[hjek]

Nathan Robinson did a great piece[0] on Ray Dalio's principles and Bridgewater's culture, which looks extremely toxic:

> Make sure, of course, that you always make specific people feel bad about mistakes: “Instead of the passive generalization or the royal ‘we,’ attribute specific actions to specific people: ‘Harry didn’t handle this well.’” And make sure everyone knows it: “Use ‘public hangings’ to deter bad behavior,” he says, by which he means making sure to belittle (I’m sorry, accurately explain the failings of) employees in front of their coworkers so that the lesson is learned widely.

[0]: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/06/how-to-make-everyone-...

[Terretta]

It's becoming politically incorrect to suggest someone could perform better in a workplace. Curious this doesn't apply on the basketball court, but does apply in the conference room. Is it so unacceptable to drive for the collective win at the "cost" of acknowledging individual gaps?

If your team and your coach aren't a safe space to accurately explore your gaps in pursuit of shoring them up, both with exercises for you and with adjustments to the team play, why train pro at all? Anything less is literal amateur hour.

No professional athlete can afford to think "accurately explore the failings of" equates to "belittle", and no serious player would expect the coach to only give post- or even mid-game feedback behind closed doors.

Without that team discussion you're going to have a really difficult time knowing what to work on in yourself to be better, and your team is going to have a hard time knowing the watch-out-fors to collaborate on guard-railing your play.

(Not incidentally, basketball and baseball are near real-time stats driven. So is BW performance culture. We understand this for improving software by running it under a debugger or tools like New Relic, why not instrument your own processes?)

If you don't feel like opting-in to acknowledging and working on gaps as a team owning the outcomes, don't sign up somewhere that does.

If you do feel like opting-in, seek out teams and managers that believe in reality-based root cause feedback loops -- great retros drive greater forward looking results, for the product, the team, and you.

[jeffreyrogers]

I worked at Bridgewater, and while there are things I disliked about it, this piece is not at all fair and does not capture what it is actually like to work there. Nathan Robinson, who is a self described socialist, is not someone I would go to for an objective assessment of a hedge fund's working conditions.

[hjek]

> Nathan Robinson, who is a self described socialist, is not someone I would go to for an objective assessment of a hedge fund's working conditions.

I'm glad you didn't have a bad time working there. Yes, of course you can disagree with NR's conclusions, yet the article is mainly a review of Dalio's book alongside some quotes from employees. This "public hangings" statement is picked straight out of his Principles book. Is any of that source material being misrepresented or unfair in your opinion, having worked there?

I'm curious about the thing with the "overseers", "captains", "dots" and "baseball cards". Is that really a thing or not?

> Each day, employees are tested and graded on their knowledge of the Principles. They walk around with iPads loaded with the rules and an interactive rating system called “dots” to evaluate peers and supervisors. The ratings feed into each employee’s permanent record, called the “baseball card.”

[castlecrasher2]

I'm not the one you responded to, but I vastly prefer a work environment where issues are transparent rather than hidden, and while coding is usually that way through processes like pull requests and code reviews it's like pulling teeth to get people's honest assessment of other characteristics.

I'm reading through Principles right now and while you bring up valid points that make people uncomfortable, I think given their continued success it's apparent that Bridgewater has been better off for it. I've unconsciously used some of the basics in my career, like being forward about criticism to my superiors and direct reports, and after a short period of discomfort I've always found the relationship better.

[jeffreyrogers]

The quoted material is accurate as far as I can tell, in that it really does say that stuff, but NR is interpreting it in an uncharitable way.

There was a test on the principles as part of the new hire orientation, but it didn't really matter how you did on it, and my manager didn't seem to place any weight on it, others might've been different. It is definitely not a daily thing that you're graded on. Dots is just an app you use to give feedback to people on how they are applying the principles, but it's mostly just used to rate if people did something well or poorly. Like if you shipped a feature on time or gave a good presentation on something you'd get a lot of positive dots and if you broke something in production you'd get a bunch of negative dots.

Other people at the company can see the feedback you got, that's part of what the baseball card is. It's really just a more transparent form of the evaluation system any company would have.

My criticism of the principles is that there are so many of them and some of them are contradictory (e.g. fight every battle vs choose your battles are two I remember) that people mostly just use them to justify what they were going to do anyways.

On the positive side, Ray and the other senior people really do care about the employees and Ray in particular is very generous towards them.