I was in the portfolio management organization for a time. To start off with the Portfolio Management (PM) team managers are terrible. Extremely political and it's gotten worse with all the deputy co-heads playing extreme nepotistic favorites as well as some of the desk leads. The deputies really see themselves as little 3rd world dictators with a country full of peasants they can play with. All of them need to go but will be there for life. They don't even try to hide it, they are pretty upfront and blatant about it. Half the portfolio management leaders will ask you for your career goals, then ACTIVELY go out of their way to block them or use them against you.
Compensation at DFA is below industry standard and the longer you stay the further behind compensation wise you will fall behind equivalent level/experience at competitors. Not just by a little but by a lot. DFA is cheap with employees, especially for the industry they are in. You will lose out on hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in your career earnings if you stay here for any length of time.
Extreme politics and favoritism with people regularly stealing credit for your work or trying to keep you from getting visibility at the firm. It's basically a high school environment with PM team leaders acting like the mean girls in high school. There is very obviously an "in circle" and an out circle. You will be demeaned, never included in any decision or asked for your input on anything if you aren't in the "in circle" no matter how relevant it is to what you are working on. DFA is extremely great at alienating people and making you wonder why you should even bother to be there. For example, the favored of the in circle will be invited to meetings and everyone else will be very blatantly excluded even if they should be there because it's directly relevant to their job.
Within the first few months of your time there if you've curried enough favor with one of the several deputies of PM you will be marked as on the right path for advancement or if you are in the outside circle which means they will do their best to stamp out your career. They make this decision extremely quickly based on god knows what.
There is no actual documented process or timing for advancement on the investment team or even the criteria to get promoted, including at the initial analyst level - you basically need to have curried enough favor with one of the key desk leads, or deputy coheads otherwise you will spend a decade in the same position.
The true irony of the investment team at DFA is you are in no way compensated or measured for actually being good at investing or managing portfolios. The only thing that matters is currying favor with one of a handful of PM team leaders in the "in circle" and doing silly internal projects, the majority of which go nowhere or have extremely minor impacts. You could be the best portfolio manager in the world, and it would literally mean less than the number of times you give a 20 second update on a minor/silly project in the monthly PM team meeting.
The technology for PM and the firm as a whole is embarrassing. The investment team who uses a ton of custom excel plugins and applications is given computers that would have been state of the art 15 years ago. You will lose a good 1-2 hours a day waiting for simple stuff to run such as outlook or booting up excel, not to mention the constant freezes and crashes. IT will role out updates that your machines just don't have the hardware to handle and that were obviously not actually tested before they decided to put it on the machines of 100+ people with no recourse. The sad thing is for a company as profitable as DFA is, it would be a small piece of a quarter's profits to fix all the technology issues and would make the average investment team member's life just so much better day to day. This comes up again and again as a top issue on the surveys they insist on doing but they simply say nothing they can do about it, just work longer hours to make up for your type writer of a computer.
