Pros
I worked at Bridgewater for nearly 4 years. If you are thinking about working at Bridgewater, I want to say that Bridgewater's reviews on Glassdoor as a whole are accurate. Ignore the 1 star hates and 5 star brainwashed positivity. Just track the themes that repeat in the 2-4 star reviews and think for yourself. Below is my summary, but these same thoughts have been echoed in many prior reviews. > Bridgewater is the real deal as a macro hedge fund; it consistently beats the market on a risk-adjusted basis and with low correlation to the equity markets. > Greatest concentration of talented and interesting people across the organization I have ever been in. What's most surprising is that this smartness spans across to even lower level positions such as event planners, administrative assistants, and analysts. Smart people want to spend time with other smart people, and Bridgewater has a huge reputation in this area. > Good compensation and benefits for non-core functions relative to the market price of similar roles in other companies. Core trading, research, account management are at or possible below market.
Cons
> 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A sub-point of my first Con, but technology is horribly outdated, and the Bridgewater culture for some reason makes significant improvements difficult.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