
Goldman Scraps On-Campus Interviews for Undergraduates - irenetrampoline
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-23/goldman-sachs-scraps-on-campus-interviews-for-robo-recruiting
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cheez
For what it's worth, I was the beneficiary of such "blind hiring". I ended up
working for an incredible trading department for too short a time and I am
told that I beat out 70 or so other applicants who actually had degrees, let
alone PhDs and Masters degrees. As far as I'm aware, I was not shafted on the
salary though it might have been 20 or 30K less than I would have received
otherwise. I don't think this was because of my lack of credentials: my salary
+ bonus beat most of Google/Facebook any day.

But there is another side of it. People like me (kicked out of the house at a
young age, a couple of stretches of jail time) who didn't get a degree, didn't
get it for a reason. We have life situations that tend to follow us around.
Unfortunately, I was not able to shed my background in a good way and that was
my biggest failure in the situation. I'm still working on it.

It seems that GS are trying to detect such situations as they should.

All in all, a good move.

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lordnacho
Maybe you can tell us something about their coding practices. A friend of mine
who work at GS told me they have an absolutely massive ball of spaghetti that
takes 7 hours to compile. That's for their trading systems.

Naturally, it's not something that attracts me to working there, and he
basically told me not to come.

There must be other divisions where people have different experiences?

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davorb
> Maybe you can tell us something about their coding practices. A friend of
> mine who work at GS told me they have an absolutely massive ball of
> spaghetti that takes 7 hours to compile. That's for their trading systems.

In case no one with actual experience responds to you, you might want to check
out Flash Boys[0], which spends a little time talking about GS's code. From
what I've read in that book and in other places, what you heard seems to be
the correct.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-
Revolt/dp/0393...](https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-
Revolt/dp/0393351599)

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kchoudhu
It depends on what system you're talking about.

If you're talking about the core risk management system, yeah, seven hours
sounds about right. But the risk management system is a _platform_ that you
can use to build other systems that can be iterated upon very, very quickly:
we regularly made changes, reviewed them and made them production visible
globally in under two minutes).

Flash Boys' technical discussion is, frankly, crap. The larger point about GS'
treatment of Aleynikov (sp?) is, however, correct and relevant.

Source: Worked there for 8 years, still suffering from withdrawal.

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cheez
Withdrawal meaning you want to go back? Hard to find a similar environment
anywhere else?

That's me in a nutshell, if not you.

~~~
kchoudhu
The amount of irritation GS abstracts away from the programmer is amazing --
and I do miss it very much. I'd like to go back, but circumstances appears to
be taking me elsewhere.

It was a good run, and unlike OP's friend, I'd recommend it wholeheartedly.

~~~
cheez
My experience as well.

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ara24
> Robo-Recruiting

In my opinion, unless the new hires are going to work with robots, this is not
going to work as they expect. And, this seems more like a cost-cutting
solution than becoming “school agnostic".

