Gates Foundation reviews

- Your experience is highly manager-dependent and while many are good, some are appallingly bad with little to no consequence. - Performance, credentials, and expertise are valued over interpersonal skills and trust building, allowing some individuals to get away with abusive behavior without consequence. - Total lack of diversity and unconscious adherence to white supremacy culture where cutthroat behavior is normalized and employees who are actually from the places we work are marginalized and/or pushed out and where grant dollars go to white-led institutions, especially in research. - Smart young people are hired and then marginalized with little opportunity for upward mobility. Generally, BMGF is the place to finish your career, not get it started (although there are a few exceptions). Programmatic roles are generally occupied by people who skew toward retirement age. - Generous benefits for parents on paper, but systemic discrimination of women with caregiving responsibilities in practice. This has showed up in major ways during COVID, where expectation have remained astronomically high and women are starting to leave. I know of several instances of women being denied opportunities or pushed out because of their caregiving responsibilities during COVID. - Major disconnect between our "talk" (i.e. what Bill and Melinda write and speak about) and our "walk" (i.e. how we do our work and how employees are treated internally).

I worked as a program officer for the foundation for six years. The mission statement of the foundation is that "All lives have equal value." The largest irony of my work experience at the foundation is that the internal motto should be, "All lives have equal value, except if you're a contract worker, admin staff, someone without direct access to senior leadership, or has Bill and Melinda on speed dial." Your value in this organization is in your job title, and everyone acts accordingly. My short summary: If the work doesn't kill you (they extract as much out of you as possible b/c you are very replaceable), then the work politics will. Just as the foundation is not a perpetual funder, it is NOT a perpetual employer. The work culture and environment is designed to ensure a half life about of 1.5 years for most employees. For an organization that can afford world class technical talent, it's HR division is possibly one of the worst I have witnessed (and I worked in government for a brief period of time). I believe this is by design as a completely incompetent HR division ensures no one sticks around too long. In fact, there are almost no paths for career growth as they expect your shelf life to be less than 2-3 years. One of the pros I list above in terms of resources (and there is a lot of it floating around) creates some of the most bizarre office politics. Type A people (almost 80% of the staff) will trip over themselves to control and command those resources, and if you're in the way (which you mostly are) then you will be thrown under the bus in the name of someone else's glory. It happens often. The first signal I knew something was deeply flawed in this work environment: the marker of a successful team meeting was that no one walked away crying (literally). You will be rewarded for "managing up" towards the senior leadership, but there is almost no accountability for how you manage down or within a team. Kiss up and kick down. You will survive well if you follow this simple principle. In the end, I did a lot of work -- some of it meaningful, but i feel much of it was a lot of hot air pushed by people who wanted to make a mark for themselves in the two years they would be spending at the foundation. This myopia is shameful but omnipresent. But, the organization seems to thrive on it b/c it has the resources to entertain so many vanity trips.