- Strange culture where people often act like doing their job is a favor. Tricky communicating effectively with intelligent but often thin skinned and/or insecure personality types holding long term senior positions
- Work often comes informally as high level projects along the lines of "rethink and simplify the current expensive but proven solution with delivery of an entirely novel, unproven, theoretically more efficient paradigm" - and then judged somewhat qualitatively on minor points and preferences, shaped by popular opinion. Politics here are as weird as they are dicey as they are crucial to getting ahead or staying afloat.
- Compensation per employee is nothing like the press/media math of "X profit / Y employees". It's higher than average in general but there's many who are paid less than their value along with many medium term consultants with no skin in the game. On the positive side, there's almost no one who adds little to no value and sticks around for more than 3-6 months like all other banks
- Management structure may be flat but largely because of its opaque, convoluted and constantly shifting nature. This can make it feel like a full political campaign cycle just to screw in a light bulb.
- As crazy as it sounds, if you reach a senior level, it becomes difficult to pursue opportunities outside GS as the universe of companies that can and will provide both a better career trajectory and higher compensation shrinks dramatically. Those that can can usually have outlandish expectations with only incremental compensation improvement offered - like describing how to build a profitable algorithmic trading system in explicit, low level technical detail over the phone in 10 minutes.
