Throwaway account because I currently work at GS and I too have the NDAs.
Great post! I've been at GS for ~8 years and I can say this is a pretty accurate description of what a GS internship is like nowadays. These 2 points ring out as the most true to me:
1. Lots of red tape. You need to get approvals for any and all access. You're 100% right, its all regulation stuff, but its still annoying as fuck. And since there are so many approvals being requested left and right, managers tend to get swarmed and not really care too much about 99% of requests so its just a matter of chasing to get things approved. To add an annoying cherry on top one of the main systems that you request access through is a bit of a legacy system, so propagation of approvals takes a few hours, which sometimes leaves you sitting on your hands and just waiting. Its not too bad though, and in the last few years a lot of effort has been put into reducing these waiting times.
2. Inhouse building. GS suffered from this a lot, as did all the big banks in the past. All of our legacy is inhouse and it slows us down today. The good news (which you also alluded too) is that for the last ~5 of so years there have been monumental shifts in pushing us towards open-source ways (shameless plug, we even have open source roles we are hiring for: https://bit.ly/3GkJGCM ), so modern development in GS is getting much better.
My only question here which you didn't address in the blog post is: if GS offered you a permanent role, would you take it?
I'm not sure. I got a return offer to intern again for summer 2022. But I ended up taking an internship at Amazon instead. Mostly because I want to try new things and see what it's like to develop at a big company without all the red tape and just in a new environment.
But I can't say that it's completely out of the realm of possibility for me to come back. I think it would largely depend on the team. If I did come back, it'd be cool to work with one of the Cloud teams.
Great Post. Sort of very courageous too to submit it on HN. I was expecting many comments on moral principle and the usual evil company etc. It is very rare you see people offering the other side, unpopular and contrarian stories.
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.
It's less "anti Javascript" and more against "it's a great idea to base the entire web around loading completely unverifiable and uncontrolled executable code from anywhere in the universe."
Javascript is a reasonably nice language for what it does, and if it was all still mostly inline or browser managed packages or whatever the modern ecosystem would likely be significantly less of a user-hostile dumpster fire.
Like millions of others, this site looks great in a text-only browser that has no Javascript support.^1 If automatically running other peoples' Javascript or some other "feature" of a popular browser^2 is preventing someone from viewing the text, and the only way to avoid this annoyance is to disable the feature, then the problem is not necessary the feature, but how the feature is being used. People who disable or avoid the feature are not necessary anti-[feature]. They are trying to avoid the effects of how that feature is being used by web developers.
Rendering the primary text content and being able to collapse comments are not on the same level of functionality.
(Though for this particular website, I can see the text just fine with JS disabled in firefox, so I'm not sure why it doesn't work for CaliforniaKarl.)
