Goldman Sachs were nearly 40 Percent of the employees are Vice Presidents

The Bloomberg article http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-18/greg-smith-quit-goldman-after-unrealistic-pitch-for-1m.html

The article on Greg Smiths resignation and it’s famous Muppet contained pretty much what one would expect from the offensive in Goldman Sachs rebuttal campaign, but the little jewel I found in the story was that it reported that Goldman Sachs has 13000 vice presidents.

This is a pretty amazing fact.   Yahoo profile for Goldman Sachs reports they have 34700 full time employees ¹.   This makes the statement on the number of Vice Presidents not only amazing but also absurd and bizarre.  Imagine that nearly 40 percent of all Goldman Sachs employees are vice presidents to be fair to Goldman Sachs it is only 37.5 percent, who wants to quibble over 2.5 percent.  Sounds likes too many chiefs and not very many Indians, maybe that might be part of the problem with Wall Street, or at the very least that might be part of the problem with Goldman Sachs.

13,000 vice presidents would explain why the senior management had no idea of who Greg Smith was when he left the firm.  So if someone were to say that they were or are a vice president of Goldman Sachs, your response could or should be “I thought nearly everyone who is employed by Goldman Sachs is a Vice President”.   It would appear that Vice President is some sort of entry-level position at the firm, what a snow job.  It is another indication that the emperor has no clothes.  The pathetic part is that we buy into to this dribble.

Mr. Smith request for a salary of 1 Million Dollars a year could be taken as prima facie evidence of his delusional mental state and possible sanity  (paranoid/schizophrenic, narcissism, and greed (ok greed is more of a sin than a psychiatric disorder, but you get the picture) at the time he worked was employed at Goldman Sachs.  Some how 500K Dollars was not enough, go figure.   I do not know about the rest of you, but I know more individuals than I can count on the fingers and toes in my immediate family, who would jump at the chance to work to be employed for just one year (two would be nice, but I am not going to be greedy) at that salary level.  (On the other hand I could just be Mittens for 9.125 days and make the same amount of money, I know it is a cheap shot, but sometime the devil just gets the best of me, after all I am only human, and from time to time I can be tempted by the dark side)   I would suspect that Mr. Smith is not the only individual working at employed at Goldman Sachs afflicted with these conditions.   I would suspect that the condition is especially rampant within the entire senior executive corps with equal or more severity.

And we wonder why the frigging wheels came of the bus.

¹ Unable to determine the number of individual who actually perform work at Goldman Sachs on any given work day, but using the most opportunistic estimates it could be that on any given work day at most about half of the employees actually perform some type of work.  It is highly unlikely that this group of employees is composed of Senior Executive Corps, Directors, and Vice presidents.