (in Europe mostly known as risk control), legal, compliance,
marketing, accounting, ALM, etc. They usually earn OK, but nowhere near what
front office makes.

Back office are the people who are there for the infrastructure. Transaction
banking, for example (i.e. making sure that your transactions are settled
correctly, that money is wired to direct recipients, etc.) Tech is in most
banks a back office thing (especially if we are not talking about algo
trading). They earn shit.

I'm involved in quant finance, so I hoped, that I would see a culture shift
after 2008-2013 from get-rich-quick-with-other-peoples-money schemes to a more
serious business culture, but that is not the case. I honestly don't believe
that Goldie can change its culture so quickly.

~~~
3EAFC164D817
> Speaking from the trenches here. [...] Tech is in most banks a back office
> thing (especially if we are not talking about algo trading). They earn shit.

You are in the wrong trench, my friend. High performing developers and systems
folks are extraordinarily well compensated at the higher end banks and hedge
funds.

When people change jobs, it's usually for another job in financial services,
largely because most technology companies cannot even begin to touch the total
compensation for such a person.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
You have to have a thick skin a mate of mine got told by a big swinging dick
in the city "I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entire wardrobe"

~~~
tomp
Given yesterday's Amazon scandalous news, along with all other tech scandals
(e.g. Condoleezza Rice at DropBox, no-poaching agreements), it's disingenuous
to claim that only happens in finance.

~~~
byEngineer
two different things: corruption and illegal activities happen all the time in
the Corporate America. Finance, Tech, Auto, you name it. That's one thing and
that's where (I believe) your comment is coming from.

Second thing: you will have much harder time becoming manager, doing important
work, becoming CEO, etc in company that is not directly in your field. It gets
worse. The Companies tend to get rid of employees who are not their "main line
of business" in the economic downturns. In other words: your job as a
developer or IT engineer at a large bank or hedge fund can (and will!) be
outsourced easily if needed. They are not an IT company! They could care less
about agile or not using Ruby or Java or Perl. They are financial insitution.
You are there to make their infrastructure work. If not you then someone else.
If nobody else, then India. You are _not_ their core business. They have you
as a nice to have extra because times are good, extra cash is there and
someone thought it might be a good idea to do it in-house. On the other hand
Google, Facebook, MS, etc -- they live and breathe technology. Your Manager
won't be a dude who doesn't care about technology. You won't be treated as the
proverbial "fifth wheel in a car". You are the core business here. On the
other hand, here is the place, where employees running books can be outsourced
at a CEO grim. Let ATP or someone take care of that crap!

I can't believe talented computer scientists would go to GS to waste their
time building great stuff for a company that will put them to jail for many
years if they put some of the HFT source code on the public server.

I don't think Google or Facebook would ever do that. The same way GS would
never try so hard to jail their traders for inside trading.

------
alecco
I've heard the financial industry is still quite top-down on decisions and
software architecture. A do-what-they-told-you kind of environment, where
technical people are seen as nerds and laughed at behind their backs.

~~~
jevgeni
You've mostly heard correctly. With the difference, that most tech people who
are officially hired as techs by banks aren't very good. Good tech people are
usually recruited by rebellious front and mid office desks.

------
ajones
When I left college, I joined a big bank and eventually made the jump to a
startup. Here's why:

\- I spent my first of two years as an applications developer and didn't push
more than 20 lines of code into production. My days were wasted with planning
meetings and release management. I spent more time in excel spreadsheets than
anything else.

\- In my second year, I worked on a new product. Things seemed much more
interesting, but something was still missing. I cover a lot of that in my blog
post about my transition from a big bank to a startup.
[https://atjonesblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/my-
transition-t...](https://atjonesblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/my-transition-
to-startup-life/)

\- In the article, it is mentioned that Goldman works on problems in machine
learning, data mining, and cloud computing. I'm sure this is 100% accurate,
but what they fail to mention is these interesting projects are usually
strictly for PhDs or engineers with decades of experience.

\- As a technologist in a bank, you're a second-class citizen. The executives
may say things like, "we're not a bank, we're a tech company!", but I saw no
actions to back up the statements. Majority of the recognition goes to the
bankers, ignoring the infrastructure laid by the tech and operations side of
the business.

After all that, I'd say I had a decent experience, but I don't think I would
have missed much by jumping straight into a tech company.

~~~
gedrap
>>> As a technologist in a bank, you're a second-class citizen

I believe that's the case in the majority of companies, where software is not
the primary product.

------
mcv
Sounds like the article is only really about Wallstreet's reputation. What
about Goldman Sachs' own specific reputation for screwing their own customers?
I mean, suppose I want to be proud of what I do? Then what place is there for
me in Goldman Sachs?

~~~
yummyfajitas
Could you provide more info on Goldman screwing their customers? Among traders
their general reputation is pretty good.

~~~
raheemm
"Why I'm Leaving Goldman Sachs" \-
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-
leaving-g...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-
goldman-sachs.html)

How Goldman screwed its IPO clients -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/nocera-
rigg...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/nocera-rigging-the-
ipo-game.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&)

------
CmonDev
Graduates are very attractive to them - no need to pay a proper bonus. If you
are in states opting for a large tech company instead is a no-brainer IMHO.

~~~
pmorici
If someone is making the decision based on pay I'm fairly certain that Goldman
Sachs, and financial firms in general pay better than most tech companies in
SV. Heck 4 of the bigger companies in tech have all but admitted that they are
guilty of colluding to keep salaries artificially low.

[http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-appeal-settlement-
reje...](http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-appeal-settlement-rejection-in-
wage-fixing-case/)

~~~
JDiculous
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure starting salaries at GS
and other banks are around $80-90k + a small bonus (10-20%?). Not bad, but
definitely less than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other major tech
companies. So if you're a software engineer going for the money, GS isn't
really the place to be.

~~~
3EAFC164D817
> So if you're a software engineer going for the money, GS isn't really the
> place to be.

Over the long term, financial services wins. The compensation curve is much
steeper than most tech firms.

~~~
lern_too_spel
GS in particular pays crap wages according to salar.ly.

~~~
massmana
That's because you're looking at the wrong job title. For experienced
engineers look at Vice President and Senior Vice President.

~~~
lern_too_spel
I'm well aware of the "everybody's a VP" system at Goldman. Those are the
titles I'm looking at.

~~~
omh
Do the stats include bonus? If you're a Goldman VP then your salary might be
mediocre but your bonus will be significant

------
nns
Earlier this year Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein spoke to
Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent
company of Bloomberg News, on technology and the financial industry.

[http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2014-06-03/blankfein-
bloo...](http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2014-06-03/blankfein-bloomberg-on-
role-of-tech-in-business)

------
piokoch
I could not belive my eyes when I have learned about GS Collections library
for Java [[https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-
collections](https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections)]. Very nice piece
of open source code with a very good documentation.

I had to double check if I am looking at the right place...

------
mempko
"They were fighting against perceptions of Wall Street as boring and
regulation-bound "

I really don't think this is the perception people have of Wall Street that is
keeping them from working there... Part of me feels that I would be destroying
lives of millions of people when the next crash inevitably comes...

~~~
kasey_junk
And how do you feel about exploiting service workers? Blowing up foreigners?
Exploiting sick people? Selling people's demographics? Automating low skilled
workers out of the workforce?

It is pretty easy to find the dark side of any profit generating job in
software.

