Organizational Culture and Religious Behavior
You must read this first-person account of a former Goldman Sachs “quant” (that’s how analysts are called) with a degree in physics (meaning, he can do fancy maths). There is a lot to love.
The hierarchy:
“There were other characters in this drama. The sales guys were complete tools, with a total IQ, summing over all of them, still safely in the double digits. The traders were crafty and quick-witted, but technically unsophisticated and with the attention span of an ADHD kid hopped up on meth and Jolly Ranchers. And the quants (strategists in Goldman speak)? Mostly failed scientists (like me) who had sold out to the man and suddenly found themselves, after making it through two years of graduate quantum mechanics, with a bat-wielding gorilla peering over their shoulder (that would be the trader) asking them where their risk report was.”
The organizational rituals that would make Durkheim proud:
“To cite a particularly grotesque example, once a year, one of the partners would buy a pallet of White Castle burgers and first-year analysts and associates would have a burger-eating competition (with some nominal amount donated to charity). All trading on the Goldman Sachs trading floor would stop as every man on the floor would gather ’round to watch the plebes stuff themselves.
Trading turned from interest-rate swaps (minimal notional size: $50MM) to the over/under on the burger count for a particular analyst. Occasionally, one poor schmuck would puke, and the partner would rush to catch it with a plastic trash bin.”
The cult-like culture and behavior:
“Wall Street, like Scientology, has an all-inclusive and claustrophobic value system all its own. Particularly at Goldman Sachs, which prided itself as a breed apart from other firms, this provincialism went even further. Former employees who had left Goldman were rarely mentioned. The unanimous phrase for it was ‘no longer with the firm,’ said in the same tone used to describe the passing of a family member.
This tendency reached the height of comedy inside the strategies division, where some of the quants published academic papers on the more theoretical aspects of their work. If an author quit Goldman though, his name would be removed from the official version of the publication. It got to the point that some papers had no authors, and had apparently written themselves. So it goes. No longer with the firm.
(…)
Wall Street is even simpler than religion. Your entire worth as a human is defined by one number: the compensation number your boss tells you at the end of the year. See, pay on Wall Street works as follows: your base salary is actually quite modest, but your ‘bonus’ is where the real money is. That bonus is completely discretionary, and can vary anywhere from zero to a manifold multiple of your base salary.
So, come mid-December, everyone on the desk lines up outside the partner’s office, like the communion line at Christmas Mass, and awaits their little crumb off the big Wall Street table. An entire year’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears comes down to that one moment. And the entire New York economy marches to the beat of that bonus drum.
Without that number though, your privileged place in the New York hierarchy goes away. Gone is the house in the East Hamptons. Gone is the $2mm duplex on the Upper West Side. Gone is your kid’s $25K/year pre-school.
And that’s why Wall Street has that roach motel property: people check in, but rarely check out. By the time you’ve been through a couple of bonus cycles and seen that wad of cash hit your bank account in mid-January, you can’t imagine a life without it.”
Read the whole thing.
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