Smart people - Great Pay - Good training and a lot of other bad things
Pros
Pays very good with little or no experience. Great training. A lot of opportunities to bond with colleagues. Most of the people are exceptional in the investment engine. Culture is solid, transparency is real and rewarding. You always know where you stand. So the law of no surprise is strictly adhered to.
Cons
Work is bad, boring, and outdated. For at least for first 3-4 years, the projects are quite bad. You end up losing your skills and forgetting everything you know. The longer you stay, the more irrelevant you become for the rest of the world. That's not really a problem because if you stay longer they keep making you sign stricter and stricter non-compete agreements. They are so secretive and paranoid about everything. It results in junior employees getting no exposure to the investment process. It also restricts freedom and flexibility. It's sad to see some really smart people doing mundane tasks with crappy tools and technologies, wasting time-fighting the bureaucracy and slow-moving tech. The culture makes the place very verbal and argumentative. That means if you're a Chinese Phd student with not very fluent English, you won't be able to argue back to make your point clear and you will be marked as a bad communicator. The place is very white top to bottom. That is very rare these days for math and tech-driven places. (The purpose of this comment is to help you steer away if you don't love arguing. There is no discrimination or preferential treatment. Everyone is treated equally.) Employee turnover is very high. They use culture as an excuse to justify the turnover. But, that mostly comes from an easy interview process with no real testing of skills and only culture testing. For more stats, around 20 people joined on the same day as me and we all went through the same training program. Only 2 still work there. You already know this before you join. But the struggle is real when you're actually fired. Nobody wants to hire ex-Bridgewater people because of the lack of any real useful skills and non-compete problems. You may run into more logistical problems because you moved to Connecticut, visa status, school changes for children, and opportunity cost. I know people who rejected four, five job offers to come here and hate every single day at work.