5 ms·
You don't know the half of it: I worked on Dalio's HR system, and what is really "interesting" is how the dots are put together. First off: All dots are public
by Thr0wawayDocs 4y ago
You don't know the half of it: I worked on Dalio's HR system, and what is really "interesting" is how the dots are put together.
First off: All dots are public. You know who is grading you well, who is grading you badly, and who is liked and disliked by each executive and manager you want. Imagine giving Ray Dalio a low score in Critical Thinking, one of the many categories. It's not going to be easy.
The dots are also put together to create a baseball card: An accumulation of what the company thinks of each person. And those scores are basically the review system, as you will be kicked out with a low enough average. You can, and should, look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly.
But the baseball card score is not just an average: Then two groups of people with different ideas of someone would give a middling score. Instead, scores are weighted with a sigmoid kernel. Said kernel takes, as its other parameter, the rater's score in that category. If the company believes that you are bad at something, your opinion doesn't matter. And since votes are public, you probably want to agree with the majority, as otherwise your lack of skill at evaluating that category could lead to people voting you lower in that category.
This mechanism is, as you might have noticed, pretty unstable. As my personal score changes the value of the dots I provided, every scoring iteration changes scores in ways that might never converge. Some people's scores would change wildly, as the people that rate them high, or low, had scores near the critical point of the sigmoid. Therefore, some determining mechanism was required to decide the final scores. Let's just say it stacks the deck in favor of executives.
So when you look at the Bridgewager version of this system, what you got was all kinds of little mechanisms that pushed really hard towards having the leadership being rated as the best at everything, and then having the leadership's rating be the most powerful force of them all. So every rating is performative, and you better be directionally agreeing with the top forces in the company. Rating honestly is something for only the naive and the politically powerful.
I wonder how far down this road Coinbase is going: Every little bit of the system matters to optimize for toxicity.
- nebula8804 4y agoIsn't Bridgewater a very high performing organization? How has the company not completely collapsed at this point? Or is there a ticking time bomb coming that will end up destroying Dalio's supposed "reputation for excellence"?
- pg_1234 4y agoMaybe it's only "high performing" according to it's own internal rating system.
- nebula8804 4y agoI think its pretty well known that this organization produces excellent results no?
- leaflets2 4y agoI guess so yes? Having grown to the largest hedge fund in the world Ray Dalio to me seems like a bright person, having glanced at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio
- spopejoy 4y agoCalling any hedge fund "high performing" is pretty meaningless, as once they've figured out their core trade their main job is to 1) keep the core trade secret, 2) try to find some other bet, 3) try to trade bigger/faster/stronger, in that order. They're just big poker players and so looking like they're the smartest in the room is part of the bluff. Secrecy is way more important but that doesn't require PhDs. This is why they're so culty, use various personality tests in hiring, and things like the rube goldberg 360 rating disaster described above. A simpler example is Jane Street who went hard into OCAML for no reason whatsoever that had to do with their bottom line but made them look "smart" while money machine goes brrr.
- leaflets2 4y ago> look at the baseball card of someone you have to meet with, but you don't work close to, and act accordingly I don't understand -- what should I look for, how should I act (and why)? (I've never been in such an environment) Interesting to read about their system!