Pros
The health insurance benefits at Goldman Sachs are excellent. The pay is slightly above average for comparable positions in the area. The global nature of the environment is interesting.
Cons
Goldman Sachs is extremely political. I was constantly asked to focus on how people perceive the team and department, rather than focusing on the actual problems. Many of the wrong technology decisions are made because of political reasons. The company spends nearly 50% of it's developer time on maintenance because they fail to make any good strategic decisions. Everything is a tactical hack which just compounds the problems. Developers are expected to be testers, business analysts, and developers. Couple this with the fact that about 50% of time is spent on maintenance, expect to spend less than 20% of your time developing. The New Yorkers think they know everything, and express their opinions adamantly as if they did. The problem is, most people are often wrong. It's as if nobody really cares about the correct answer, but just being right themselves. The managers try to give excessive feedback, but they don't think it through. In fact, the feedback is very often conflicting and it give the impression of extreme micro-managing. Everybody is working crazy hours, but nobody is going anywhere in their career. People work 70 hours a week for 5 years to get a VP promotion, which is meaningless because so many people have the promotion already. The employees are disingenuous. Everybody brainwashes themselves into thinking the place is great. The "culture" is touted as being second to none. Oddly though, as I announced I was leaving people came out of the woodwork to tell me how badly they hate the company. I could keep going on, but I'll just say, the company is unable to hire and retain talent in the office I was at, and there is good reason why.