Pros
You get to work with great, sharp, execution-oriented people. In front-office technology roles, you learn the business and people skills, not just technical skills. I'm paid well and I appreciate the prestige and respect comes with working at Goldman. The people I work with are a joy to work with. They are humble, fun, very sociable, and very professional. Everyone is very well put together and affable. Honestly, I absolutely love working at Goldman, so don't let my below nitpicks make you think I don't. The only way for us to improve is for us to be transparent about—and focus on–our issues. So I'm going to focus on the nitpicks. If you can live with them, then JOIN! Because I'm pretty much covering every nit-picky grievance I have. (Really.) I think things are largely moving in the right direction, and that's what matters most, as it tells me that we are aware of our deficiencies, and we're actively working to improve them. No place is perfect, but Goldman is certainly among the very best places to work. I feel very happy, privileged, honored, and humbled to be a member of Goldman's "family."
Cons
There are lots of meetings and distractions to juggle as a technologist. There's always more to get done then there is time for. Sometimes projects aren't properly designed in order to meet the pressure of deadlines, and you end up building a Leaning Tower of Pisa. You usually have to perform support tasks (on that leaning tower) while simultaneously developing new features. After you've helped resolve issues, the same people come back and ask what the status is on the project delivery timeline… in a meeting you're spending time with them in, of course. Some in the business will ask why a bug existed and how we can stop them going forward, as though we knew about them to begin with and left them in. (Have they ever read the notes on any phone app update? Find one that didn't include bug fixes! Unfortunately, bugs happen. Please be understanding.) There's also a lot of proprietary in-house tech. Goldman often chooses to re-invent the wheel, instead of using an open source library, or contributing to them, for that matter. In the end, it's a losing play that doesn't scale; better solutions are inevitably created when you collaborate with the world, and you gain knowledge-sharing gravity when you do so. Documentation is often lacking as well.