Why do people think Goldman pays software developers so well? They do not. They pay whatever is required compared to their competition (mostly other ibanks). There is a tiny sliver (less than 5%) of the dev staff who work in front office and are called "Strats". (Some other banks have "Strats" [Morgan?] or put you into a quant team to pay you more [JPM/UBS/etc].) They make about 25-50% more money compared to vanilla software devs in the IT division.