Go with GS. In the end, you want to work for companies that will be accretive to your future career growth in the industry. Also, you want to make sure not only you have technical experience but also domain experience that will be more valuable in the future.

GS had for long time and still has the cache within Financial sector. Having GS on your resume will open doors at other financial companies for technology opportunities and give you an edge in your career growth.

Google has the cache right now but will it be persistent in the future. Considering Microsoft name on your resume no longer gives you any edge/influence like it did in 1990s, I will assume Google influence will be similar to Microsoft in another decade.

CS is a fast changing field so skill obsolescence is a major issue with the field and a major challenge to long term stability/growth of your career. You will have to stay up to date with newer technologies and continue to reinvent yourself every 5-10 years just to stay relevant. For example, knowing Microsoft stack is no longer as valuable as it was just a decade ago.

Working in an industry vertical such as financial, despite changes in CS technology applied to finance, you are still relevant because of your domain knowledge.

I'm sure it depends entirely on what area of the org you work in but in my opinion GS is not a good place for most programmers. The bulk of their programmers will be supporting applications (not writing sophisticated trading software) and in that area career progression seemed to be shockingly slow from what I could tell.

I interviewed at GS years ago and I ended up declining the job mid interview when I realized it would likely be years before I worked back up into a role where I'd have control over designing more complex systems. In short, GS seemed particularly good at pumping out sub-par code monkeys.

Thanks for the info.

Twice the salary is almost a no-brainer for anyone in any field to be honest.

Go with GS.

Microsoft/Google will have you drinking Kool-Aid and you'll be pushing their shit.

If you go into GS you will learn a lot more about finance and that's important, you can take that knowledge and move to a corporation that uses a better language like Haskell or Ocaml, or find some open minded people who will let you use a better language inside GS.

At Microsoft/Google you are stuck with .Net/C++ or something like Go which was designed by an idiot who forgot about incremental compilation. Also they are offering you less, so they can go fuck themselves.

Thats pretty harsh for MS/Google :P .