> Incredible amount of bureaucracy for a 1,500 person organization. Bridgewater's culture emphasizes criticism and soundness of logic. This is outstanding for some problems, but is a nightmare for solving other kinds. I feel like this culture emphasizes incremental improvements, but makes paradigm shifts practically impossible even for super talented people.
I contrast Bridgewater's culture with Google's culture that lets smart people try moon-shot ideas with lots of positivity and less oversight. Both organizations are immensely successful with wildly different cultures.
>A sub-point of my first Con, but technology is horribly outdated, and the Bridgewater culture for some reason makes significant improvements difficult. As a result, you have to rely on smart people doing smart things with manual processes. Bridgewater literally has a team of 50+ people manually checking for new data points and investigating data points that fall outside 3 standard deviations of historical data points. This has essentially gone unchanged over 5 years despite massive improvements in data science and statistical analysis.
>Job risk. Roughly 15% of the company is fired or leaves in any given year. The overall caliber of hires is very high, so those who get fired/ get fed up and quit aren't idiots/deadwood. Anecdotally, the risk is not a problem for those <5 years out of college who can find good jobs after leaving Bridgewater. It's a big risk for senior hires who have established, successful careers prior to joining Bridgewater.
> Poor location and refusal to open an NYC office
