I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was a positive report, of a positive experience. I’ve encountered a couple of these, lately.
I’m so used to the relentless negativity (much of it, unfortunately, justified) that comes from posts that start with “My experience at …”.
I have always been very enthusiastic about tech, and have striven to be positive in my own discussions (which has sometimes been a challenge).
I have often felt as if people consider my attitude a naive anachronism. It’s nice to read enthusiasm from someone at the start of their career. I very much believe in tech, and refuse to treat it as a gladiatorial arena.
> I’m so used to the relentless negativity (much of it, unfortunately, justified) that comes from posts that start with “My experience at …”.
I’ve helped with some mentoring programs on and off over the years. Most students and grads actually have very positive experiences in their internships and first jobs.
There are exceptions, of course, but they’re more rare than you’d think from reading Reddit CS career advice forums and trending stories on HN.
One recent quirk I’ve been seeing is occasionally a junior person will have a good job but for some reason or another become convinced that they’re working for an abusive company under terrible conditions. It sounds strange if you’ve never seen it, but some young people come into the working world with a lot of weird misconceptions they pick up from Reddit and other social media. For example, I’ve seen multiple young developers have near crises because their companies have code review and their seniors have a lot of feedback and changes in their code reviews. We spend a lot of time mentoring about what’s normal and why getting feedback at work is actually a good thing.
It is a pleasant and positive report, but a few observations strike me as naive, for example "They were all awesome and collaborative people that I could talk to about my personal life or my career, and they had my best interest in mind."
I can believe that they were all friendly and supportive (one reason being that an intern doesn't pose a threat at all), but I am fairly sure they had their own interests firmly above his.
Solid post and a well-done reflection on your experience. It's also great that you were able to not only able to ship something, but also get the experience of iterating on it and problem solving along the way. Definitely not an "intern project"!
Digging into a particular thread in your post:
> Later I came to realize that they have a culture of building things inhouse and it shows.
> [...]
> The first I noticed was the old tech, as I mentioned before there is a lot of internally maintained technology and that's good for a few reasons like the fact that you're just a message away from contacting the world wide expert for the technology you're using. But it can also have it's downsides, you don't fully benefit from the fruits of Open Source and it could lead to stagnation and slow development.
You've shown some great observations about what might be simplified as "build versus buy", with buy having options like "actually buy" and "adopt FOSS".
As you grow in your career, I encourage you continue to dig even deeper into the ripple effects of this sort of tech decision. Yes, it might have been better tech than the alternatives at one point in time and there are internal experts for that tech one message away. Long term, that can become a form of institutional knowledge (risk) and sunk cost fallacy (we built it, we should continue investing in it).
In other words, remain curious and be willing to question decisions as the context, culture, and challenge evolve!
> Long term, that can become a form of institutional knowledge (risk)
This is a bit of a tangent but it's something I find surprising in tech (at least the megacorp I work in): institutional knowledge is kept inside people's heads and when they leave, the knowledge is lost and not much is done to stop it.
"That's obvious" you might think but in the US Army for example, there's an organisation [0] that debriefs soldiers returned from deployment and collects their experiences and lessons to disseminate them to the rest of the military (and there are sister organisations in other countries e.g. Australia [1]).
There's an entire field of study dedicated to knowledge management [2] and I know it's present in some large companies but I'm really surprised you never really see it in tech.
And lots of companies have offboarding processes that usually include hand overs and an exit interview to serve similar purpose. If most companies were paid billions to kill kids around the world I'm sure they could also afford a whole department just for this too.
If you wait until the employee has given their notice to begin their knowledge transfer, the company has completely lost the plot.
Not only are you asking to compress years of learning into a couple of weeks or months in the best case that they remember everything and want to turn over that knowledge, worst case is sometimes the person is just not available or has forgotten important chunks. And that's not even mentioning layoffs and firings.
Companies don't pay attention to knowledge transfer for the same reason they don't pay attention to technical debt and scope creep - no incentives to do so for the managers who would have to dedicate engineer time to it.
I agree, his tone is flippant and outdated. Nowadays the purpose is to give jobs to red states that don’t fund education and drone strike foreign woman and children. Also they tacitly assist when a sitting president starts to try and dismantle our democracy. He really gave our military the short shrift.
Yeah I think you bring up a good point. I actually meant to write a bit more on the Tech Risk aspect of the business. There's a lot of red tape, and it can be overbearing sometimes. But it is a bank so most of these measures are necessary.
Throwaway account because I currently work at GS and I too have the NDAs.
Great post! I've been at GS for ~8 years and I can say this is a pretty accurate description of what a GS internship is like nowadays. These 2 points ring out as the most true to me:
1. Lots of red tape. You need to get approvals for any and all access. You're 100% right, its all regulation stuff, but its still annoying as fuck. And since there are so many approvals being requested left and right, managers tend to get swarmed and not really care too much about 99% of requests so its just a matter of chasing to get things approved. To add an annoying cherry on top one of the main systems that you request access through is a bit of a legacy system, so propagation of approvals takes a few hours, which sometimes leaves you sitting on your hands and just waiting. Its not too bad though, and in the last few years a lot of effort has been put into reducing these waiting times.
2. Inhouse building. GS suffered from this a lot, as did all the big banks in the past. All of our legacy is inhouse and it slows us down today. The good news (which you also alluded too) is that for the last ~5 of so years there have been monumental shifts in pushing us towards open-source ways (shameless plug, we even have open source roles we are hiring for: https://bit.ly/3GkJGCM ), so modern development in GS is getting much better.
My only question here which you didn't address in the blog post is: if GS offered you a permanent role, would you take it?
I'm not sure. I got a return offer to intern again for summer 2022. But I ended up taking an internship at Amazon instead. Mostly because I want to try new things and see what it's like to develop at a big company without all the red tape and just in a new environment.
But I can't say that it's completely out of the realm of possibility for me to come back. I think it would largely depend on the team. If I did come back, it'd be cool to work with one of the Cloud teams.
Great Post. Sort of very courageous too to submit it on HN. I was expecting many comments on moral principle and the usual evil company etc. It is very rare you see people offering the other side, unpopular and contrarian stories.
Hello! I'm sorry to report, none of the text is rendering for me on Safari 15.1 on macOS 10.15. If I resize the window the text suddenly appears, but when I scroll the text disappears.
It's less "anti Javascript" and more against "it's a great idea to base the entire web around loading completely unverifiable and uncontrolled executable code from anywhere in the universe."
Javascript is a reasonably nice language for what it does, and if it was all still mostly inline or browser managed packages or whatever the modern ecosystem would likely be significantly less of a user-hostile dumpster fire.
Like millions of others, this site looks great in a text-only browser that has no Javascript support.^1 If automatically running other peoples' Javascript or some other "feature" of a popular browser^2 is preventing someone from viewing the text, and the only way to avoid this annoyance is to disable the feature, then the problem is not necessary the feature, but how the feature is being used. People who disable or avoid the feature are not necessary anti-[feature]. They are trying to avoid the effects of how that feature is being used by web developers.
Rendering the primary text content and being able to collapse comments are not on the same level of functionality.
(Though for this particular website, I can see the text just fine with JS disabled in firefox, so I'm not sure why it doesn't work for CaliforniaKarl.)
> One thing that was immediately apparent to me was this company-wide culture of getting things done. If you ever need help with something critical someone will step up and help you, there's a strong focus on the product, customer, and always delivering on time. You will never hear someone say, "that's not my job".
And that is a key to success which then enables numbers to come into play!
As a manager, it’s really not hard to see who’s actually doing what within a team. I’d have to be completely blind to communications and stop doing 1:1s to mis-attribute some work to the wrong person. As a developer I’m also familiar with Git and routinely look through recent commits, usually just to maintain familiarity with what’s being done but it also makes it clear who’s delivering what code.
But even if I wasn’t as involved, it’s still easy to see who’s always stepping up to help others and who’s struggling to deliver on their own with nearly any tiny amount of communication with the team.
It’s also really easy to see who’s developing a “not my job, not my problem” attitude. When a team gets to a point where individuals are delivering what they consider “their work” but the team as a whole struggles to deliver anything because everyone avoids the loose ends or refuses to help others, the entire team is getting poor performance reviews.
Bonuses and increased compensation if possible. If not, then increased autonomy, respect, and trust at the very least. If someone goes above and beyond outside of their job description, they're demonstrating initiative and judgement.
What you shouldn't do that a lot of places do is just give the person more work with nothing else. "Good job, now keep doing that AND all your other work for the same salary. That's cool, right? Your boss got a fat bonus for your work, though."
The very least, you should not reward alternate behaviour like in my example above. That's a good place to start. In some of the cases I have seen, individual contributors got a pat on the back while the others got disproportionate raises, bonuses etc.
In your year end performance review it should show how impactful you have been, not only to your team but to other teams as well, and should be used as part of the consideration for promotions.
From my experience, this is true, but reward is not why such behavior becomes culture. Culture is ingrained by leaders who act and lead according to value organization adheres to. The key here is to have leaders at every level who embodies such value. Having such values baked into performance evaluation is how "reward" plays a role in engendering and sustaining such culture. It is about whom does the organization promotes and chooses to be a leader. It's not about simple salary increase or cash rewards, as such things don't last more than a few months.
Learn the politics of the organizations you work for. Learn how to gain visibility for your work. This is primarily how to communicate its impact to stakeholders of all kinds, not just tech people. Learn it's hard to hire engineers, and if your manager isn't helping you with the above, it's time to quit or tell someone above them.
Truly I've never had trouble getting recognition for extraordinary work, and I've worked at a lot of questionable organizations.
As a manager, I strongly agree. There’s a huge difference between teams where people are happy to help each other out and teams where people have a “not my job, not my problem” attitude.
My recent experience (past 5 years) had been with remote teams, where this problem is exaggerated even more. Some people see remote as an excuse to minimize their own workload so they can finish their tickets early and log off as quick as possible.
It takes some mentoring to get employees, remote or otherwise, to understand that the team’s deliverables are what counts rather than just closing the tickets they claimed. As hard as we try, tickets will never account for 100% of the work that needs to be done, especially when it comes to things like sharing knowledge with newer team members and helping with loose ends. Someone who wants to isolate and avoid helping others can’t really be effective in a collaborative team environment.
My experience has been that systems where people's job is to "finish tickets" actively contributes to this attitude. Even if somebody agrees in principle that it's the team and business goals that matter, what's getting measured? What feels like it matters? If somebody isn't finishing their tickets quickly they will feel bad about it because it looks bad and the processes around it reinforce that it looks bad. Even if you tell people that it's actively better to help the team, any individual doing that is still going to feel bad going to some "ceremony" and needing to say "their" tickets are "behind schedule".
I remember somebody explaining to me that culture isn't based on what an organization or manager says is rewarded—or even on what's "officially" evaluated—but on what people feel is rewarded and punished. If you're constantly tracking individual tickets, that's what people are going to perceive as important just because the organization's actions place such an emphasis on it.
People aren't "using remote as an excuse", they're responding to the system as it's designed! Frankly, seeing the situation as people "making excuses" is fundamentally counterproductive as a manager—it sounds like you're blaming individual team members for the problem. Starting from that perspective, how can you meaningfully work with the team to improve the system and the culture?
> My recent experience (past 5 years) had been with remote teams, where this problem is exaggerated even more. Some people see remote as an excuse to minimize their own workload so they can finish their tickets early and log off as quick as possible.
Listen to yourself, you are viewing a way people want to work as a problem.
The way they get the job done ?quickly? and then log off sounds ideal for a change of contract where a basic wage + performance pay could be used to incentivise parts of the workforce which in turn could improve customer satisfaction.
So I wonder if you have spotted an opportunity for change whilst viewing it as a problem?
Interesting. As my team has gotten more experience being remote, we actually work as a team much better.
Where I've noticed more of a breakdown is between teams. Not necessarily in the form of "not my job", but rather a refusal to collaborate. So more "not your turf" fiefdoms.
> It takes some mentoring to get employees, remote or otherwise, to understand that the team’s deliverables are what counts rather than just closing the tickets they claimed. As hard as we try, tickets will never account for 100% of the work that needs to be done, especially when it comes to things like sharing knowledge with newer team members and helping with loose ends. Someone who wants to isolate and avoid helping others can’t really be effective in a collaborative team environment.
This scales out to the inter-team level as well. the organization's success is ultimately paramount. If the company goes out of business, everyone's out looking for a new job.
Email and slack work great for newbie questions. Wikis even better. A culture that documents in a central location would fix many of your environmental issues.
Loose ends get lost and should be in a ticket.
Team objectives sit with the team leader. Project objectives with the project owner.
In college, I interviewed here as I also went to school in Utah. I will never forget all the red flags as I stepped foot into the building.
First was the dress code. Everyone was in suits or dresses, even the developers. Some more relaxed, but everyone looked as if they were from Wall Street. I remember being the least dressed person there interviewing with my khakis and red dress shirt (no tie).
Every hiring manager except one(I interviewed for 5 teams) gave off a holier than thou vibe. One dude was super chill but everyone else had a stick up you know where.
The environments were small open rooms where developers had computers lined next to each other. You would bump elbows with each other. It was very messy and part of me wondered how anything got done being so close to meeting rooms and sales pits with all the noise. Cubicles looked appealing compared to this and that’s saying something. I did not aspire to be a code monkey.
The interviews had ridiculous questions like “why is a manhole cover round?” or “why does a tennis ball have felt?”. The joke of an answer I gave to the first was that it’s so the TMNT can throw them like frisbees. That was not well received.
I got offers from 3 of the teams ultimately. The pay was really terrible and the hours were long for intern work. I took a job working remotely for a local company instead that paid me 70k/yr while I finished my studies.
I’m glad the author had a positive experience and things have changed over the last 10 years.
When I (male) interviewed for a tech role at Amazon back in 2000, one of my interviewers was a woman in a sundress (it was summer), with large, visible tattoos and a nose piercing.
The men were dressed casually, in jeans and t-shirts, but seeing her able to feel comfortable as herself made me excited to join. This was at a time that Starbucks made baristas cover up visible tattoos, and many professional tech roles at large companies still required "business casual" of khakis & polos.
Not enough is said about the cultural shift that happened as a result of technology giving economic and social power to the West Coast counter-culture scene.
During the first dot com bubble, dress code at Goldman was still (non-casual) business. This lead to the absurd situation that teams on the West Coast came to the office in a suit and tie, would then change into slacks and hoodie to meet with tech bro startup clients, and then change back into the suit at the office.
Around 2000 or so GS relaxed the dress code, and, to compete better with tech in hiring, even put a foosball table somewhere in their NY headquarters on 85 Broad Street. Then the dot com bubble burst, and the foosball table was gone rather quickly.
Yes, now you can dress however you like, paint your body and hair however you like... but God have mercy on your soul if you say or think (or did in the past 30 years) something Twitter doesn't like. I'm not sure it's actually an improvement, to think about it.
Moving social opprobrium from assumptions made based on look to documented speech and action? I don't know; that seems like a strict improvement.
In any case, these seem like two unrelated changes (West Coast culture of looks-acceptance coinciding with a global telecommunications and searchable data storage networkb that feed existing culture of lack of words / deeds acceptance).
Oh it's way beyond "social opprobrium". And no, I don't think these two changes are entirely unrelated. Maybe not direct consequences of each other - tolerance of tattoos of course does not directly cause intolerance of free speech - but likely having related causes beyond mere coincidence in time.
I think the related cause is that the people with the tattoos helped build, enlarge, and improve the global telecommunications infrastructure.
But the consequent public shunning is an existing practice grown to the scale of the public being global facilitated by the global telecommunications infrastructure; it's not new and it doesn't stem culturally solely from the people who built the system. It would have been too expensive in the past to know what racist thing somebody said in confidence to a friend before boarding a plane... Now, they can broadcast it worldwide and people globally will have done extended commentary on it amongst each other by the time the plane lands.
But it's not the West Coast folks managing the commentary... They have handed a tool to the world, and this is how the world chooses to use it.
So you think you could say something counter-culture in a GS-like strict dress code environment and get away with it? Or is your point that bigoted rants would have been better accepted in a boardroom in the 90's when the old boys were smoking cigars with each other?
I read it as that being the point - that back then even starbucks made their employees cover their tattoos. That's why it seemed like a big deal to OP that Amazon didn't.
I interviewed for a position in a bank central. Everybody with shirt and tie, but the bad thing is that it was an open plan with more than a hundred screaming programmers. Why was everybody so loud I can't understand.
The idiot that I had the displeasure to talk to was proud of the hellish environment, hero culture and seemed to think that they had some kind of bleeding edge tech there. I needed just a couple of questions to realize that it was crap.
The recruiter had driven me there. He asked if I thought I passed. "I surely hope I didn't!!"
I started my career at GS in SLC about six years ago. I remember when the entire technology division ditched the dress-up rules. It felt like a monumental change.
I have to wonder if I worked with some of the managers you interviewed with--that sounds like a familiar phenomenon. A few relaxed people, but lots of folks who brought a NYC investment banking attitude with them to SLC.
The interviews had ridiculous questions like “why is a manhole cover round?”
That was always one of the worst standard brain-teaser questions because so many people who asked it didn't know the correct answer.
Hint: If your answer was that a circular cover is the only shape that can't fall down the matching hole, everything you think you know about the world is wrong and the term you're looking for is "curve of constant width".
The real answer is because manhole covers are mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is usually easier and cheaper than the alternatives.
Manhole covers are round because manholes are round and manholes are round because pipes are round. Even in America there are plenty of square grates and covers on the ground, it's just that they're not covering pipes.
The pipes used are also mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is also usually easier and cheaper than cross-sections with other shapes. Obviously there are other important considerations like the ease of tunnelling and the strength of the pipes when buried underground as well.
However, one thing that none of this depends on is a circular cover being the only shape that can't fall down the corresponding circular hole. That was the standard answer that way too many companies that used this particular interview question wanted and it was wrong.
And so on... Now a great - though a bit unfair - question would be to ask about circular ones, listen to the standard pitch, and then show these photos and ask - so what's going on here? Are all these people idiots?
A good software engineer knows there are rules, and there are reasons for the rules, and there are reasons why sometimes rules need to be different because the situation is different. If you just learn one single "right" answer, you'd end up trying to fit a round manhole cover into a triangular opening.
> The real answer is because manhole covers are mass produced and manufacturing circular ones is usually easier and cheaper than the alternatives.
My understanding is the primary reason is because circular covers cannot fall into the hole itself, whereas that problem exists with other shapes like squares.
Equilateral triangles can fall in. You have three dimensions: the height of the triangle is less than the side length of the triangle, so it fits in near the sides of the hole.
Which includes circles and Reuleaux triangles, which are much more difficult to manufacture than circles. I think this can be rounded off to "circles are the only well-known shape that can't fall into a similarly-sized hole".
Is it easier and cheaper to manufacture because a circle has no obvious weaknesses? For example most point shapes are weak structurally weak at the corners.
There are infinite shapes that cannot fall down the matching hole, but the circle is the easiest to manufacture. A circular cover is easier to manufacture than e.g. a Reuleaux triangle shaped one.
Just a detail, but there is no such thing as a "red dress shirt." You might have a red button-down shirt, but that would definitely not be considered a "dress shirt" nor would it be appropriate for a workplace where people where suits and ties. Not even "business casual." Such a shirt would only be ok if it's the kind of place where jeans are ok.
The environments were small open rooms where developers
had computers lined next to each other. You would bump
elbows with each other.
I always struggled to work in environments like that but always blamed it on ADHD etc. But, there's a lot of evidence that increased CO2 levels have negative effects on cognition, so maybe it wasn't just me.
“why does a tennis ball have felt?”
I know the correct answer(s) because I'm a tennis player but this feels like a really weird interview question. I understand the (highly dubious) point of these brain teasers - it's less about getting the "correct" answer and more about observing the candidate's thought process. But this one feels worse than most because I'm not sure how you could reason about it unless you're already pretty familiar with tennis.
I do like open-ended, "I just want to learn more about the interviewee's thought process" questions in general; I just prefer them to be a little more relevant. Such as,
- how would you troubleshoot particular problem XYZ?
- how would you design the database schema given the following set of requirements?
- what's a controversial/unpopular software development opinion you have?
- what's the best project you ever worked on, and why?
- what's one thing you'd change about $TECHNOLOGY_RELEVANT_TO_THE_ROLE_THEYRE_APPLYING_FOR ?
I've never played tennis in my life but I have a general idea how it works from pop culture so let's see if I can reason it out.
The reason must have to do with either judging or playing the game (otherwise, why bother?). I'm no physicist or aeronautics engineer but I presume the fuzz is relatively negligible on ball speed over short distances, so it's probably not related to how the ball flies. It also doesn't seem realistic that it interacts with the racket or the court. One not so serious thought is perhaps it's got to do with net dynamics but that seems like an edge case I professional play. I haven't really watched tennis but I imagine most volleys end in balls bouncing out of bounds or a player not being able to return a hit. A little excessive to add fuzz for that. I also considered that maybe it's a means of having something adhere to the ball (like if it bounces on the line) but they have high speed cameras and line judges for those sorts of things. Guessing it's not that.
If it doesn't affect the dynamics of the ball or the adjucation of a play, it seems to me that it's instead a more general indicator. You touch the fuzzy ball before every serve and feel the fuzziness. You have a finger sense for a good ball and worn one. If the ball is fuzzy enough, it's good enough. Therefore, it seems to me it's a quality indicator for players to know when to switch out.
And I looked it up, it turns out I'm quite bad at physics! Won't spoil it any further for others trying to guess.
Some of these are right and some of those are wrong. But far more importantly if I was an interviewer forced to ask you this question, I would really love your thought process there - I particularly like the way you ruled things out. Excellent work.
I'm not really familiar with tennis aside from playing a couple games in high school gym, seeing a game or two on TV, and reading an essay from David Foster Wallace.
My approach would be to take what I assume the properties of felt are in terms of how they relate to a tennis game and assume that those properties are selected for. So, felt is probably a little cushion, giving the ball a little more durability as it gets whacked by rackets or off the ground. The felt provides grip, without which, a tennis ball may bounce off the ground in ways that are impossible to return. The color of the felt makes the ball easier to see (though of course you could color a nude call too).
My response to you is nearly identical to what I told a sibling commenter. Some of those things are right and some of them are wrong, but far more importantly I really like your thought process.
I don't want to give "real" answer/answers, in case anybody else is having fun speculating!
But I will also say that the "real" answer/answers are somewhat debatable. In the sense of: the players utilize the properties of the felt in particular ways. So, are the balls fuzzy because the players utilize those properties, or do the players utilize those properties because the balls are fuzzy? (Which came first, the chicken or the egg?) The answer itself is fuzzy, because the reality is that the ball and the players and the game have evolved steadily over ~100 years.
The first thing I notice is that this post shows the obvious[1] advantage of treating interns well and trying to give them a good experience. The thought of working for Goldman can inspire a negative gut reaction in many people (though for a range of reasons from their reputation in the media, being old and big, crazy hours, management practices, or other reasons) and this post shows that working to give interns a good experience not only increases the chance that they will accept offers but also that they will tell their friends about their positive experiences or write blog posts about it.
I think I tend to automatically think of Goldman as being relatively small and full of bankers coming up with crazy ideas for weird trades or products, but I think that description wouldn’t have been accurate 20 year’s ago (they were then and are now a big company) and certainly isn’t now the company has been public for a while and has business ranging from traditional IB and trading to retail/private banking. This post shows some ‘big corporate’ things like the two weeks of zoom sessions or satellite offices and it seems to me that it is an impressive achievement to be a large company where people seem to take responsibility and get things done.
Certainly the author of this post seemed to get a lot done (even if they seemed a bit overworked). When I compare this to my own employer where we give interns two short projects with different teams, it seems our system may get a better read (two independent opinions instead of one) which can be good for evaluation, but it is hard to come up with good projects that will result in good, reasonably complete things running in production by the time the time is up. And everyone like getting things done and complete.
I didn’t see much written about mentorship but maybe that was left unsaid or maybe it is hard for an intern to write about.
[1] It’s obvious in the sense that most people will agree with the statement (at least in tech) but actions don’t always line up with the statement (e.g. when all Google internships became remote, they decided to pay interns based on where they were rather than where they were going to intern, which was pretty bad for European interns headed for mountain view and led to some silly situations like a bunch of interns travelling across Europe in the middle of 2020 lockdown to make it to Switzerland). And if you look at IB internships, there seems to be a culture of proving oneself by surviving gruelling and unpleasant working conditions.
> I think I tend to automatically think of Goldman as being relatively small and full of bankers coming up with crazy ideas for weird trades or products,
I think that was the case in the 80s maybe. Alongside obviously traditional investment banking. Emanuel Derman is a legendary quant who was at Goldman for quite a few years and has a great autobiography 'My Life As A Quant' which describes Goldman at the time as quite a small company, relatively speaking.
There is also infamous internal resistance to doing anything too related to consumer banking, which is only just being overcome. People at GS wanted to focus on the glamorous stuff like structured products or mergers and acquisitions, and worried that moving into e.g. retail saving accounts would cause a drop in prestige.
Nice write up, I am glad that you had such a fulfilling internship and chose to share your experience with us.
In your post you mention working around the browser’s maximum URL length. Assuming this is due to the size of the URL parameters containing “data items”, did you consider POSTing the data instead? Also, could you elaborate more on how your solution is able to reconstruct the query on the backend after reducing the URL length by 50%?
Yeah, so I did implement the ability to POST the data. However because there was a need to be able to just share a link with someone and see everything they saw, so I had to somehow fit everything into the URL. I can't really go more in depth without divulging some info on the type of data, sorry!
Sound like you might benefit with being able to save a configuration file and that the whole dashboard might be a bit too complex for using inside a browser ?
When reading the reference to "internally maintained technology" as opposed to open source, at an investment bank, I was reminded of this eye-opening HN post, "An Oral History of Bank Python", https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html
/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047 . Which goes into quite a bit more detail (perhaps on similar/same things?) than an intern with an NDA would be comfortable sharing.
URL lengths used to be a major pain. Browsers have sane limits these days (IE was about 2000 chars before v11; most browsers accept far more now), but I've used plenty of SaaS apps that get a bit upset if you try to add very long URLs in forms that put a max length far lower than browsers will handle. Compressing them where possible is good UX.
What a great post. I'm long past the age of interning, and I have no plans to work for GS.
However this was great to read.
One, it's nice simply to read about a person having a positive experience. Two, great writing skills! (They will serve you well in your career)
Three, this was useful for me. As a senior dev it's wonderful to have data points like this to learn and reaffirm what kinds of things make positive experiences for interns and junior SWE's.
I’d just like to point out that in the 90s many companies had rather strict and formal dress codes, but nobody scrutinised your usenet posting history.
Where you go to school matters very little in the grand scheme of things. The exciting work isn’t at the biggest companies.. tbh it’s at the smallest. Good job though, positivity is what matters as you grow. Keep at it!
Well done and congratulations on shipping something that works. As you are still early in your journey, keep that with you. At the end of the day the specific tech and techniques will often recede into the background. What people - you, your colleagues, your bosses, your customers, even your competitors - will remember is that you delivered something that got the job done.
Very nice! This is a good recap writeup. I got a sense of what your experience is like, and I think you did a solid job of describing what you were working on without stepping over the line into proprietary details.
Seems like you had a neat opportunity to tackle several different problems across the stack - nice work coming up with solutions to those!
I worked for a large investment bank directly comparable to GS. I was a data and systems analyst that ended up doing pseudo-SWE work in addition to my other responsibilities. The interview process was stiff, rigid, felt outdated and very intimidating.
Ended up getting the job coming from a no name school with minimal experience. The reason why I got it, and why I seem to obtain most of my jobs, is because people say I'm "likeable". To this day, I have no idea what that means in the context of software development, investment banking, or technology in general as I work strictly behind the scenes and never in a client-facing capacity.
I will say, it was the best job I ever had; albeit, our dress code was always full business suits and printers and fax machines were still used. My boss ended up becoming a phenomenal role-model and mentor and taught me how to think critically about my work.
Did you hear any cool stories about when they failed in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the taxpayers? What’s the current mood on if that will happen again?
GS didn't fail and didn't want to take any money from the government but the treasury secretary Hank Paulson forced them to. They paid it back with interest.
depends on the desk and division. Global markets does there execution business to drive price execution improvements, liquidity seeking algos mostly.
QIS - quant investment management services is more asset management using data science.
they dont do hft, thats more Millenium or point72, maybe citidel.
end of day they use tech to drive reduced cogs and keep in clients. the front office folks bake off against Morgan Stanley, UBS, et all to offer bespoke products that are ' new and sexy omg wow '
slang is neat insofar as access is concerned, but as one former CFO once said WHY TF U STILL USING SECDB?
Made me look it up. Sounds interesting. I've never really thought about risk from the executive level. Must be the holy grail to be able to know how much risk one is taking at any given point.
Yeah a lot of it is Quant Infra, but there's also a lot of internal applications for dealing with different aspects of their consumer facing business. On top of this, there's also a lot tools that are not customer facing and are just to track different aspects of the business and every day operations.
Thank you for the insight. I've had a bit to do with apprentices before, but only recently started supervising interns. It's nice to see another view of things as my only experience as an intern was awful.
Instead of encoding your URL scheme, did you consider switching to POST requests with the query parameters on the body? Presumably that would have made your caching solution require some rework?
Your website is really cool, good first impression but can't stay longer than 5 minutes as it hurts my eye. Have you experienced this or it's just my monitor?
Thanks for the feedback! I generally prefer darker themes, so my eyes don't hurt. I am however working on a toggle button to make the website light/dark.
> In the end we woke up at 6am, drank copious amounts of coffee and presented the project at 7am in a department-wide Zoom session which included several Managing Directors and other leaders in our branch, it went really well.
Not bad in absolute terms, but even their NY/NJ offerings are half of what the top trading firms seem to offer, and middle of the pack for tech: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/
GS intern pay in Salt Lake City was like $33 or $35 an hour a few years ago. I can only imagine it’s higher now. No way the interns aren’t paid at a big bank - not in this day and age.
I interned with goldman in their 200 west office in lower Manhattan years ago. They pay, and paid well (still less than proper tech companies), and while no one I knew returned full time, the experience, prestige, and network of other young ambitious college peers was really one of those opportunities I look back on and acknowledge as one of my “luck” moments to get me to where I am today.
Granted, with my age I can proudly say, fuck the entire institution that is GS.
I'm interested to know why you didn't go back. Reading OPs article there are a lot of red flags that stand out to me today, but if I was young and fresh out of college, I'd probably be happy to take a job there.
U.S. companies can't legally hire interns for no pay (I believe there are some exceptions, but GS definitely wouldn't qualify). So it's probably best to avoid jumping to conclusions like this in the future.
GS interns and most finance interns do get paid and paid quite well compared to interns in basically any other industry (maybe tech interns get more? I doubt it though).
At first I thought you were saying they underpay tech and agreed, but then I read "for free".
I have never even seen or heard of an unpaid software engineering internship. Why are you assuming they're unpaid? Where are these unpaid SWE internships?
I've never come across unpaid internships in Fortune 100. They may even be paid higher in internship than the bottom end if software engineering full time jobs.
At every level when adjusted for local cost of living? No way. Intern/New Analyst jobs paid around half of what you’d get at full tech companies. If you stick with it for 2 years and then 5 years you can get very good bumps.
The cool thing about Goldman as an internship/first-post-uni job is that they provide the opportunity for a lot of very capable people whose resumes would be ignored for SWE roles in tech. And, while I don’t know what the current H1B situation is, banking tech has been a huge enabler for talent in markets like Ghana or Nigeria.
That was not the case 10+ years ago, especially at the entry level. Their entry level pay used to be lower because people did not mind accepting lower in exchange for the brand name on the resume.
What a horrible advice. People absolutely do not have to share your attitudes and priorities. And you are saying it to a person just starting a career! I am glad to see the majority of the comments have been supportive and constructive, like HN usually is.
This blog was adorable. I have some minor constructive criticisms. Going on hikes or eating with coworkers isn’t “surreal” and cheapens the writing. I noticed a few frequent typos that a spellchecker would have caught. Your criticisms and defenses of Goldman Sachs feel inauthentic because you haven’t experienced much outside of Goldman Sachs. The same inauthentic feel goes for the portion about open source. That didn’t sound like you, it sounded like something you heard e.g. “open source is good, closed source is bad”
Consider not bringing up “drama” if you don’t want to share it with the readers. That may have been one of the most interesting leads and it didn’t go anywhere. That sounded like you, while the rest sounded mostly political.
Thanks for the constructive criticism! When I said surreal I didn't mean the hikes, I meant the way they took me into their inner circle and treated me like just another team member as opposed to just a temporary intern. I'll have to run a spell checker, no real excuse for that. I can only draw from my own experience when writing the blog, so I just wrote about how I felt while going through it. As "inauthentic" as that might sound. Also Goldman wasn't my first paid SWE job, I've had previous jobs where I've had to write production software and my thoughts on Open Source are my own, through my own experiences. I'm not simply regurgitating a position.
I have to agree with the 'adorable' comment, me being someone in his 50s and wishing I could have had the same experience. While I, too, thought that the blog started a bit uneven, it was cool that you then focused on the technical side and finished on the successful project conclusion and the human connections made.
Whether the friendships end up lasting forever or not, what I can tell you is that you'll never forget how you felt on that 7am zoom call or when you got the invite to return later. That excitement is palpable to me as a reader, in the same way that it will be to you as you advance in your career and look back.
I read "surreal" as "it was surreal how whole-heartedly they welcomed us" as opposed to "hiking with your coworkers is a totally surreal, bizarre experience." The surrounding context doesn't support your interpretation at all: the blog post is about how well he was treated, not how strange the experience was.
That didn’t sound like you, it sounded like something you heard e.g.
“open source is good, closed source is bad”
Wow, what? Accusing him of parroting others' opinions is just weird and again, maybe you're right (I can't read the author's mind) but there's nothing else in the post to support this.
Your criticisms and defenses of Goldman Sachs feel inauthentic
because you haven’t experienced much outside of Goldman Sachs.
How many years should somebody spend in the industry before it's okay for them to share their thoughts? 5? 10? 20?
It would be an entirely different story if the author was misrepresenting himself, but considering the post is entire
Consider not bringing up “drama” if you don’t want to share it
with the readers.
I think his brief mention of this and the other minor downsides is precisely what helped this article feel so authentic. It gave me what felt like a balanced picture of life at Goldman Sachs. Leaving out the actual content of the "drama" is 100% appropriate, for a variety of reasons.
I’m so used to the relentless negativity (much of it, unfortunately, justified) that comes from posts that start with “My experience at …”.
I have always been very enthusiastic about tech, and have striven to be positive in my own discussions (which has sometimes been a challenge).
I have often felt as if people consider my attitude a naive anachronism. It’s nice to read enthusiasm from someone at the start of their career. I very much believe in tech, and refuse to treat it as a gladiatorial arena.
I sincerely wish the OP luck.