Comment by necrotic_comp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by necrotic_comp | Hacker News Reader

I worked as a dev at GS - it's a much smaller bank than its competitors (40k vs 204k at Citi, for example) but completes the same amount of work.

This means that every employee is expected to do the job of multiple people, and is expected to manage their time appropriately to be able to handle this. For me, I joked about working two shifts, and starting 'second shift' after the trading day ended and I handed off monitoring to Asia. I'd grab dinner and then start working on my coding assignments.

At the end of my tenure, it wasn't uncommon for me to work 15 hours a day and be on call 24/7.

Now, this isn't healthy by a long shot, but it is what's expected. You get used to it and you allocate your time to make sure you don't go crazy.

When I hear about these kids going through the ringer and working these 100 hour weeks, I'm almost incredulous because: a) this is the amount you're going to be expected to work in the future, but you need to figure out how to manage it and b) you've heard the stories, what did you think was going to happen ?

I have sympathy because it's hard, and I've been there, but that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's awesome. It's pretty inspiring to figure out what you're capable of under dire circumstances, you develop great skills quickly, and after GS everything else has the volume turned down.

Also, you can tap out and there's no shame in that.

Do you still consider it a good salary once you factor in all the extra hours and "health concerns" [1]?

[1]: I imagine super high caffeine/stimulant consumption, sustained lack of sleep, high blood pressure, inconsistent diet, less time to go to the gym, lack of social opportunities outside of work, etc.

it's a much smaller bank than its competitors (40k vs 204k at Citi, for example)

Not a like-for-like comparison as Citi and JPMC have huge retail operations. The size of their investment banking divisions isn’t as wildly disparate as you think

> that's the culture of the firm and if you can handle it, it's awesome

It's also a clear signal to everyone later in your career that you can handle that sort of throughput and not fuzz out.

I highly doubt that. Those people are unmarried (probably not even dating), have very few friends outside of work, and definitely not any kids. That’s literally the only time in their life they can work like that without “fuzzing out”

Later in life priorities change for good reasons.

Priorities change, but you can influence those by paying more.

The ability to work 70+ hours week after week after week and keeping the quality reasonably high, that doesn't change as much. It's also something you can't convince people to be able to by offering more money.

I don’t think people working like that in their 20s is a prediction of how they’ll work in their 40s.

We have some kind of superpower in our 20s. You can work like dogs all day and night and still be productive in the morning.

Biologically speaking it’s probably because those are prime child rearing years and that effort is needed to raise children. Instead Goldman Sachs gets those years. Hopefully it was worth it to all in the grind.

> it’s probably because those are prime child rearing years and that effort is needed to raise children. Instead Goldman Sachs gets those years.

Few people are responsibly having kids in their early twenties. Goldman got the time, but their alumni got the cash and cachet.

Not defending the practices in the complaint. 90+ hours is excessive. I turned down that lifestyle and think I’ve done decently well for myself. But being dismissive about the power, wealth and material comforts that work opens one up to is ignoring a strong signalling mechanism in our society.

Few people are responsibly having kids in their early twenties

In most of human history your kids would old enough to help you on the farm by the time you reached your early 20’s!

I've always found that working significantly more than average is a mental thing more than a physical thing. It can become a bit of a habit, not easy to get into, but once you're in the rhythm, "it just works".

The signal is probably not so much the raw energy level, but the discipline to focus that energy on a task. If you choose to work that hard at 20 instead of spending half your day hanging out with friends, that might be a good signal for how hard you'll work when you're 40. It is in my personal experience, but that doesn't say much.

> Later in life priorities change for good reasons

Everyone gets that. They left for a reason. But someone who can stay afloat at 70+ hours a week will tend to, at the very least, not fuck up with 40 or fifty. And having someone who will reliably not fuck up is worth paying up for in most roles.

What do devs even do at GS?

I mean banks are not an example of technological innovators; if all you’re doing is some HTML changes like a squirrel running in a wheel 80 hours a day you will not be able to handle 40 hours a day in a messy startup environment where devs need to constantly reconcile business logic with changing environment.

Banks don’t require “smart” work; even less so for low-level analysts.

Constantly reconciling business logic with changing environment is exactly what devs do at GS. GS powers the likes of Apple Card, Stripe Treasury, etc. There’s a lot of engineering required to handle the scale.

There are very few companies that are “technological innovators”. Most SV devs aren’t writing a new distributed system or a process scheduler for the Linux kernel.

It's definitely used as a signal in finance. There is a prestige of working at certain shops that carry over in your career. Similar to how it doesn't matter what you studied at Harvard, just that you studied at Harvard. I'm not saying it's right, just that it exists lol.

Business schools also acknowledge this when deciding who to accept/reject.

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