A panel of Goldman Sachs employees spent a recent Tuesday night at the Columbia University faculty club trying to convince a packed room of potential recruits that Wall Street, not Silicon Valley, was the place to be for computer scientists.
The Goldman employees knew they had an uphill battle. They were fighting against perceptions of Wall Street as boring and regulation-bound and Silicon Valley as the promised land of flip-flops, beanbag chairs and million-dollar stock options.
Their argument to the room of technologically inclined students was that Wall Street was where they could find far more challenging, diverse and, yes, lucrative jobs working on some of the world’s most difficult technical problems.
“Whereas in other opportunities you might be considering, it is working one type of data or one type of application, we deal in hundreds of products in hundreds of markets, with thousands or tens of thousands of clients, every day, millions of times of day worldwide,” Afsheen Afshar, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, told the students.
The tone of the event at Columbia reflected Goldman’s awareness that it had fallen behind in the battle for the hearts and minds of the type of programming talent that is becoming an increasingly essential ingredient for financial firms.
“At a lot of the schools where we recruit, it wasn’t top of mind for people with an engineer skills set,” said R. Martin Chavez, Goldman’s chief information officer, who oversees all of the firm’s technology operations. “The engineers would think, ‘I will go work for a tech company.’ ”
The number of high-level programmer-cum-bankers at Goldman — what the firm calls strats — has risen 43 percent, to 1,223 employees, since 2009. The overall technology division is now the largest division at Goldman, with 8,000 of the firm’s 32,000 employees.
Among the 78 people who were named Goldman partners this week, the highest honor at the firm, six were software engineers.
But as programmers have become more important to Wall Street, the competition for them has grown more intense. In response, Mr. Chavez has made a concerted effort to recast Goldman’s reputation among potential recruits since taking over as Goldman’s head of technology last year.
The firm rolled out a new, hipper website for engineering recruits in September, with lots of slick graphics. At the Columbia event, the screen at the front of the room had a word cloud showing the cool fields — at least for computer scientists — that Goldman engineers work in, among them “machine learning,” “data mining” and “cloud computing.”
Last month, the firm ran its first Google Hangout for interested computer engineers. Mr. Chavez traveled to Boston last month to talk at the first big recruiting event of the year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In all of these events, the bank is fighting old assumptions that the programmers who work for the firm are just back-office employees making sure the computers and phones work. All of the bank’s new recruiting materials emphasize that engineers at the firm are involved in its most basic businesses, trading securities and advising companies, developing the same sorts of high-level software that Silicon Valley companies work on.
“I am in a trading team which writes applications and helps traders from the time the trade comes in to the time it gets booked,” Neha Srivastava, who works on interest rate products, told the group at Columbia. “This opportunity to really see your code in action is something that is really valuable.”
The push within Goldman Sachs is a sign of how things have changed since the financial crisis. A few years back, critics of finance were wringing their hands about the high proportion of graduates from elite schools like M.I.T. who were going into finance rather than lending their talents to new start-ups.
In 2007, for instance, 28.7 percent of M.I.T. graduating seniors took a job in finance and only 9.3 percent went to software companies. At graduation last year, those numbers had flipped, with 21.5 percent of graduates taking software jobs and only 11.8 percent going into finance.
Even with that shift, some professors at elite universities still worry that banks are attracting too many of the top students. Vivek Wadhwa, a former entrepreneur who teaches at Stanford and Duke, said that programmers who join financial firms end up too focused on making money rather than changing the world.
“It breaks my heart when my engineering students use the talents I taught them to engineer the financial system instead of engineering solutions to the world’s problems,” he said.
Goldman employees resist the notion that their work does not help the broader world, given the bank’s involvement in helping companies and governments raise money and deal with risk.
But Mr. Chavez said that potential recruits had all but stopped asking the questions about the reputational issues surrounding Goldman Sachs and Wall Street that came up soon after the crisis. Now, the main concerns he hears from recruits are about giving up the perks of working in Silicon Valley. Goldman is competing on this front against all the media portrayals of the relaxed dress code and lifestyle in the tech industry.
If nothing else, Mr. Chavez said, candidates’ concerns are usually assuaged when they see the generous compensation that Goldman offers.
“As soon as we start talking to the candidates about what our starting packages look like, the lifestyle questions about flip-flops and beanbags really start to go away,” he said.
But Mr. Chavez and the Goldman employees at the Columbia recruiting session said the real reasons to come to Goldman were the challenging work and the smart people.
Dr. Afshar, who works with teams at Goldman to develop programs to price derivatives, previously worked in academia and medicine, after getting a medical degree and a Ph.D. He told the Columbia students that his four years since joining Goldman had been the most fulfilling yet.
“We have really amongst the most complex problems and intricate problems that folks in your shoes could work on,” he said.
An article on Friday about Goldman Sachs’s efforts to recruit computer engineers misstated the job title of Afsheen Afshar. He is a managing director and works on developing programs to price derivatives, but he is not chief data scientist.