Any thoughts on Fred Alger?

Reposting this from another Fred Alger thread:

Proceed with caution at Alger:

Alger has an incredibly high churn rate in the lower and mid level ranks but exit ops are not bad - people regularly leaving for other roles on buyside (most frequently to the major pod-shops but also to other solid l/s HFs and also corp dev outside of finance - activist not an exit op as far as I’m aware) people leave because to many people it is a pretty miserable place to work - there is a good vibe amongst the analysts but the PMs are disorganized, lack a structured investment process, and, worst of all, regularly yell at their analysts as a form of giving feedback (maybe this is common elsewhere on buyside but it seemed like a pretty outdated form of communication to me in this day and age).

Additionally, ‘head honcho’ can be arrogant, insecure, volatile, and narcissistic - e.g. dropping hints about how rich he is when the market is down to give himself a boost and often going on angry rants, laying into a specific analyst publicly on group Zoom calls from one small thing which triggers him which then snowballs into a 5-10 minute yelling monologue against the analyst who had a small error in their comp table or hadn’t updated the model of an unowned name for the quarter etc etc - this is pretty bad for morale at the firm and the other PMs adopt similar communication styles by osmosis.

Overall - this firm is a decent place to train - but statistically you will not find yourself to be super happy after the first year or so, and looking to move elsewhere - that being said, there are occasionally people who stick around but I would say the churn rate is almost as high as in a typical BB IB analyst program (~90% after 3-4 years - disclosure: this might not be totally accurate for IB, happy to be corrected, but is accurate for Alger).