Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Satisfying to work at a place where even if you're not doing the work on the ground, the work you do enables it in some way.

Cons – There is a fine line between pride of enabling good work and arrogance. There seems to be quite a bit of the latter and that was disappointing.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than a year

Pros – You will never work with a more talented and accomplished group of peers who share a deep commitment to a common goal. There are amazing people here.

Cons – The organizational and management culture is challenging: a self-imposed emphasis on speed with rapid cycles of rethinking seem, in some strategies at least, to result in lots of false starts. On the team I joined, we had a very high turnover rate, especially at the higher levels, which was frustrating.

Advice to Senior Management – Working to catalyze and support change in an established "industry" will require greater stability and continuity among program officers and deputy directors. Relationship building and consistent follow through is critical, but is not yet a strong suit for the foundation.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The mission is incredible and there are a lot of smart people working hard to achieve it
Amazing campus and great benefits
Work/life balance can be great for many who take advantage of the "flexible work styles"
For geeks you will have all the Micorosft latest and greatest at yuor disposal

Cons – For anyone in IT it is a disfunctional and ineffective organization. The CEO is a very smart and capable man but is very introverted and his focus his up the organization. This is a huge problem as his "leadership" team are incompetant and lack even basic management skills. Their traits range from basic immaturity to emotionally unstable; there is also a "boys club" whose behaviour is oftern very inappropriate.
The result of this lack of leadership is spinning at the lower levels; no clear strategy, inablility to make simple decisions effectilvely and worst of all a huge waste of foundation resources.

Advice to Senior Management – Invest in employee and specficially leadership and management skills development. There is a huge reliance on highly paid consultants for staff aigmentation - hold managers accountable for hiring and retaining strong teams

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Awesome coworkers
Opportunity to make an impact
Very professional work environment
Superb facilities for staff (benefits and salary)

Cons – slow decision making
Regional offices aren't empowered enough to make strategic decisions
Poor work life balance

Advice to Senior Management – Promote work life balance, break the silos to ensure greater coordination between teams and empower regional offices

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – In many ways, it's like most complex organizations - constant leadership change, reorgs, shifting priorities. But at the end of each day, no matter how challenging, I walk away knowing I contributed in some way to a greater good.

Cons – Your success hinges greatly on your manager. This can be a very good thing if you have a manager who is your champion. If you don't, it could be completely detrimental to your career growth. Manager effectiveness is still very much an area of development for the organization as a whole.

Advice to Senior Management – Acknowledge that employees who aren't managers or directors still have a voice. More skip-level feedback should be encouraged, even solicited.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – The belief that you can change the world is great and they have the money to back it.

Cons – Do not expect to be treated as an equal. The sense of entitlement just because you work at the foundation runs rampant, which is a little unsettling.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than a year

Pros – • It is a fast-paced and constantly evolving place. If you don’t enjoy being an active part of a changing environment or dealing with uncertainty, this can be a stressful place. If you thrive in dynamic environments, you will find lots of opportunity to shape how the organization does business.
• The foundation is in a lucky situation to attract highly capable people. If you used to be the top performer on your team in your prior job, don’t be surprised if you’re suddenly surrounded by people who are equally smart, dedicated and high performing. It is up to you whether you choose to check your ego at the door and get excited about working with such a peer group or whether you get intimidated and feel like others are out-shining you. Contrary to some other comments, I haven’t seen much backstabbing going on, but I can imagine that some people used to feel more exceptional before joining the foundation and end up interpreting their new environment as less friendly than it really is.
• The diversity of people’s careers is impressive – many have deep scientific backgrounds, others are business people or have worked in policy-related jobs. The workforce is very international, though it would be good to continue to grow the share of people coming from developing countries. Having the openness and flexibility to work effectively with a broad spectrum of people is crucial for someone to enjoy working at the foundation.
• There is a substantial amount of bureaucracy involved in the foundation’s work, and given the incredible number and size of investments that are being made every year, this is no surprise (for comparison, think about a corporate procurement department that processes $3-4bn in contracts every year, many of which go to overseas organizations and involve complex issues such as IP, clinical trials, etc.). The foundation’s business processes are maturing continuously and I’ve seen considerable progress since I joined. To be frank, working here is not all about inventing new ways to save kids in Africa, it is also about doing the necessary due diligence and paperwork that goes into making responsible long-term investments.
• I got a sense that manager effectiveness and career development were not prioritized in the foundation’s early years. In the last couple of years, however, we’ve seen strong awareness of these topics among senior management, accompanied by very concrete steps taken to address them. The foundation is moving gradually toward a mature business that figures out how to manage its talent more effectively. I’ve been very satisfied with my superiors since I joined, but can understand that others were perhaps less lucky and found themselves working for a boss whose strengths were in vaccine science and not people management.
• Benefits are excellent. Pay is very good for a non-profit, though it may be higher in the private sector for certain job profiles. However, if these are important factors in your decision to work for the foundation, you should probably ask yourself if you really belong here.

Cons – See under PROs
Many aspects of working at the foundation have a positive and a negative side. I attempted to explain in a balanced way and posted them above.
Personally, I am very satisfied with my job at the foundation and would say that the pros clearly outweigh the cons.

Advice to Senior Management – Continue the process of maturing the organization and recognize that changes need time to settle before benefits occur. Too much change can exhaust and confuse people while taking away valuable bandwidth for interaction with partners. Keep focusing on manager effectiveness when hiring and promoting. Try to create more space for people to work on exciting projects outside the hierarchy (Google’s 20% time could be an inspiration for this) and avoid unproductive second-guessing by senior management. Review the role and contributions of consultants and contractors to spend money more effectively and reduce dependency on non-foundation staff for critical activities.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a contractor

Pros – Great location.
Awesome new campus with plenty of windows and work space.
Good equipment and furniture to work with.
Good management, friendly, hands-off style.

Cons – If you are a contractor you will quickly feel left out in many events that take place at the foundation.

If you are working as a contractor in IT you will not have a chance to get hired on full time but you will see many other departments converting contingent staff to full time.

Advice to Senior Management – None.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – The foundation has tremendous benefits and incredible people and a laudible mission

Cons – the culture is largely ego driven, hierarchial and the strategy changes constantly.

Advice to Senior Management – Start leading and inspiring instead of show-boating

Former Employee – worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a contractor for less than a year

Pros – Campus is amazing; onsite café was fantastic; work was interesting; I was pretty much left on my own to do my job; the Help Desk staff was awesome and amazingly responsive (unlike at Microsoft); it was a very low-stress contract, which was great

Cons – Lots of cliques--I felt like an outcast; contractors are treated like second-class citizens, even though 99% of my project team were contractors; employees spent a great deal of time complaining to each other about internal politics; the project that I was hired to work on was poorly planned; it's a very untrusting environment; open-space work area is extremely annoying--you have to wear headphones and listen to music if you want to concentrate and get work done

Advice to Senior Management – It's hard to give advice to management when I was only a contractor there for a short time, but it's obvious there are problems that need to be addressed--listen to your employees and try to resolve the issues.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend