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 wor

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.