Bridgewater Associates reviews

1. People management is absurdly bad. Employees at all levels of the organization spend 7-10 hours a week with "culture" work with little relevance to the role. A subset of employees are adept at using the Principles to aggressively further their career/agenda. I was too naive to understand this and was one of those thrown under the bus after 3 years. 2. The technology is horribly outdated. The majority of analytical work is still done on Excel. Culture management is done with manual forms in Sharepoint and on the Ipad. 3. Bridgewater has an edge in the market, but you likely won't be "in the circle". Of the 1400 employees, I estimate that less than 50 have high level involvement with the investment structure, decision making, and trading. The business is so profitable that there's incredible levels of waste hiring hundreds of people with minimal contribution to the overall organization.

- Your progress in any professional way is brought to a halt - Though claiming to be meritocracy, it is very subtle political environment - Amount of procrastinating is UN-believable, for example you can spend talking 30 minutes of your 30 minutes meeting talking about what is the goal of your meeting and whether makes sense (true story !) - Non-compete is UN-bearable, they are now stopping everybody from leaving to other financials - Technology is 10-12 years old - Members of Management Committee (MC) are nodders and Ray-pleasers who see it as opportunity to get shares and be secured for life - Ray keeps saying he is retired and literally makes all the decisions