Many banks and other financial institutions are finding this out now in their desperate bid to find competent COBOL programmers to continuing maintaining legacy critical applications running on mainframes when most COBOL programmers are retired or dead, and more are headed that way every day. It wouldn't shock me to find out that the effects of COVID being weighted towards worse outcomes for older people had a material effect on the human resource risk of using COBOL-based critical systems.

Banks will absolutely hold on to anything to avoid an unknown risk as long as they think they can hedge or mitigate known risks, and utterly fail to acknowledge the truth of unknown unknowns. This will ultimately be their downfall if governments ever let them follow standard business outcomes, otherwise they'll eventually absorb some upstart to keep hedging forever.

Nassim Taleb has written entire books on this fact about banks. It's interesting that the same flaws in their financial thinking apply to their IT infrastructure.

Again, this stems from the culture of financial institutions where tech workers are viewed as support staff, not strategically critical, despite what financial institutions say publicly.

This is all with worse work/life balance, low flexibility, (GS was the first big bank to recall everyone and enforce working on site I believe.), a 'conservative' tech stack if you're lucky or a simply unpleasant one if you're not, and generally not being valued the same way as you would be at a FAANG or typical tech company.

Google/FB devs total comp (including RSUs) will easily beat Goldman devs by 150-200%, depending upon your performance.

If so, $100k plus a 15% bonus is laughably low. Even shitty startups pay new grads more than that.

My understanding is that GS's interview is actually harder to pass than a lot of FAANG companies. So you have to wonder why anyone would even interview there if the pay is that low...

Visa regularly makes double the profit per employee of FAANG - so, yes, they could easily pay more.

They have profits. They just aren't in the US.

Maybe you and I have a different concept of payday.

What makes GS less than FAANG is the annual stock grant FAANGs throw at software engineers, and of course it Finance.

Technology companies lean the other way and enforce security through comprehensive automation of the controls they must follow.