Bridgewater Associates reviews

To all the people considering working here, start with one thing: this is a leveraged bond fund. Not much there right now. They get all their returns from leveraged bonds and tips. They are terrible with stock and borderline with currency. Also, did you notice that all the positive responses sound the same. That might be because one or two people are writing them. Even if its 15, do you want to sound like that? Here is the bottom line: as an investment, portfolio, or management associated you are going to range between 120 and 150k. For that price, you will sign a stifling non-compete, learn nothing about how anyone but bridgewater invests, and deal with humiliating terrible stuff all day long. Not to mention they are managing 130 Billion on Excel. In many cases you actually have to open different versions of excel for different terribly constructed workbooks. DO NOT work here. It is borderline a career killer and you will not get any slice of the pie. Even the people on the signals team, who have to sign LIFETIME non-competes, do not break 300k. That will hardly cover your lawyer when you attempt to leave. They expect you to come and quit. You are not in it for the long haul. You will not make big money here. In fact, they pay well below the industry standard. Do not work here

Too many to count, my top items: 1) Consistently penny smart, pound foolish. For example trying to lowball new hires saying "you get what you deserve over time" just results in people not being happy and leaving since raises are slow to non-existent. Trying to squeeze into a seeming arbitrary budget but canceling projects to engineer desperately needed replacement systems. 2) Way too much churn around management (no CTO lasts over a year) and direction - nobody wants to be accountable for a decision. Impossible to know what direction to invest in and which to migrate away from since the plan changes every quarter. 3) Following the above - most systems and processes are massively out of date. There are still Windows 2003 servers serving critical roles and most pieces of the infrastructure are multiple revisions out of date. 4) Cloak and Dagger non-sense. "Security" is paramount and there are literally hundreds of people in Security who get to say no to what technologists want to do but they are not responsible for keeping most of the Security tools running. Most technologists aren't officially allowed to know what Security software is loaded onto all desktops and servers, but almost trivial troubleshooting uncovers one of the dozen tools in slowing down performance or breaking something. Nobody is allowed to talk about how their "proprietary" system works since it's a secret - yet it turns out so much is just duct taped together with Excel, VB scripts, and other terrible non-enterprise solutions since nobody was willing to work with and share with another part of the firm and implement things properly. This despite the entire hypocritical focus on What Good Looks Like. 5) 0 development in anything that matters. No training on technology, it's all management principles training - or forced indoctrination into a "way of being" that just does not work with technology. 6) The constant threat of outsourcing. The Bridgewater method just doesn't work for technology - once you have a system it needs grunt work to maintain (as opposed to investing where often the smartest thing to do in don't do anything while you weigh options) - there is a constant desire to outsource the technology teams creating FUD about people's jobs and mental anguish.