Bridgewater Associates reviews

Parties and "team bonding" events get excessive- forced bonding with co-workers to "build community" takes even more time away from family and friends outside of work. Managers are expected to attend and it is viewed negatively if managers do not attend. Poor work life balance Parties get out of hand, and no-one really cares... kind of like "Mad Men" in how it operates. Men who are complained about are minimally disciplined, if at all, and excuses made for them. Forced bell curve on performance, requires constant culling of employees. Managers know this and need to plan for it, if you aren't in charge of who gets in the bottom 30% you are 75% more likely to be in there. It becomes a chess game of managers keeping their jobs and "sorting people." Highly successful people aren't good enough. You are labeled within 3 months of your arrival, and if the picture wasn't pretty to them, by whatever algorithm that they are using this week to assess you, it will never be pretty and you will never come out from under any label you get there... It will be on your "baseball card" and follow you to any role for the rest of your career there. Reckless assessment and testing practices, using personality and workplace assessments in ways that they were never intended to be interpreted by people with zero training resulting in hiring and firing decisions as well as opinions of people that are unfounded - rampant confirmation bias. Everyone is compared to the founder and his heir apparent, so if your results are different from them, you are in the red and scores are lower. No perceived value in diversity of thinking, approach, etc. Constant failure and revolving door of Senior Executive team and department heads is depressing... If you can't communicate in their language, good luck uttering a full sentence without being interrupted and negative feedback being recorded for you in their assessment system. No effort to understand one another. Most people just trying to survive by attacking rather than being attacked. Principles are great in theory, but can be manipulated to support whatever theory the better debater needs. And, if something happens that requires Ray to do something he doesn't want to, to stay in line with his own principles and values, he'll just write a new one to justify what he does. The worst part is that Management and the company pretend to be different from every other corporate environment and they fool lots of people who end up being blindsided. Real truth is that they are just as political, scheming, back stabbing and pushing of their own agendas as any other financial institution, but they are full of arrogance and hubris that they are somehow better and more elevated than people at those other companies. Its just all the harder to figure out who you can trust there. You are being watched -- 100% of the time--Through your badges, cameras, computer activity, blackberry, more cameras and all formal conversations are audio-taped. You are encouraged to report on other employees, preferably publicly, but anonymously is OK too and they'll give you lots of ways to do that.

This was the single worst place where I have accomplished NOTHING (and it is not the show about NOTHING either). There is a smell of fresh BS every time you get on the meeting and somebody calls out some of the principles, to either stall you or protect their turf or simply, score political points. There are so many stories that I cannot write about, from high-level managers building their cases about team-members, to losing money, projects that deliver nothing after 3 years (like tech renovation or trading), clueless people just playing culture card, etc. Ray is somewhat crazy, compares him self to Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, just completely out of reality. He proclaimed that his system of collecting the data about employees (dots) is the greatest gift man-kind in history (delusional) while all there is, is a source of people losing their hours looking at "feedback" provided bu other people. Every day. Only graduates, right out of school and not seeing anything else, could call this place a great company to work for. Not because they are bad kids, they just have not seen anything else.