Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Employee Review

I worked at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time for more than a year

Pros – Amazing to work on projects with the potential to have scaled impact on people's lives

Some of the smartest most talented people I have had the pleasure to work with (but they are not the managers and leaders)

Cons – One of the most poisonous political environments I have ever experienced - this is academia supercharged with large check books. Fifedom's abound.

Senior managers lack good management skills and have no accountability for their own organizational health

Very little visability with executives/leaders - senior managers control all the information flow.

Incredibly bureaucratic for an organization of this size - Microsoft has a more nimble bureacracy than BMGF

Many unhappy people inside who live in fear because they have few career options in Seattle with the same prestige, so they are forced to stay there

Abstracted from the real work on the ground and depend too much on consultants who make $200+ per hour to inform their decision making.

Don't value on the ground immersion and don't reward telling the truth when something is not going well on the ground, in fact they punish it

Advice to Senior Management – Break down the walls with the rank and file employees
Create more transparency and safe communication
Stop measuring success by how much you meet your grant giving quota each year and instead really measure teams by how much impact has been achieved

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