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It's interesting how the tone of this article is almost exactly the same as the one about the Microsoft employee that recently quit Google. Something happens t

• mmj48 15y ago
  I genuinely thought this piece was a satire of the ex-Google MSFTer.
• chime 15y ago
  > Something happens to companies as they get larger... I think promotion happens. When you're a fresh grad right out-of-college and the Managing Director says "client is our #1 priority", you take it to heart. That's your new mantra now. Nine years later, when the same Director, now promoted to the Board says the same line, you groan inside because you know exactly how often he calls his clients muppets. Slowly you begin to feel that the company is no longer the same wonderful, inspirational place of work that you signed up for. Positions of power at any company, non-profit, government, or political organizations are not filled with do-gooders who want to give everyone a hug. They are filled with thick-skinned, ambitious, practical people who have learnt to say the right things at the right time. So if you're a junior exec., you will hear inspirational BS. As you join their ranks, you will hear their real thoughts. If the latter disgust you, it clearly means you aren't fit to join their ranks, not because of any lack of skills on your part but rather the difference in how you view the world. To me all these execs leaving companies and saying "it's so different now" just means they all grew up and realized they didn't like what they signed up for. It's no different than couples splitting because "we grew apart." I highly recommend people quitting if things aren't working out ( http://chir.ag/200804242130 http://chir.ag/200804242130 ) but I do not recommend airing out the dirty laundry, especially when no laws were broken because you're just scaring off the next company you intend to work for. None of my above comments were in reference to anything at GS/Google/MS specifically. Facebook will start charging for integration some day too and some Dropbox exec will joke in company meetings about all the stupid people who save personal photos on their servers. People are people and companies are companies.
  • anabis 15y ago
    Yeah, Goldman Sachs made a predatory loan to Greece in 2002. That is just 2 years after this guy got hired.
    • refurb 15y ago
      Got any details? Predatory loan usually refers to taking advantage of someone who doesn't know what they are getting themselves into. Are you saying that Greece lacks the financial knowledge to understand what they are signing?
      • UrbanPat 15y ago
        Details abound: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-06/goldman-secret-greece-loan-shows-two-sinners-as-client-unravels.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-06/goldman-secret-gree... Greece wasn't innocent in this, but it's pretty obvious that Goldman took advantage of them.
  • larrys 15y ago
    "When you're a fresh grad right out-of-college" It's called being wet behind the ears. Most people in that situation simply don't realize how much they don't know. And guess what you aren't going to be able to read about it and know either. You will find it out through life experience. The upside is you aren't jaded and you will try things that older people will avoid because of their wisdom and experience.
  • jflatow 15y ago
    It might be that things never change and all attempts to bring back the good ol' culture are just reactionary, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't speak up when they feel disgusted by what's going on around them. Fear(s) motivate(s) people pretty well to do just about anything, including to keep silent (as you recommend), but I'm glad that people are brave enough, or stupid enough, to say what they think is right, even in the face of such fears. It might also turn out that the people who agree with the dissenters outnumber the powerful incumbents who they oppose.
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• danssig 15y ago
  That Forbes article is a great one. Personally I think now that the cat is out of the bag, we should start to see things changing at the executive level (though it's going to take years). For a long time, many of us have speculated that CEOs were overpaid but suggesting this was met with claims of being "anti-capitalist" and other such nonsense. Now thanks to the Forbes article and the book it's talking about, we can demonstrate that CEOs are * clearly* overpaid. Their own pay has gone up, while company performance per salary dollar has gone down. Meanwhile the rest of us produce vastly more than, say, 20 years ago, yet wages remain mostly flat.
  • yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Could you define what you mean by "overpaid"? Is it merely a complaint that CEOs are paid more than you wish they were, or something else? Meanwhile the rest of us produce vastly more than, say, 20 years ago, yet wages remain mostly flat. This claim betrays a misunderstanding of how productivity is measured, and how workers are compensated for their productivity (i.e., comp is wages + benefits, not wages). Wages + benefits is not flat. http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=1140 http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_displa... And productivity can easily go up due to factors unrelated to workers. E.g., if a company replaces workers with robots, the measured productivity (total production / # of employees) of the remainder will go up. Is this a reason to increase their pay?
    • overpaid 15y ago
      There are many people who believe that CEO compensation has skyrocketed not because CEO value has skyrocketed, but because of a lack of downward pressure on their compensation packages. CEO compensation has to get approved by a board made up of other executives. As such, these board members have every incentive to lean towards granting generous raises, and virtually no incentive towards toeing a hard line. This problem is exacerbated by the universal belief that every CEO is above average. As such, every CEO can say "we all agree I'm in the top quartile of CEOs, right?", and everyone will agree, and then he'll get a pay package that's top 10-25%. And then, because CEO tenures are shrinking, this cycle will repeat, often, in a cycle that has absolutely nothing to do with the value created for shareholders, and absolutely everything to do with executive compensation schemes having gone off the rails.
• JanezStupar 15y ago
  I would strongly advise reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy on the subject of emergent culture in sovereign institutions. These companies are small empires in their own right, creating a lasting and prosperous empire is an monumental undertaking where chasing fads has little effect. In business circles I find Bosch and IBM to be prime examples of quality in this regard.
• crag 15y ago
  "Something happens to companies as they get larger, where the culture of a company starts dying from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts, ..." Goldman (or Google) is no where near death. But Goldman is still in crisis mode. The primary focus now is profit margin. making money for you and your clients isn't the point any longer. It's your position that matters. But Goldman, used to award your bonus not just based on your position. They used to survey your clients. And their opinion mattered. Not sure if they still do this. I haven't worked in Wall Street since 1996. And Goldman isn't the only firm in this position, by the way. And Google is sort of in the same place. FB scares the hell out of them. And instead of innovating (and taking risks) they copy. Google and Goldman are blinded now. They can't see beyond their own models.
• silverlake 15y ago
  > Something happens to companies as they get larger They went public. My gf is a senior manager at GS (200+ drones in her department). When the company went public the partners could easily cash out. Without as much skin in the game, they could squeeze as much profit (aka bonus) from GS without worrying about the long-term viability. Also, hedge funds are now a more lucrative place to work for many people. So if GS doesn't pay, then a hedge fund will. Another thing is that prop trading made vastly more money than IBanking for the last decade, which changed who got promoted and rewarded. Finally, the company grew very rapidly in the last 10 years and much of it's culture got diluted with all the new people. It's not a bad place, it's just a normal IBank now.
  • mattwrench 15y ago
    I agree that going public hurts companies but not because the partners/founders can cash out. At least in the tech world once a company reaches a certain size, it seems as though founders can liquidate a large portion of their stock pre-IPO; Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to worry about Facebook's IPO in order to get rich. Rather, I feel that having a somewhat-arbitrary, short-term indicator in the form of stock price is what hurts public companies and their culture much more than the loss of its leaders.
    • bpyne 15y ago
      What you say is IMO correct. But, I think there is something more fundamental. A company cannot function to full potential when beholden to 2 masters - customer and investor - with opposing needs. The customer wants the best product/service possible; the investor wants the maximum ROI.
• jonnathanson 15y ago
  I think your last paragraph aptly explains it all. A fish rots from the head down. If we take a broad and intangible concept like "culture" and reduce it to its mechanical workings, we see that it's usually the net result of everyone's incentives. If people at the top are setting perverse incentives, then their lieutenants will meet those incentives, and on down to their lieutenants, and so forth. Those at the bottom of the ladder will model the behaviors of those they're seeing get ahead. And one day, when they're moving up, they'll carry out the behaviors they've been conditioned to exhibit. The other tricky thing about culture is that it's a lot like trust: very hard to earn, very easy to squander. Once lost, it's difficult -- sometimes impossible -- to recover.
• cromwellian 15y ago
  It's a little hyperbolic to compare Goldman Sachs culture to Google culture. Little has changed as far as I can tell about Google culture internally. People still care about the same things, management for the most part, still cares about the same things, and all of these public assertions that G+ is an all consuming diversion to the detriment of everything else is a gross hyperbole. Googlers are not sitting around making fun of their users, joking about them, giving them funny nicknames. With these types of rants, it is hard to derive truth from fiction. Once a narrative is set up, everyone starts to keep feeding into it. It's easy to believe the worst about Goldman, so everything said "fits" and makes it believable. My own biases make it more likely to believe in stories of greedy people selling snake oil. Still, one should be skeptical and avoid piling on.
• larrys 15y ago
  "financially positive but culturally negative (some would say sociopathic) decisions, such as closing plants that were profitable, but weren't profitable enough." This is something that is inherent in a certain type of investor and Wall Street and you see it in YC as well as VC firms and (startup) angel investors. While you might be able to get a local businessman on Main st. to believe in your idea which is profitable (but not sexy and not "billion dollar") that will probably make both of you money, you won't get anyone in the de facto startup community to take you seriously. They won't give you money unless you are shooting for the stars.
• jrwoodruff 15y ago
  Goldman survived for 140 years without promotion problems. My personal theory is these problems - corporate profit before clients, short-term gains, lack of long-term vision - is a symptom of our current culture and, more broadly, the shifting information landscape. 100 years ago, few people even knew what the DOW index was, let alone followed it daily.
  • polyfractal 15y ago
    Funnily enough, the Dow was a relatively unimportant indicator until the Great Depression, when the media seized upon it as something to watch on a daily basis. It was originally intended not to be checked more than a few times a month, and only as a brief snapshot of the economy. It's importance in popular media and culture is vastly overblown. The rising and falling of the Dow on a daily basis is basically worthless from an economic point of view - it's just noise.
• 5teev 15y ago
  "It's interesting how the tone of this article is almost exactly the same as the one about the Microsoft employee that recently quit Google." An interesting difference, though, is the Goldman-Sachs employee sees a problem with focusing on short-term gains, while the Google employee sees a mistake in a long-term bet (that Google can compete successfully with Facebook in the social realm).