The Stray World

A com­ment on Slash­dot which pos­sibly viol­ates sev­eral non-disclosure agree­ments has come to light, show-casing the won­der­ful com­pil­a­tions of pro­tein lib­rar­ies run­ning Gold­man Sachs.

Per­sonal Exper­i­ence Work­ing at Gold­man Sachs

I worked for this com­pany as a con­tractor try­ing to do Win­dows Server admin­is­tra­tion but I was so dis­gus­ted by the work ethic, envir­on­ment, co-workers, cor­por­ate ideo­logy, and man­agers that I flat out gave up on this con­tract and walked off after 3-months of work­ing there to go to another fin­ance firm only to be refreshed with a sane and enjoy­able work­ing envir­on­ment that paid even more money.

There is some­thing ser­i­ously wrong at Gold­man Sachs and many of the people who work there are either com­plete asses or are slowly hav­ing their per­son­al­it­ies changed to become asses before they gradu­ate to pricks, assholes, and fur­ther on.

Hon­est Hope for Assholes

If you’re an asshole and have fin­ance, com­puter, math, or engin­eer­ing skills but are hav­ing a hard time find­ing or keep­ing a job because of your asshole per­son­al­ity, then you should def­in­itely go and work for Gold­man Sachs because you’ll be right at home.

Inter­view Process

The inter­view pro­cess was long since it required 7-separate one-on-one indi­vidual inter­views which included hour long tech­nical quizz­ing by all these people. I should have real­ized that some­thing is wrong when I learned that the last per­son on the inter­view list was a tech­nical dir­ector who had no know­ledge or back­ground of tech­no­logy what so ever and who was only appoin­ted to the pos­i­tion 6-months ago. (Ding!)

The HR hir­ing pro­cess was unusu­ally long with a thick book of paper­work to sign includ­ing a lot more legal doc­u­ments than any other fin­an­cial firms. I retained a copy of all the doc­u­ments and I’m amazed at the lay­ers and lay­ers of legalese in these doc­u­ments. Of course it took the depart­ment a month and a half to actu­ally com­plete the whole pro­cess, which is insanely long when it comes to con­tract­ors in NYC, and I was about to take another job because of the long wait. (Ding!)

Turn Over Rate High

The depart­ment that I joined had only 8-people, 2 of them were there for a few years, 1 for half a year, and the other 5 joined within the last few months. They obvi­ously had prob­lems retain­ing employ­ees since only two guys were employ­ees and the rest were con­tract­ors. The two guys who were there for a while were com­pletely unhelp­ful, unin­ter­ested, unmo­tiv­ated and gen­er­ally behaved as pricks to the rest of the new guys. (Ding!)

Man­age­ment

The man­ager was an Indian guy who’s only man­age­ment motto was “just get it done” without telling you any­thing use­ful or try­ing to con­nect you with the people from other depart­ments who you needed to get things done or even tell you who they are (cor­por­ate address book was too much for him). (Ding!)

Help Desk, Desktop Sup­port for Server Administrators

I didn’t get to start right away in my role doing Win­dows Server admin­is­tra­tion but instead had to go through a use­less ini­ti­ation pro­cess of work­ing 1-week in the desktop sup­port depart­ment lit­er­ally cart­ing mon­it­ors and PCs to people’s desk to set up new users and then per­form desktop applic­a­tion install­a­tions and troubleshoot­ing people’s dirty mouse ball prob­lems. (Ding!)

When I finally fin­ished the week and was shown my cubicle in the server admin depart­ment I was happy to start real work, only to be told that in Gold­man Sachs the server admin­is­trat­ors duties included dir­ectly sup­port­ing the users and desktop com­puters as a first-line of help desk for the 300-servers that I was per­son­ally sup­port­ing for all issues, alerts, upgrades, and hard­ware replace­ments. I also sup­por­ted the developer depart­ment because of some of these serv­ers were devel­op­ment boxes and this included devel­op­ment applic­a­tion install­a­tions and repairs on these desktop, includ­ing Microsoft Visual Stu­dio troubleshoot­ing. The users of those desktops and serv­ers would call me the admin sup­port­ing them and I would have to con­tact the other depart­ments on behalf of the users if I couldn’t resolve the issues on their desktops. This is an unheard off work assign­ment where the server admin also does dir­ect desktop and help desk admin duties. I spent as much time dia­gnos­ing 32-bit wide uni­code to nar­row ascii func­tion call errors in badly coded intern­ally developed Out­look Forms caus­ing crashes of the mail cli­ent as I did doing server work. (Ding!)

Enter­prise Wide Pro­ject Assignments

Just after a few days I was invited to a meet­ing and sat in a room in front of people and man­ager from other depart­ments and was looked at in the face and asked “When is the new dis­aster recov­ery pro­ject going to be com­pleted?”. Blind sighted was not the word that could describe this meet­ing, more like a get­ting a homerun hit at the back of your skull with a base­ball bat. I asked “What’s this pro­ject exactly and what’s the status?” only to be told “You tell us!”. (Ding!) Only to find out that I was also charged with get­ting all the serv­ers that had local stor­age to be con­ver­ted to SAN stor­age then get­ting that SAN stor­age migrated to EMC Sym­met­rix frames then using SRDF to mir­ror the serv­ers between their data­cen­ter down­town and either New Jer­sey or either Brook­lyn Metro­tech cen­ter. I was put in charge of the entire pro­ject for the depart­ment and hun­dreds of serv­ers just because I worked with EMC and SRDF at a pre­vi­ous fin­an­cial firm and was com­fort­able doing long dis­tance syncs and fail­overs for dis­aster pro­jects. This was on top of my other smal­ler pro­jects, desktop sup­port, and help desk duties.

Work­ing Hours

I had so much work to do that I ended up doing 9, then, 10, 11, 12 hour days just try­ing to get through all the user requests, server alerts and issues, and try to make some head­way on the pro­jects. More pro­jects were assigned every week from a stack of old unfin­ished and untouched pro­jects from the other people in the depart­ments that my plate was over­flow­ing. That’s when I asked my man­ager to inter­vene and pri­or­it­ize my work only to be told to do my own pri­or­it­ies and man­age my own time. It seemed that he didn’t care about sign­ing 60–70 hour work­week timesheets since there was no over­time on this con­tract and it was all flat per-hour rate. (Ding!) That’s the last time I made that con­ces­sion on a con­tract prom­ised to be 35–40 hours a week only.

Another admin just star­ted in this depart­ment and they were com­mut­ing 2.5-hours of driv­ing every day and also doing 10–11-hour shift like myself. I could not under­stand how that was pos­sible and if that per­son would last. They didn’t last even 2-months before dis­ap­pear­ing without a word. Just van­ished, gone…

Prom­ise of Con­ver­sion and Bonuses for Employees

The man­ager would often men­tion about a pos­sib­il­ity of con­ver­sion from con­tract to employee after a few months if the con­tract­ors proved them­selves and he would dangle the promisse of large bon­suses, as much as 50% of the salary for employ­ees after the first year. This seemed like a dangling car­rot for some of the folks. This seemed like a horse and pony show to me because the prom­ises were made with a little sneer and didn’t seem at all genu­ine after look­ing at the short time most of the con­tract­ors were there.

Escape At Last

After three months of this I’ve had enough and nailed a bet­ter pay­ing con­tract at a com­pet­ing fin­an­cial com­pany only to be wel­comed into the depart­ment and put on a single import­ant pro­ject to build out SAN con­nec­ted stor­age, print, and backup clusters for every major cor­por­ate loc­a­tion in the US. I headed that pro­ject, wrote up the tech­nical instruc­tions and doc­u­ment­a­tion for the already planned out server lay­out, and then per­son­ally built all the clusters with two other co-workers. I learned how to pro­gram Bro­cade switches, talk to IBM auto­loader tape lib­rar­ies using SCSI com­mands over SAN fibre con­nec­tions, and built out fully auto­mated and func­tion­ing stor­age clusters.

It was awe­some com­pared to the shit work at Gold­man Sachs.