Banks like Goldman Sachs are becoming more and more reliant on technology than ever before. They even make more money because of systems like High-frequency trading.
Trading nowadays goes through algorithmic programs. It has even gone so sar that the ‘black box’ has to be as close as possible to the input of the datacenter from were the trading data originated. When the trading firm receives the data just a millisecond earlier it could make millions more and faster.
In the financial service industry also called banks or hedge fund you have people called ‘quantitative analyst’ (also called quants). These people are insanely good with numbers (specializes in the application of mathematical and statistical methods – such as numerical or quantitative techniques – to financial and risk management problems). Call them the wizards or the nerds of the financial industry.
Banks like Goldman Sachs employ 35.000 globally and about 9.000 of them are engineers. To put this into perspective, Goldman Sachs has a multi-billion budget dedicated to engineers. This means that Goldman’s team of engineers is bigger than the entire payrolls at Silicon Valley companies such as LinkedIn and Twitter.