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'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

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Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#151

Post by JCharante »

lesuorac wrote: post #96
throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I 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…

> My high credibility makes someone else have bad credibility, which changes the rankings again. How many iterations do we run before we consider the results stable? Tangential to your point but this is actually a solved problem and you only have to run once. You might even recognize the solution [1] [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenvalues_and_eigenvectors

Why only once? When we did pagerank in class we chose a precision factor and then iterated pagerank until the delta values for the matrices were less than the precision factor

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#152

Post by [deleted] »

gottorf wrote: post #54
cjohnson318 wrote: post #15

I stopped listening to Ray Dalio when he trotted out the meme about out of control crime in big cities at the beginning of one interview or another. I don't know if he's lazy, or out of touch, but I don't like it when people are fast and loose with extremely verifiable information. Like, maybe you have expert intuition the future of inflation, that's great; but if you're going to talk about extremely verifiable infor…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#153

Post by wolverine876 »

lmm wrote: post #150
wolverine876 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean anger, people feeling threatened/unsafe, etc. It doesn't always happen, it can be reduced, but you're kidding yourself if it isn't happening. Again, like getting zero bug reports for your software - something is wrong.

Will it happen? Sure. Can you reduce it to the level where it doesn't significantly deter people from being honest about issues? IME yes, though perhaps not in every kind of organisation.

Yes, agreed, though I don't think the solution is only reducing frequency, but managing it effectively when it does happen.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#154

Post by niemandhier »

throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I 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…

If those scores can be seen by everybody it should be possible to mine the data and reverse engineer the algorithm.

A bad actor could use this to craft a „malicious review“.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#155

Post by mamonster »

financltravsty wrote: post #100
mamonster wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dalio is a perfect example of just how much finance has evolved over the last 30-40 years. Risk parity today is a turbo vanilla strategy that every systematic shop can offer and that a master student in fin. eng. can probably build, and yet in like 1990 this was the forefront of systematic investing and got you paid. Bridgewater today is still riding on the fact that they "invented" risk parity.

Curious if there are any materials to do some autodidactic learning similar to what a financial engineering masters would get you. There are a lot of oft recommended books whenever the topic comes up, but they always border on too theoretical or outright "pop." I would imagine simply looking at a syllabus from something like Baruch and going through the recommended readings would be a starting point.

I mean, if you have MFE prerequisites then sure. The prerequisites for modern financial engineering is having a good handle on probability theory and in particular stochastic calculus.

It would also depend on the program. Baruch is more for quant strats and wants to send people to option market makers/funds or to banks to sell derivatives. Something like Carnegie Mellon MSCF(Computational Finance) is more oriented to send people to Bridgewater or AQR, which run systematic strats(risk parity, factor, alternative risk premia, portable alpha, etc.).

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#156

Post by ughOk »

I interviewed at Bridgewater a few years ago. I ended up passing on the job but it was tempting.

I love the idea of strong feedback. I've always wanted work to feel like I'm lifting weights with my buddies: We constantly critique each other. We all want to get better and any advice or critique is welcome.

In general, withholding criticism is a sign that either:

1. The person needing advice is more concerned with their ego than actually getting better. They get mad about criticism or find it hurtful.

2. The person who is withholding advice either has nefarious purposes, has a low option of you (they assume you fall into category 1), or simply doesn't care about helping you.

Criticism is the respectful, professional thing to do. It assumes the best in people - that they're trying their best and want to get better.

You shouldn't be an asshole by the way. If you phrase your criticism in a way where someone is likely to get defensive then it's less likely to be effective. Empathy is an important skill in teaching.

After years spent working with companies in SF - where criticism is generally avoided at all costs - Bridgewater piqued my interest.

I tried to discern if Bridgewater shared my outlook but, ultimately, I just couldn't tell. I asked extremely pointed questions - uncomfortable things I wouldn't normally ask in an interview. But I figured they wanted radical candor, right?

I asked every interviewer things like "How important is making sure people actually hear this criticism?", or "Couldn't people just use this as an excuse to be a jerk?". All the answers were wishy-washy.

Plus, they force constant feedback. More feedback is good. But constant? It felt like it'd be, at best, distracting. And at worst, like it would lead to a lot of false criticism. If you _have_ to criticize, even if you don't have an opinion, then are you really making people better?

In the end I got the impression that they value criticism for the sake of criticism. And it generally seemed like giving criticism was more highly valued than ensuring people actually heard what you were saying (communication skills and empathy weren't emphasized). They'd confused the forest for the trees.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#157

Post by refurb »

ughOk wrote: post #156

I interviewed at Bridgewater a few years ago. I ended up passing on the job but it was tempting. I love the idea of strong feedback. I've always wanted work to feel like I'm lifting weights with my buddies: We constantly critique each other. We all want to get better and any advice or critique is welcome. In general, withholding criticism is a sign that either: 1. The person needing advice is more concerned with thei…

I had a chat with someone working at Bridgewater. After meetings they basically debrief with feedback. Even internal meetings. This person seemed pretty happy with it, but it seemed like a bit of overkill? I have 3-6 meetings a day, am I really going to hear feedback for each?

And the issue I have with feedback is that there is a big difference between feedback to improve something where the person is deficient (e.g. you should learn about net present value), and feedback that is just about the person's style (e.g. you ask too many questions).

People are different. There is more than one way to skin a cat. For example, some people develop a solution through an analytical approach - defining a goal, looking at all options, coming up with some objective way to rank them, then filtering down.

Other people do it in a very "messy" way (or what some percive as messy). They immediately come up with a solution, then refine as they go based on what they learn and what other people think (e.g. questions, opinions, etc).

Is one way better than the other? No. But if someone kept giving me feedback on my particular style, I'd start to get annoyed. If it's not wrong, then there shouldn't be feedback. You actually want people with different styles, it can prevent group think and personally, I learn a lot by working with people who approach problems different.

I get the sense Bridgewater feedback is just used to shape behaviors in the model of some ideal form (i.e. the New Soviet Man), not feedback that improve people whatever their style is. But I might be wrong.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#158

Post by glimshe »

ughOk wrote: post #156

I interviewed at Bridgewater a few years ago. I ended up passing on the job but it was tempting. I love the idea of strong feedback. I've always wanted work to feel like I'm lifting weights with my buddies: We constantly critique each other. We all want to get better and any advice or critique is welcome. In general, withholding criticism is a sign that either: 1. The person needing advice is more concerned with thei…

Bridgewater's practices sound like an episode of Black Mirror - indeed, that one where any person could realtime rate anyone else.

If you want to get continuous feedback, all you need to do is to get married.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#159

Post by vintermann »

fullshark wrote: post #106
diegof79 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't look like anything I've ever called radical transparency.

Re: 'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires

#160

Post by vintermann »

thumbsup-_- wrote: post #137
throw3823423 wrote: post #63

I 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…

This is classic example of if you give people a metric (that is meant to be a condensation of things that truly matter) based on which they are evaluated it, they will just start optimizing for and gaming that metric instead of focusing on things that truly matter.

I don't think there ever was a time this metric was good.
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