[deleted]
'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
101–110 of 179 posts
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#102"Dalio would often review the results in his office ... chewing on Scotch tape, as was his habit when he was concentrating..." This article really buried the lede here
Does he have a special dispenser at his desk? Does he have one strip he chews on throughout the day, or does he get a new one after every meeting? Is it folded up, balled up?
So many questions. So, so many.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#103Very funny. If it's true that all the talk of computers and statistical modelling at Bridgewater is bullshit, and it's just a vanilla hedge fund, then it reminds me of the story from The Man Who Solved the Market that Renaissance was founded as a quant fund but none of the algorithms actually worked, so Simons just traded on hunches until D.E Shaw started competing with them years later.
A lot of people think of this in too much of a binary fashion. Hunches vs Quant. It's really more of a continuum. Or you could broadly tranche into 4 categories - 1) pure hunches, 2) pure quant ML stuff (I don't know what this signal even means, but computer say number go up), 3) hunches that you validate with data (kind of like the scientific process), and 4) the reverse - quant ML/data that you validate with logic/…
>A lot of people think of this in too much of a binary fashion. Hunches vs Quant.
It's really more of a continuum.
People say the same thing about fundamental analysis versus technical. It's not a binary; everyone is both, and only vary on how much they lean to one side.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#104It's interesting. I have seen rating systems work – in the military. They're harsh to some, but in some situations, you have to filter out B and C players to keep the A players alive. I do think transparent systems w/360º peer reviews are better than many others. I wonder what else is out there that might work.
The problem is that the majority of people are bad, so trusting the majority is a bad idea.
[deleted]
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#105Ugh, I had a recruiter approach me a couple of years ago to work for some company that had a "radical openness" culture or something like that. The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. The way they sold it sounded a bit culty to me, and the potential for abusive behaviour seemed high. Di…
> The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation.
Treating all ideas as valid is fine if that means all ideas get evaluated. For hierarchy you need somebody who can be the decision maker when a consensus cannot be reached otherwise the most stubborn opinionated people become the de facto decision makers. I experienced that situation before and resulted in some very bad implementations and massive tech debt and the people who stuck us with those bad decisions got to avoid responsibility and leave other people cleaning up the mess they created.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#106I worked with Ferrucci in BW. The internals of the employee rating system that preceded him were hilarious. In short: Everyone is encouraged to rate anyone else in a variety of categories, as often as possible. Every rating is public. You know who is rating you, and how they did it. Those ratings are put together to get a score in every category, and can be seen by anyone. It's your Baseball Card. The problem is that…
I'm surprised by your comment. It's a basic knowledge of getting feedback in UX research or any social research that social pressure influences your response. That's why most feedback surveys are anonymous. Even in politics, there is an old theory called the Spiral of Silence on how people shut down their contrarian opinions in public. It looks like Ray's fixation on "radical transparency" ignored the basics of human…
The people who practice/advocate radical transparency believe they are above human nature.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you're going to talk about extremely verifiable information, like per-capita crime rates in American cities, then you should have your facts straight. To be fair, if his claim is "out of control crime" and you interpret it as "out of control crime rates", you're talking about different things. There's enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that in some big cities, the occurrence of certain kinds of crime (like car…
[flagged]
I haven't heard about this, do you have a source on what crime-generating activities he was involved in?
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The idea was supposedly that everyones ideas were valid and hierarchy didn't matter and that everyone should challenge anything no matter who they were in the organisation. On the engineering side, ideally this is how things are done anyway. I've never had a problem digging into the ideas presented by engineers more senior than me, and I've always encouraged junior engineers to question any ideas I present. Everyon…
Just because you are in engineering does not mean politics, culture, psychology stop applying. It's really no different than any job at all. Engineers will often think they're in some kind of meritocracy, when in reality they're just as trapped by social constructions as anyone else.
This.
I've never worked at a place that could reasonably be broad-brushed as a meritocracy. Every company employs humans, and humans bring their humanness to their jobs.
Some places are closer to a real meritocracy than others, but ones that think they are tend to be further from it than ones that don't.
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#109I've heard a lot about Bridgewater and frankly don't understand how they hire anyone. If you're smart enough to get offers at top-tier funds surely you'd rank BW last because of this (very public) insanity.
Have they just resigned themselves to the uphill battle?
Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
#110It's interesting. I have seen rating systems work – in the military. They're harsh to some, but in some situations, you have to filter out B and C players to keep the A players alive. I do think transparent systems w/360º peer reviews are better than many others. I wonder what else is out there that might work.
We’re talking about OERs and NCOERs right? Those pencil-whipped, boilerplate evals where if you have a 300 PT score and don’t get a DUI/beat your spouse, 1/1? The process that takes 24 months to kick someone out? I don’t think you know what you’re talking about in this regard and/or didn’t serve, candidly.
Extreme lethality and Total Force focus; promote now.