I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was a positive report, of a positive experience. I’ve encountered a couple of these, lately.<p>I’m so used to the relentless negativity (much of it, unfortunately, justified) that comes from posts that start with “My experience at …”.<p>I have always been very enthusiastic about tech, and have striven to be positive in my own discussions (which has sometimes been a challenge).<p>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.<p>I sincerely wish the OP luck.
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"!<p>Digging into a particular thread in your post:<p>> Later I came to realize that they have a culture of building things inhouse and it shows.<p>> [...]<p>> 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.<p>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".<p>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).<p>In other words, remain curious and be willing to question decisions as the context, culture, and challenge evolve!
> 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".<p>And that is a key to success which then enables numbers to come into play!<p>It works for every organisation.
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I’m glad the author had a positive experience and things have changed over the last 10 years.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[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.
Nice write up, I am glad that you had such a fulfilling internship and chose to share your experience with us.<p>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%?
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", <a href="https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html" rel="nofollow">https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html</a>
/ <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104047</a> . Which goes into quite a bit more detail (perhaps on similar/same things?) than an intern with an NDA would be comfortable sharing.<p>Pretty wild stuff.
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.
What a great post. I'm long past the age of interning, and I have no plans to work for GS.<p>However this was great to read.<p>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)<p>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.
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.
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!
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.<p>Always be shipping.
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.<p>Seems like you had a neat opportunity to tackle several different problems across the stack - nice work coming up with solutions to those!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Congrats on successfully completing the internship! Looks like you made a significant contribution.<p>This is a well written summary as well. Reading it brought back memories from my internship at GS 3 years ago. :)<p>I also wrote a blog post about my experience going from an intern to FTE if you’re interested in checking it out: <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/news/sheikh-araf.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/...</a><p>Good luck!
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?
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.
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?
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?
> 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.<p>They had you over a barrel mate.
I'm sure the people you worked with were earnest and intelligent.<p>But you worked for the fucking devil, and karma will take its piece. Please care a little more about who you help.
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”<p>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.