<p>To people who were offered positions or even interviews last year:
What do you feel set you apart? Was it merely a GPA/target school thing, or was there something really special that you feel got you the interview? Also, when offered the interview/position, were you a freshman or sophomore?</p>
<p>^^ Sorry, posted on wrong thread. Ignore please.</p>
<p>It’s pretty tough to move internally from a tech internship to a front office full time position at the same bank (read: essentially impossible, if not actually impossible). almost surely will require switching at that point banks. </p>
<p>Once you are full time in IT, you could potentially make the switch, but it also takes quite a bit of work. I did technology my sophomore summer at a bank. it was a lame experience, no one in IT at a bank is happy where they are, so 50% of the people just look sad all the time and 50% are scheming to move to another part of the bank (trading or banking) or to a software company. Only a few of them will be successful in transfering though.</p>
<p>I’d be skeptical of whether you’d make more money in GS IT vs a top software firm. Salaries are certainly higher at software places (I’m in stanford CS, so I have lots of data points to compare against the analyst salary one would get at GS). I don’t know much about what bonuses look like for IT guys at places like GS, but I imagine they aren’t very high. This is all completely separate from the GS Strategists, which are essentially the quant guys that work on trading desks and such. They spend a lot of time coding and all, but they are front office and surely make a great deal more money. I think the Strats are what people here are referring to as “front office IT”. GS IT -> Strats i imagine is also quite the difficult move, but certainly much more feasible than GS IT -> GS banking.</p>
<p>BigMike - do you mind telling us what area of IT you were in? How much do people get paid at software companies? More than 3-400? Strategist are not front office IT. Strategist use use a lot of non-compiling programming language to help them do their calculations. They are the end users of their own program(s), whereas IT create programs for other people to use. Front office IT support/create applications for S&T, bankers, structurers. Any mistake they make could translate into $$$ lost for the firm. Most of those systems need to run 24 hrs with real time replication.</p>
<p>BigMike - you said you did technology at a bank your sophomore year, I am just surprised you don’t know what front office IT is.</p>
<p>According to investopedia</p>
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<p>BigMike, could you tell us a little about what kind of things you did in your IT internship at the bank? For example, were you working on projects in software development? Were there a lot of coding? It seems that IT in banking is very intense, and that gives me a image of people coding constantly to make very complicated applications (which is not what I want to do because I am not a coder.) Are there other projects available in application development or are most positions in application development programmer positions?</p>
<p>@oldfort I think we just have a difference in perspective. there is no such thing as front office IT at a bank. I was on a volatility analytics team that supported a couple teams of traders and some quants as well. We were definitely back office, very back office. Maybe we weren’t the one’s updating the company’s website and fixing computers, but definitely still back office. You can think of them as front office if you want, but you won’t be treated (or paid) like it. I guarantee that the traders you work for will absolutely not think of you as front office.</p>
<p>Also, I had an offer from GS strats, and am super well aware of what they do. although, there is a lot of variation from team to team. Most of the one’s I met coded in straight c++ as well as goldmans proprietary language</p>
<p>As for salaries, most of my friends that are going to top software firms are making between 15-25K more a year in salary than starting analysts at banks.</p>
<p>If you are not a programmer you should not go into IT. The IT behind banking (and probably wealth management as well) is not very complicated. Afterall, all bankers do at the end of the day is use excel and make powerpoint presentations. Most bank do make addons and such to excel/powerpoint to make putting together presentations and models easier, but thats not really interesting from a technology standpoint. Supporting trading can be different, since there are definitely electronic trading systems that are as much (if not more) about the technology used to build them than the underlying trading ideas themselves (especially true in high frequency). These technical problems can get a lot more difficult though, and are about optimizing network connections, optimizing code (some places rewrite everything into assembly by hand for max speed), hacking into kernals/doing really intense stuff to get really small increases in speed. This is obviously only for hardcore techies.</p>
<p>Basically everyone I met in IT was a coder. there were a few product manager types, but they had a coding background as well. For my summer I spent time designing and coding a couple user interfaces for new apps (java) and some scripts to interact with the file system to organize very large amounts of market data (perl).</p>
<p>I manage few front office IT groups at a Ibank. We (IT) support front office, we are NOT the front office. First year salary at those technology firms maybe higher, but what’s their growth? A technologist at a bank may have a lower base salary, but they get a bonus, and senior programmers/managers do get multiple of their base for bonus. Most banks do long term development off shore (India or China). People on shore are project managers, BA, and front office application support. On shore developers are their top guns, people they feel they need to have around to be able to turn things around very quickly. Those top programmers usually support high revenue generating front office business. IB uses very little IT support (they are quite happy with their Excel and VB), it’s S&T that hire high calibre programmers. Some trading desks even have their own programmers working for them directly.</p>
<p>OP,
If your interest/goal is to be in finance/banking, go to GS Tech. If your interest/goal is to be in tech, go to tech company.</p>
<p>BigMike3541 is located at Stanford, in the middle of Silicon Valley where pay from tech company large/small are high. Also, the big return is really from stock options.</p>
<p>oldfort-I feel your pain. I thought about wading into this forum a few times before and unfortunately it seems to be akin to putting your hand in blender with the many “experts” in this particular area of cc with a little bit of knowledge and a heavy dose of rumour and wiki…</p>
<p>btw bigmike et al it seems oldfort knows exactly what she’s talking about. and yeah if you are wondering yeah i drive one.</p>
<p>I actually recently interviewed with the Technology Division at GS and I can tell you in simple terms, if you do not enjoy or want to become a programmer then an IT position at an investment company is not the best for you.</p>