The Street vs The Valley
A former Goldman Sachs quant recounts his days at the firm and compares it with his current job as a startup founder in a post entitled Why founding a three-person startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs.
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.
11:39pm 
