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My Experience as a SWE Intern at Goldman Sachs

243 points by Cybergenik 5y ago

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
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?
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  Yesss... but I don't know how much I can say, so I won't say anything about it besides that it was a very complicated and interesting situation.
  - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
    Oh come on, we’re all friends here! It will be our little secret.
    - anshumankmr 5y ago
      That would be inviting trouble for him.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  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.
unobatbayar 5y ago
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?
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  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.
  - unobatbayar 5y ago
    I see, it's probably just my monitor; Don't feel pressured to change anything. Anyway, great job on your internship!
Cybergenik 5y ago
Hi, this is my first post on HackerNews. Been a long time reader, this is my experience from this past summer 2021. Let me know what you guys think!
- CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
  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.
  - Cybergenik 5y ago
    I just tried it on Safari, and it seems to work for me. Maybe try and see if javascript is enabled.
    - bahador 5y ago
      Asking hners to enable JavaScript is dangerous. Many here are anti JavaScript.
      - Cybergenik 5y ago
        my bad, it's a Gatsby site. Need JS :/
        bahador 5y ago
        You did nothing wrong. No need to apologize.
        fake-name 5y ago
        Using a site generation framework that requires JS to render static text is doing something wrong.
        5y ago
siculars 5y ago
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. Always be shipping.
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure to always remember this
acemarke 5y ago
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!
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  Yeah it was a lot of fun to get to work on these problems!
ncmncm 5y ago
I guess the next step is a ransom gang, and then maybe Oracle.
- ackbar03 5y ago
  Sign me up
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Then FAANG
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Nah, that's too evil. It was explained to me by people who work there that Facebook desperately wants to be as evil as Microsoft or Google, but just can't come close yet.
tomc1985 5y ago
So what exactly does Goldman Sachs do techwise? What is all this software infra? Quant finance stuff? HFT?
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  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.
- RobRivera 5y ago
  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?
  - Cybergenik 5y ago
    LOL SecDB, I remember that...
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      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.
      - rjsw 5y ago
        You might like to watch Margin Call [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_Call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_Call
devadvance 5y ago
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!
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  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.
- Youden 5y ago
  > 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Center_for_Army_Lessons_Learned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Center_for_Army_Less... [1]: https://cove.army.gov.au/bio/army-knowledge-centre https://cove.army.gov.au/bio/army-knowledge-centre [2]: https://www.kmworld.com/About/What_is_Knowledge_Management https://www.kmworld.com/About/What_is_Knowledge_Management
wilbdhm 5y ago
> 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. They had you over a barrel mate.
- bidirectional 5y ago
  How so?
blakehawkins 5y ago
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?
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849488 I'll update the blog to clarify this
jacobgo 5y ago
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%?
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  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!
  - grey-area 5y ago
    Perhaps use a short random string or hash instead which is a reference to the saved state? This is preferable for a few reasons.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    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 ?
- exdsq 5y ago
  > 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%? Seems like it’s for readability on either end so maybe a dictionary is a solution for when it’s actually used
jackblemming 5y ago
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.
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  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.
  - markoman 5y ago
    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.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  I can't agree with this criticism at all. 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.
exdsq 5y ago
Front page on HN is a nice achievement too :)
joosters 5y ago
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  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).
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  I was compensated very well man! Don't worry, I wouldn't take a job like this if it wasn't well paid ;)
  - joosters 5y ago
    Sorry for my wrong assumption!
- Kiro 5y ago
  They are paid. Why is this comment the most upvoted? It's straight up misinformation. Shows that people just love to jump on the hate bandwagon whenever opportunity rises. HN is all about the pitchforks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- granzymes 5y ago
  Goldman pays their interns... In fact, I believe the pay is the same hourly rate as their entry-level jobs.
  - joosters 5y ago
    Apologies, the article mentions nothing about pay and internships just implied unpaid to me.
    - ztratar 5y ago
awill88 5y ago
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!
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  Always! :)
onion2k 5y ago
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.
arafsheikh 5y ago
Congrats on successfully completing the internship! Looks like you made a significant contribution. This is a well written summary as well. Reading it brought back memories from my internship at GS 3 years ago. :) I also wrote a blog post about my experience going from an intern to FTE if you’re interested in checking it out: https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/news/sheikh-araf.html https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/... Good luck!
Terry_Roll 5y ago
> 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! It works for every organisation.
- tchalla 5y ago
  It only works if such a behaviour is rewarded. In many settings, stepping up will men you doing the work while someone else gets the reward.
  - cj 5y ago
    How should employers reward such behavior? I’m guessing a “thank you, good job” isn’t what you mean by “gets the reward”.
    - tchalla 5y ago
      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.
    - KallDrexx 5y ago
      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.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      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."
Prcmaker 5y ago
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.
mandmandam 5y ago
I'm sure the people you worked with were earnest and intelligent. But you worked for the fucking devil, and karma will take its piece. Please care a little more about who you help.
- cema 5y ago
  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.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    GS being scum is not a subjective opinion. "I was just doing my job" is why the planet is so fucked, and it's better to realise that at the outset of your career than the end.
    - cema 5y ago
      Yes it is subjective, that's the point.
      - mandmandam 5y ago
        Bullshit. By any objective measure they are responsible for huge evil. I'm sure drooling morons, enablers, and the complicit will screech otherwise, but they're badly wrong.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
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 sincerely wish the OP luck.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > 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.
- FabHK 5y ago
  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.
dan-robertson 5y ago
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.
- bidirectional 5y ago
  > 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.
thenerdhead 5y ago
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.
- jelkand 5y ago
  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.
- jasonpeacock 5y ago
  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.
jrochkind1 5y ago
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://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047 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. Pretty wild stuff.
rossmohax 5y ago
GS has a reputation of being most tech advanced among big banks. This post explains why it is.
nfRfqX5n 5y ago
nice post, you might have accomplished more than some regular full timers
once-in-a-while 5y ago
nickdothutton 5y ago
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.
JohnBooty 5y ago
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.
RIDDLERTHIS 5y ago
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.
kats 5y ago
What happened to "Don't be evil"?

243 points by Cybergenik 5y ago

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?

Cybergenik 5y ago
Yesss... but I don't know how much I can say, so I won't say anything about it besides that it was a very complicated and interesting situation.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  Oh come on, we’re all friends here! It will be our little secret.
  - anshumankmr 5y ago
    That would be inviting trouble for him.
missedthecue 5y ago
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.

unobatbayar 5y ago

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?

Cybergenik 5y ago
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.
- unobatbayar 5y ago
  I see, it's probably just my monitor; Don't feel pressured to change anything. Anyway, great job on your internship!

Cybergenik 5y ago

Hi, this is my first post on HackerNews. Been a long time reader, this is my experience from this past summer 2021. Let me know what you guys think!

CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
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.
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  I just tried it on Safari, and it seems to work for me. Maybe try and see if javascript is enabled.
  - bahador 5y ago
    Asking hners to enable JavaScript is dangerous. Many here are anti JavaScript.
    - Cybergenik 5y ago
      my bad, it's a Gatsby site. Need JS :/
      - bahador 5y ago
        You did nothing wrong. No need to apologize.
        fake-name 5y ago
        Using a site generation framework that requires JS to render static text is doing something wrong.
        5y ago

siculars 5y ago

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. Always be shipping.

Cybergenik 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure to always remember this

acemarke 5y ago

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!

Cybergenik 5y ago
Yeah it was a lot of fun to get to work on these problems!

ncmncm 5y ago

I guess the next step is a ransom gang, and then maybe Oracle.

ackbar03 5y ago
Sign me up
quickthrower2 5y ago
Then FAANG
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Nah, that's too evil. It was explained to me by people who work there that Facebook desperately wants to be as evil as Microsoft or Google, but just can't come close yet.

tomc1985 5y ago

So what exactly does Goldman Sachs do techwise? What is all this software infra? Quant finance stuff? HFT?

Cybergenik 5y ago
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.
RobRivera 5y ago
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?
- Cybergenik 5y ago
  LOL SecDB, I remember that...
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    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.
    - rjsw 5y ago
      You might like to watch Margin Call [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_Call https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_Call

devadvance 5y ago

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!

Cybergenik 5y ago
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.
Youden 5y ago
> 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. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Center_for_Army_Lessons_Learned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Center_for_Army_Less... [1]: https://cove.army.gov.au/bio/army-knowledge-centre https://cove.army.gov.au/bio/army-knowledge-centre [2]: https://www.kmworld.com/About/What_is_Knowledge_Management https://www.kmworld.com/About/What_is_Knowledge_Management

wilbdhm 5y ago

> 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. They had you over a barrel mate.

bidirectional 5y ago
How so?

blakehawkins 5y ago

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?

Cybergenik 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849488 I'll update the blog to clarify this

jacobgo 5y ago

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%?

Cybergenik 5y ago
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!
- grey-area 5y ago
  Perhaps use a short random string or hash instead which is a reference to the saved state? This is preferable for a few reasons.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  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 ?
exdsq 5y ago
> 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%? Seems like it’s for readability on either end so maybe a dictionary is a solution for when it’s actually used

jackblemming 5y ago

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.

Cybergenik 5y ago
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.
- markoman 5y ago
  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.
JohnBooty 5y ago
I can't agree with this criticism at all. 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.

exdsq 5y ago

Front page on HN is a nice achievement too :)

joosters 5y ago

Mikeb85 5y ago
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).
Cybergenik 5y ago
I was compensated very well man! Don't worry, I wouldn't take a job like this if it wasn't well paid ;)
- joosters 5y ago
  Sorry for my wrong assumption!
Kiro 5y ago
They are paid. Why is this comment the most upvoted? It's straight up misinformation. Shows that people just love to jump on the hate bandwagon whenever opportunity rises. HN is all about the pitchforks.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
granzymes 5y ago
Goldman pays their interns... In fact, I believe the pay is the same hourly rate as their entry-level jobs.
- joosters 5y ago
  Apologies, the article mentions nothing about pay and internships just implied unpaid to me.
  - ztratar 5y ago

awill88 5y ago

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!

Cybergenik 5y ago
Always! :)

onion2k 5y ago

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.

arafsheikh 5y ago

Congrats on successfully completing the internship! Looks like you made a significant contribution. This is a well written summary as well. Reading it brought back memories from my internship at GS 3 years ago. :) I also wrote a blog post about my experience going from an intern to FTE if you’re interested in checking it out: https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/news/sheikh-araf.html https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/... Good luck!

Terry_Roll 5y ago

> 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! It works for every organisation.

tchalla 5y ago
It only works if such a behaviour is rewarded. In many settings, stepping up will men you doing the work while someone else gets the reward.
- cj 5y ago
  How should employers reward such behavior? I’m guessing a “thank you, good job” isn’t what you mean by “gets the reward”.
  - tchalla 5y ago
    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.
  - KallDrexx 5y ago
    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.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    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."

Prcmaker 5y ago

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.

mandmandam 5y ago

I'm sure the people you worked with were earnest and intelligent. But you worked for the fucking devil, and karma will take its piece. Please care a little more about who you help.

cema 5y ago
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.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  GS being scum is not a subjective opinion. "I was just doing my job" is why the planet is so fucked, and it's better to realise that at the outset of your career than the end.
  - cema 5y ago
    Yes it is subjective, that's the point.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      Bullshit. By any objective measure they are responsible for huge evil. I'm sure drooling morons, enablers, and the complicit will screech otherwise, but they're badly wrong.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

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 sincerely wish the OP luck.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 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.
FabHK 5y ago
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.

dan-robertson 5y ago

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.

bidirectional 5y ago
> 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.

thenerdhead 5y ago

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.

jelkand 5y ago
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.
jasonpeacock 5y ago
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.

jrochkind1 5y ago

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://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047 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. Pretty wild stuff.

rossmohax 5y ago

GS has a reputation of being most tech advanced among big banks. This post explains why it is.

nfRfqX5n 5y ago

nice post, you might have accomplished more than some regular full timers

once-in-a-while 5y ago

nickdothutton 5y ago

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.

JohnBooty 5y ago

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.

RIDDLERTHIS 5y ago

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.

kats 5y ago

What happened to "Don't be evil"?