Goldman Sachs reviews

Naturally, the hours were bad, but presumably you know what you are signing up for. I had worked long hours before but it is much harder without the sense of teamwork, camaraderie, and gratitude from senior folks. A few people were genuinely malicious and there was no way to protect yourself from them and no recourse when you were mistreated. Before I started people told me that a lot of backstabbing goes on at Goldman. I didn't really know what that meant until a few weeks into my summer. Most people were smart enough, but they didn't seem to be anything exceptional. If anything, the experience gives you the sense that smartest guys on Wall Street really aren't that clever. The simplistic level of the financial analyses and the lack of thought that goes into the inputs to analyses was eye-opening.

Massive workplace politics, you have to scream loud for visibility, seriously you need to scream for anything you have done, you are doing, or you haven't done but would like to do - as long as it makes you sound good. Some decent, but not loud enough people got laid off first. The performance evaluation is rather subjective, unlike what they told you, it's not linked to your compensation in most cases - people who scored high in their review could still get very little based on how much you're 'favoured' by the management. Career development completely depends on your boss, and your boss' boss: if you have a supportive manager in career development and guides you about promotion do's and don'ts, it's great. Otherwise you have to fight for yourself. Worst of all, some managers would actually prefer keeping you working on the same stuff for years and stop you from moving to other teams. You don't get to work with smart people all the time, there are a fair amount of incompetent people in the back office divisions.