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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

#81

Post by pstuart »

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…

Incentives are a hell of a drug.

It would be so cool if someone could apply game theory for mortals that could digest these systems and show how to make them more "fair". It may be an impossible task but it seems worthy of exploration.

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

#82

Post by mszcz »

pk-protect-ai wrote: post #56

I wonder when they actually do their work. I mean, if you're constantly evaluating your colleagues and their work, when do you find the time to get your own work done? Or are you just making up numbers for these evaluations?

Hey, those evaluations won't evaluate themselves you know! That's important work!

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

#84

Post by steveBK123 »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #12

Who is doing the trading? It seems like making money is almost an afterthought and other traders can't seem to find these Bridgewater whale trades. Is it all a front or a Madoff situation?

There's no reason BW needs to be a whale. No matter how big these funds are, liquid global markets are gigantic. They are in equities, rates, fx, all sorts of derivatives thereof.

They are generally making millions and millions of smaller trades. So sure they have $100B AUM and maybe 5x levered to $500B. But across a million positions that's .. an average $500K position size.

Few if any of these funds ever have like $10B sitting in a single trade.

And even if they did, consider the result of a quick google search "Average daily trading volume of U.S. treasury securities 2000-2018. In 2018, the average total volume of treasury securities traded per day was over 547 billion U.S. dollars."

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

#85

Post by wolverine876 »

com2kid wrote: post #47
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #18

Ugh, 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. 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…

Conflict will happen if it's a truly honest system. If there's no conflict, people are not telling the truth about things that cause conflict. Does it happen, and how does the system handle it?

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

#86

Post by dogman144 »

motohagiography wrote: post #75
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…

The people who survive in that culture, are they interesting, and do they go on to do anything interesting afterwards?

I have met or value relationships with plenty STEM BW alums, but they tend to speak about it as a funky place, seemed to color their views about buy side jobs and suggest that you know what you’re getting into with a job there.

Seems anecdotally that it’s used as a stepping stone into leadership or used to bank savings.

Several tech leaders I know are out of BW.

An SRE I knew there was at ~$600 TC and got a retention offer at ~$900 when they left to do a passion job.

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

#87

Post by adamgordonbell »

ethanbond wrote: post #30
adamgordonbell wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His book had many insane ideas for running a company. I assume the power of PR is why it was well received.

Or because Bridgewater is inarguably in the top 0.000001% of most successful commercial endeavors ever? A book being "well-received" doesn't generally mean "everyone should follow all of the ideas in here."

Yeah, that's true. He's clearly been successful and the biography parts of the book were interesting.

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

#88

Post by BeetleB »

com2kid wrote: post #47
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #18

Ugh, 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. 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…

It's hard to get right, and merely having a culture of openness is not sufficient - it is easy to abuse - intentionally or otherwise. A common theme I see is "X criticizes/scrutinizes Y more often than he does Z because of some bias X has against Y" (could be an implicit bias). Most teams I've been in are incapable of handling such behavior (i.e. recognizing that X is the problem and not Y).

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

#89

Post by wolverine876 »

We want meritocracy, and in theory we reward merit with capital and power. But merit can change quickly - and power tends to corrupt and reduce merit - while power and capital remain.

From the article's description, CEOs like to flaunt their corruption and lack of merit these days.

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

#90

Post by LegitShady »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #18

Ugh, 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…

valve?
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