Bridgewater

Would you recommend Bridgewater to new grads over Faang?

Depends what you are looking for in a role and what kind of career path you want... BW is a great place to start a career IMO, especially in the Investment Associate or Technology Associate programs, but the culture is very unique and not for everyone

Both have uncapped trajectories of increasing impact and TC. But career paths are pretty much all bespoke based on what's important to you, how you think, what you're good at/bad at, and how that aligns to what the company needs. Benefit of everyone producing and the company collecting and exposing a lot of data about everyone is that those matches are generally more data-driven than at other places. Definitely a meritocracy though - you can rise as much as you're capable of rising.

WLB in tech org is very good, for the most part. Fairly big org tho so do your homework/ask to talk to engineers on the team if you get an offer. (Go read Principles for a real answer to your second question). If someone messes something up at another firm, the focus is usually on "how should this go in the future?". At BW, it's about that, but just as (if not more) importantly, it's about "why did that happen, and what can we learn about the people and processes involved?". If I screwed something up because I was moving too fast and being disorganized, that's captured as a data point. The fundamental philosophy is that the culture is "for" people who would rather see and understand those data points (and the composite picture they paint through time) about themselves and about others, so that you and the people around you can make better decisions about how to operate in the future.