The biggest GS problem is that there is no meritocracy. Having worked in IB for more than 15years, I’ve seen tremendous injustices in terms of promotions, pay, and culture. Goldman is now difference.
HR tends to recruit mix of brilliant people, which we can divided into 2 categories:
- superbly educated and mediocre ones too (mostly with bought MBAs, not even target, expensive ones, as we are seeing many random, non-name candidates).Being superb, CFA , Phd technical is a deep liability because you’re expected to stay quiet and just churn out work.
- Administrators, sliders based on bosses liking than skills. Conversely, the people who are incapable of producing quality work are assigned “softer jobs” such as going to meetings, presenting to higher ups, and eventually managing others. Sooner or later all the “smart” people end up reporting to people who don’t understand the business but are good at sucking up to their boss. Those mainly have MBAs, so they aren't experts at all from anything...if you think 1 yrs programme will make you a leader in banking you are irrational, especially without ground knowledge which only qualifications and even masters provides.
I don’t have an axe to grind, and actually think this culture has helped my career. In fact it is a great place to learn and grow if you have luck to deal with 1st category! Provided exit opportunities (if you are not too old - age bias) Hedge Funds etc in my case, Smart people but very cut through sometimes too. Nevertheless I can call myself a lucky person as managed to land my role pretty easily within the FO last year although:
- My background by any means wasn’t an obvious choice for FO as former generic Firmops so OP experience, never involved in pitching before, not like most colleagues coming firm Risk or Finance etc
- I’m unique as I didn’t have any expensive target Ivy(US)/Russel Group(UK) diploma – in fact I have graduated mediocre accounting major in one of Easter European Unis, not even the most competitive major to start with, so it isn’t true that only those break in, it is possible even in FO!
- I’m not qualified – neither FCA, FRM, ACCA etc, in fact Analyst I managed tend to be more technical as far my operation 15YeO goes.
- I did one of the budget friendliest (budget limits and language barrier) non-target London’s MBA – costed £16k ca. when most of my colleagues have LSE (costed £110-140£k eMBA) etc in comparison, due to problems with communication I was also forced to use help copywriters to achieve my final result.
- My communication skills although average as I have never studied English language as my 1st foreign language, nor my Eastern accent luckily hasn’t impacted my chances. Know sectors at FS are very biased on this in London as well as expat nationalities (policies one thing, reality another)
In other words not only geniuses get ED roles but also like my case process masters as I was lucky to work on process in competitive bank they wanted.
Only reason why HR so much lowered a threshold for me and fact I'm a women (as Goldman after lawsuit and paying $215m compensation tries so much to get more women into front office roles)

Posted on 24 May 2023 by Rater #1 | Flag as inappropriate

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