Just a bad interview process overall. Goldman Sachs loves to say "We want to be a tech company and attract top tech talent!". But coming from a top tech company, they are very far from that. Here are the list of red flags to get you to stay away if you're coming from Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Facebook, etc., like I was. This remains the only onsite that I've ever had that elicited enough of a negative reaction for me to end it early (professionally, but promptly). Red Flags: 1. 3 phone screens and an early day of on-sites. Most phone screens I've had is 2 before, and usually one suffices. One of the phone screens was just rapid fire CS trivia about merge sort and java GC, stuff that's not relevant to day to day problem solving and definitely stuff that Google doesn't ask. The onsite started at 10AM and lasted until 3 (wouldn't lasted till 4pm if I didn't walk out), and the jet lag from the West Coast was killer. 2. Every interview was like good cop bad cop. There was always one nice/neutral guy and one Type-A jerk who would interrupt the flow of the conversation. Just constant interrupting, no smiling, occasionally deriding my answers, getting visibly upset if I asked them to repeat some part of the question. Telling me that my method was wrong, then 5 minutes later giving me that same method as a hint. One of the good cop interviewers was trying to keep things casual and we got into a discussion on developing fullstack vs backend, very fine for a lot of interviews if you cap it at like 1-2 minutes, and bad cop comes in and snappily interrupts and says we gotta move on and the good cop withdrew into himself, with body language that says he's been scolded before and he needs to do better next time for master. Didn't say anything for the rest of the interview. I also remember one of the interviewers came in five minutes late and the other interviewer was acting like it was the end of the world and was visibly distressed. This happened at Bloomberg and no one cared, so you can't just blame it on East Coast culture. 3. They put you in an interview room where you can see one of the open-office layouts that's similar to the one you'd work in. It looked like some evil CEO somewhere said "Hey, how can we dehumanize our engineers as much as possible while getting the most work out of them? Let's pack them into rows and rows of desks like corporate sardines, give them cheap hardware, and minimize the interactions between them." I get it, NYC real estate is expensive, open-office is the new thing, those ultra-wide monitors Amazon has are expensive. But seeing rows and rows of people, some who I didn't see get up the entire time I was interviewing, was off-putting and you can tell Goldman Sachs is still very much entrenched in the old-school office style. 4. Weird lunch experience. It's lunch time. Someone walks in with a lunch voucher, hands it to me, and walks out with saying two sentences like I was a leper. Once again, no emotion on her face at all. At this point I should really leave as my gut instinct is telling me to leave, but I don't want to make a rash decision so I sit in solitude eating that PB&J in solitude (which was the best thing on the menu). 5. System design retros - I don't mind system design questions. They can be fun. But my problem is when I get these so called system designs retros where they ask me about a system I built and what I could have done better and they' re just grilling me and grilling me to make it better and "Why didn't you just do this?? Why didn't you do that???" They were probably just curious and were looking for input, but add the thick stoic accents and no smiling or general proof that they're not lizard people, and it was very clear I don't want to call these people coworkers. My red flag alerts were going off up to this point but this was the last straw. 6. It's 2018 and instead of a Concur account they have me emailing around Excel files with my bank account number; actually now that I think of it I think it took almost 3 months to get reimbursed. Not a good look for a wannabe tech company (good look for an investment bank maybe, finance people just love their Excel spreadsheets, right?) 7. Misc Red Flags - Receptionists were snappy. Hiring manager on the phone screen kept interrupting me. Thick accents from all over the world: good for diversity's sake, bad for noise-free communication in interviews. One of the interviews involved more rapid fire CS trivia, as if the phone screen wasn't enough, especially since there was a lot of overlap. Everyone dodged my work-life balance questions with "Oh it just matters that you get the work done." Any company that averages 40 hours of week just says that.