Goldman Sachs Software Engineer/Analyst Developer reviews

Goldman is infamous for long working hours and intense pressure. Very often people have lunch at their desks, come in early, and stay very late. Even when people are at home or on vacation they're most likely checking their emails. Everyone is expected to be reachable 24/7. Project timelines are usually grossly underestimated and deadlines are inflexible for changes. Depending on departments and teams, it can get political at times. Teams reshuffling can happen quietly when under new management. Performance reviews might not necessarily reflect on performance because managers have complete say on the final rating and what comments from the reviewers are going to appear on the final review. Some managers honestly don't care about their employees career growth or their satisfactions. "Knowledge drain" happen easily because most support work of the IT teams has been offloaded to offshore support team, who has very high turn-over rate. Platforms are not necessarily stable because the focus is on delivering new business requirements in the quickest way possible. This often adds burden to supporting the platforms because new systems are being built too fast without having to consider how to support them. The paid is not that high compared to other firms if taking the hours into account. Promotions and titles are harder to get compared to other firms as well.

Unavoidable support work if you are not the smartest or are just into the organization. Should be ready to work late and deal with legacy code a lot, only the brightest/already settled employees get the opportunity to work in the new projects. But this might have been only my department.