13 ms·
'Ray, this is a religion': How Bridgewater lost two top hires
- eschneider 3y ago"Scientology, but for hedge funds!"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoWait until you hear about "dot collector". Any Bridgewater veterans care to comment?
- dwaltrip 3y ago> His main interest, as he wrote in his best-selling autobiography-cum–self-help book, Principles: Life and Work, is to lead others toward “meaningful lives” and “meaningful relationships.” … > Staffers were given iPads and directed to rank one another on a one-to-ten scale on their performance dozens of times per day in categories derived from Dalio’s Principles … > The goal of all the data, Dalio would say, was to sort everyone at Bridgewater on a single scale. ——— Truly they’ve stumbled on the heart of human connection and meaning.
- hinkley 3y agoIf it comes out that Dalio was secretly sleeping with five different people at the company, at the same time, let's just say that my response would be, "that tracks."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adamgordonbell 3y agoHis book had many insane ideas for running a company. I assume the power of PR is why it was well received.
- ethanbond 3y agoOr 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."
- adamgordonbell 3y agoYeah, that's true. He's clearly been successful and the biography parts of the book were interesting.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RGamma 3y agoThis may have been just a stupid delusion by Dalio but some day one of these sociopaths is gonna get their hands on the wrong AI model and end us all. The necessary precondition of private individuals side stepping democratic control via their unchecked powerful organizations is already established. Gotta hope for the whistleblowers...
- erulabs 3y agoI think you're seeing it wrong. When CEOs no longer need scientists and engineers, when they can speak their will into existence directly, they will immediately destroy themselves. This rating system, had the CEO gotten it's say, would not have made Bridgewater thrive. That stupid ideas are often impossible to accomplish is a huge barrier to stupid leadership screwing themselves sideways. Anyways, thats the optimistic take :P
- hinkley 3y agoSandbagging can just as easily be used for good or for evil. "How goes our plans to <do something morally reprehensible>?" Oh, we are still having trouble with the requirements. It's all blocked up in committee. Not much progress to report.
- RGamma 3y agoThat's assuming the effects of that stay contained within the respective organization which is not something I would bet on. Chances are a CEO type will be the first to get their hands on AGI or something close enough.
- fzeroracer 3y agoUnfortunately I think this is sort of the optimistic take. They will destroy themselves, but also take down a lot of other systems with them, just look at Musk. These things have a very long tail end for all of the accumulated problems to turn from a ripple to a tide.
- immibis 3y agoThis is already happening, and has nothing to do with LLMs. Look at the other thread about banks closing customer accounts for no reason.
- renewiltord 3y ago[flagged]
- Orangeair 3y ago> No one is going to comment on some random crap you publish on what's a glorified blog. I have no idea why the article doesn't lead with this, but it's adapted from a book: > Dalio declined to be interviewed for the book from which this article is adapted.
- renewiltord 3y agoFair enough. I suppose if one were a rando NYT reporter one would think most people would be thrilled to be interviewed to comment on the book one is writing with no access to the principals.
- taway1237 3y ago>It's always funny when some rag tries to say "X declined to comment". No one is going to comment on some random crap you publish on what's a glorified blog Strong disagree. I like when people writing articles at least give the other side a chance to comment. It makes me feel the piece is less obviously biased. Of course it can be abused by giving the other side just a dew hours to comment (so basically no real chance), but it's still better than nothing.
- renewiltord 3y agoHaha, yes, of course. It's just that it's natural to decline when some guy writing a glorified blog post anthology fills it with "declined to comment" when it's obvious everyone would decline to comment. He's not Walter Isaacson. He's just a low-level reporter at the NYT who mostly publishes GPT-4 level articles on what the current stock price of a bank is.
- wolverine876 3y agoWhat defines a 'glorified blog'? What research did the author do?
- j7ake 3y agoIt’s sad to see so many person/hours wasted spinning their wheels to please a narcissist.
- radicaldreamer 3y agoWho 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?
- jeffreyrogers 3y agoThe SEC investigated them a long time ago and determined that their trades were legitimate but just done in convoluted ways. There is a recent NYT piece that covers it. There's a new book about Bridgewater coming out so that's why there are so many articles about them recently.
- steveBK123 3y agoThere'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."
- cjohnson318 3y agoI 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 information, like per-capita crime rates in American cities, then you should have your facts straight.
- kyleyeats 3y agoWould you say that believability is very important to you?
- cjohnson318 3y agoI think that supporting an argument with accepted facts is a good way to build trust.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gottorf 3y ago> 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 cars being broken into) is up, yet reporting is down, leading to a lower crime rate that doesn't reflect the street-level reality accurately. Of course, this isn't a problem limited to this domain.
- immibis 3y ago[flagged]
- 3y ago
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoUgh, 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. Didn't make me want to work for them.
- paulddraper 3y agoCould it be "radical candor?" [1] [1] https://www.radicalcandor.com/ https://www.radicalcandor.com/
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoI honestly can't remember, it's possible. It sounded like the kind of idea that would either be awesome if done well, or sheer hell if people did what people often do with otherwise good ideas...
- liveoneggs 3y agohttps://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Way_of_Absolute_Candor https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Way_of_Absolute_Candor
- whatshisface 3y agoI would have tried to challenge it during the interview, so that if they hired me I'd know they were legitimately pluralistic.
- htrp 3y agoRadical Openness is definitely Bridgewater
- lubutu 3y agoWhen I was looking for work back in 2016 there was a company who advertised their way of working as "infrared", if I remember correctly. It was all about total openness and autonomy. For example, they asked one employee to decide how many hours everyone should work per day, and they decided on something, which was then applied company-wide. This was apparently "democracy in action". Quite odd. I think they've since dropped that whole thing.
- hardwaregeek 3y agoMan, this feels like something out of Severance. Creating an AI model of Dalio to properly rank employees according to tenants? What the hell?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 3y agoHm. When is Severance coming back? Such a great show. I assume Dalio has been having a field day with ChatGPT/LLMs.
- 23B1 3y agoIt'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.
- esafak 3y agoHow does the military rating system work?
- 23B1 3y agoI've seen multiple. The one I like is 'pinks and blues' where you're given two of each - a pink and a blue - and you write out why you think two dudes should get a blue (good) and a bad (pink). If you start accruing a bunch of pinks, there's a problem. It's very simple and probably wouldn't pass muster with an HR department, but it was effective at getting rid of turds.
- esafak 3y agoCan you split the votes as you want among the candidates or does each have to get at least one review? How often do you rate? Do you only rate peers, or new hires? What about superiors? I could not find any reference to this system. As a person below said it recalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_voting
- immibis 3y agoIt sounds like it's not an automated rating system and doesn't rank people. It only identifies really good people and really bad people.
- projektfu 3y agoIt's a form of limited voting, with both approval and disapproval votes. In a unit, maybe there are 20-40 "candidates" and you are given four votes, two up and two down. This will probably identify a couple people receiving more than one vote. Limited voting has had interesting results in things like city council elections.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI mellowed out when I realized crystal energy chasers and systems peddled by MBAs were equally unsubstantiated and unfalsifiable, seeking answers to the same things: fulfillment and productivity
- immibis 3y agoYeah, but the MBAs can take away your food supply.
- slibhb 3y agoThere was a NYT article about Bridgewater and Dalio last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/how-does-the-worlds-largest-hedge-fund-really-make-its-money.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/01/business/how-does-the-wor... If these articles are right, the picture I'm coming away with is that Dalio had some good strategies that gave him an edge decades ago but now his competitors have caught up and pulled ahead. Apparently Bridgewater no longer has any quantitative edge and it's really just Dalio and a few close advisors making calls from the gut. Plus all this weird nonsense about "principles".
- toomuchtodo 3y agoSame deal with Bill Gross (“the bond king”). Macro tailwind, a few good compounding successes, and riding that draft for the remainder. They don’t retire, they just graduate to “thought leaders” because what else are you going to do with that much free time and ego. The money no longer matters, all that is left is to chase status. https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gross+lucky https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gross+lucky https://www.cnbc.com/video/2013/04/03/great-investors-more-lucky-than-good.html https://www.cnbc.com/video/2013/04/03/great-investors-more-l... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-janus-henderson-billgross/bill-gross-once-wall-streets-bond-king-retires-after-rocky-second-act-idUSKCN1PT19T https://www.reuters.com/article/us-janus-henderson-billgross... https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2016-252 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2016-252 (ETF pricing violations mentioned in the book) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120854/thebondking https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250120854/thebondking (highly recommend the book "The Bond King" for deep background on Gross' professional career and PIMCO)
- steveBK123 3y agoYeah that's the thing with investing. Markets change, trades get crowded, data/tech gets commoditized, and strategies stop working. If you do not have a process and evolve, you are roadkill. So some guys who are early, big and right can attract a halo that long outlives its reality. To build some piece of tech you need to have some sort of process, and it is probably replicable to building another piece of tech. It is entirely possible to just get lucky right place, right time and make a killing investing for a good run before your lack of process catches up with you. Half the "Big Short" guys fall under the same category as Dalio & Gross. But hey, if you make your number and then can graduate into "thought leadership" its not such a bad gig either.
- qd011 3y agoPatrick Boyle posted an interview on this topic with the author of the article just an hour ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb5kngSrrsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bb5kngSrrsw
- pavlov 3y agoAlso in the Vanity Fair there’s an extract from the new book about the time the future FBI director was snooping for employees’ dirty laundry at Dalio’s hedge fund and conducting year-long show trials: “Inside James Comey’s Bizarre $7M Job as a Top Hedge Fund’s In-House Inquisitor” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/james-comey-dalio-bridgewater-the-fund https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/james-comey-dalio-br... It’s every bit as strange as it sounds.
- monkeydreams 3y ago> It’s every bit as strange as it sounds. Nope. Much, much stranger.
- catlover76 3y agoLawyers really like external validation from authority figures, and Dalio sounds like a douche whose ego needs for others to feel they want his external validation. The section with the multiple investigations of the employee who didn't bring in the bagels really brings that home lol Match made in heaven.
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoAbsolutely wild.
- yen223 3y ago"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
- ketzo 3y agoDoes 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.
- lawlessone 3y agoIt's too weird to make up.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoMaybe it is product placement (advertising). If a popular personality has an interview, they can reach out to an ad agency (or vice versa) and be asked if they want to do something weird during the interview with a brand name product that would get people talking.
- TheCleric 3y agoYeah the rest of it can be chalked up as narcissistic business personality, but this? This is psychotic. A billionaire chewing on scotch tape.
- groby_b 3y agoYou can dislike billionaires without making questionable ad-hoc diagnoses disconnected from actual knowledge about the disorder. Chewing scotch tape is many things, "out of the usual" certainly being one of them, but it's nowhere close to diagnostic criteria for psychosis.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
- resolutebat 3y agohttps://archive.li/2023.11.07-192356/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ray-dalio-rob-copeland-the-fund-book-excerpt.html https://archive.li/2023.11.07-192356/https://nymag.com/intel...
- tamimio 3y agoMost of these hedge funds CEOs are psychopaths and completely unfit to be in the society if it wasn’t for the wealth they have, a lot of people used to put up with that but since COVID, a lot have been changed, that’s why they hate the remote work, it doesn’t feed their narcissistic egos.
- sbierwagen 3y agoVery 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.
- steveBK123 3y agoA 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/hunches (computer says number go up, but why would this pattern exist, who is on other side of this, what are the tail risks, etc).
- TMWNN 3y ago>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.
- dogman144 3y agoIt’s the same except that your avg tech/fund. analyst isn’t sitting on 10gb private fiber global data networks. Hunches and quants tend to work when you have that much data and compute firepower. Setup is closest akin to what insurance and social media companies run. When you have that data and speed, you’ll do well. Secret isn’t the IP, it’s having access to the infra that can make use of it. Siren Servers/Jaron Lannier describes it in generalities well.
- voisin 3y agoI read that book too, albeit a number of years ago when it first came out, and I don’t recall “none of the algorithms actually worked” being true.
- pk-protect-ai 3y agoI 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?
- mszcz 3y agoHey, those evaluations won't evaluate themselves you know! That's important work!
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> The truth is that at Bridgewater, some are more equal than others. And Ray Dalio is the most equal one of all. Major Animal Farm vibes.
- ilaksh 3y agoI think this is just human nature. Dalio just systematized it and put it out in the open. We are primates.
- Almondsetat 3y agoIt’s an almost verbatim quote from the book, of course it has “Animal Farm “””vibes””” “
- throw3823423 3y agoI 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 not everyone is equally 'credible' in their rating. If I am bad at underwater basketweaving, my opinions on the matter are useless. But if I become good, suddenly my opinion is very important. You can imagine how, as one accumulates ratings, the system becomes unstable: 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? Maybe there's two groups of people that massively disagree in a topic. One will be high credibility, and the other bad, and that determines final scores. Maybe the opinion of one other random employee just changes everyone else's scores massively. So the first thing is that the way we know an iteration is good involves whether certain key people are rated highly or not, because anything that, say, said that Ray is bad at critical thinking is obviously faulty. So ultimately winners and losers on anything contentious are determined by fiat. So then we have someone who is highly rated, and is 100% aware of who is rating them badly. Do you really think it's safe to do that? I don't. Therefore, if you don't have very significant clout, your rating of people should be simple: Go look at that person's baseball card, and rate something very similar in that category. Anything else is asking for trouble. You are supposed to be honest... but honestly, its better to just agree with those that are credible. So what you get is a system where, if you are smart, you mostly agree with the bosses... but not too much, as to show that you are an independent thinker. But you better disagree in places that don't matter too much. If there's anything surprising, is that more people involved into the initiative stayed on board that long, because it's clear that the stated goals and the actual goals are completely detached from each other. It's unsurprising that it's not a great place to work, although the pay is very good.
- carabiner 3y agoIs it true that Ray has a bias against STEM people, and prefers elite liberal arts pedigrees?
- motohagiography 3y ago
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoWith enough money and power, a crazy asshole can get people to work towards any premise, whether they believe in it or not.
- wolverine876 3y agoWe 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.
- strangattractor 3y agoI love the pee story here. A long time ago I was friends with a facilities person at Apple. She told of a peculiar case where she was called in to take care of a problem in one of the conference rooms. Apparently someone had not thought a meeting had gone well. That evening they had returned to the conference room and taken a dump on the table. Message received. Maybe someone was trying to send a Ray a message with a puddle of pee:)
- saghm 3y agoThat's pretty awful; making some random innocent cleaning person deal with literal shit does nothing to the person you're actually mad at.
- strangattractor 3y agoCan't disagree with that. But it is amazing the kinds of things that go on in large corporations.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ng12 3y agoI'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?
- dang 3y agoRelated ongoing thread: Bridgewater Had Believability Issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181360 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
- karaterobot 3y agoI feel like 75% of the CEOs I've met have essentially been this high on their own supply, they just been the tyrants of smaller kingdoms than Bridgewater.
- efitz 3y agoI had an ex-Bridgewater colleague a couple jobs ago, who brought “Radical Transparency “ with him. One on one he was a nice enough guy, and he was super smart. In meetings or as a manager he was a nightmare and left a dumpster fire of problems in his wake including driving off nearly his whole team.
- diziet 3y agoRelated: https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-explains-the-dot-collector-feedback-tool-his-company-uses-to-rate-employees https://qz.com/1071749/bridgewater-associates-ceo-ray-dalio-...
- ughOk 3y agoI 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.
- refurb 3y agoI 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.
- JohnClark1337 3y ago[dead]
- kevinventullo 3y agoThe fact that Ferrucci didn’t immediately see through this insanity makes me question his supposed genius. Like the job was never to make some ultra-intelligent system, the job was to stroke the CEO’s ego by saying “Look, hard math proves that you’re the smartest guy in the room.”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ThetanTechie 3y ago[flagged]