Goldman Sachs is hiring hundreds of people here. Can you really earn more at Microsoft than investment banking as an intern?

Goldman Sachs’ (real) hot new office, where the best paid interns work

by Paul Clarke

28 August 2015

3 minute read

Goldman Sachs’ (real) hot new office, where the best paid interns work

If you want to work for Goldman Sachs and don’t fancy moving to a fake office in China, try one of its growing ‘high value’ locations. 75% of Goldman Sachs’ new hires in the second quarter of 2015 were made in locations like Mumbai and Salt Lake City.

Now, the new place to be is…Warsaw, Poland. Goldman has been present there since 2011, but over the next three years plans to add “several hundred” new hires in technology and operations units to tap into the locally skilled and comparatively cheap workforce.

Goldman is not alone in using Eastern Europe for such work, as UBS, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse all have back office operations out there.

Goldman Sachs is supposedly more generous to its back office employees in London than other banks, so this move could save a lot in pay. Goldman pays its operations VPs an average of £125k ($192k), which is £9k more than its nearest competitor, according to one study.

Separately, if you’re a university student looking for a place to earn a lot of money, you should work for Microsoft. It’s no longer the cool option, but it’s the only tech firm in a sea of investment banks, which makes the top 10 paying firms for interns.

Average pay is $5,423 a month, according to figures taken from Glassdoor. Credit Suisse is the best paying bank with $5,113, it suggests.

This could be low-balling a bit, however. Our own research, taken from interviews with this year’s interns, suggests that all the big investment banks pay their interns between $6.1-7.2k, which blows Microsoft out of the water.

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