I was a software intern at Bridgewater in 2013. My impressions from that time are that Bridgewater had an interesting, unique, and very intentional culture, but at some point the firm grew and Dalio started thinking about how to scale that culture. He wrote the Principles book and had everyone read and discuss it; the Dots app was implemented; etc.
The core cultural values seemed reasonable to me, but the efforts to scale the culture felt heavyhanded and seemed like they sometimes backfired. Attempting to quantify someone's "believability" based on subjective data collected on an iPad app was a bit silly and easily gameable. The fact that Dalio and other executives scored highest on basically every facet was an obvious sign that the system was a bit farcical.
Maybe the company managed to solve some of those cultural scaling challenges after 2013? I wasn't around to see what happened after.
If fact there was active work to make Dalio top on believability and have it flow from there. The developer behind it is extensively interviewed in "The Firm."
Dalio and others being on top of rating was a way Dalio sanity checked the algo, per the book and was not happy when it drifted away from that standard.
How much of the book's content is shaded by sour grapes is unclear though.
The core cultural values seemed reasonable to me, but the efforts to scale the culture felt heavyhanded and seemed like they sometimes backfired. Attempting to quantify someone's "believability" based on subjective data collected on an iPad app was a bit silly and easily gameable. The fact that Dalio and other executives scored highest on basically every facet was an obvious sign that the system was a bit farcical.
Maybe the company managed to solve some of those cultural scaling challenges after 2013? I wasn't around to see what happened after.