I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. I extensively reviewed the rules and reworded my comments and they were removed yet again. My points were fully factually true and were not anything too untoward (pay raises were promised to members of a new team, they never materialized, most team members left). For what it's worth, Path Forward IT is not a great place to work. advancement rarely comes with rewards and abuse of salary agreements abound(work all night to get a system up and running, they still require 8 hours behind a desk even if it would be unproductive. Flexibility works one way there).
By and large, GlassDoor ratings are no longer a good measure of how well a company treats employees; they now measure, mainly, whether a company has the ability to engineer and maintain artificially good GlassDoor ratings.<p>GlassDoor, in short, has become a textbook example of Goodhart's Law:<p><pre><code> "When a measure becomes a target,
it ceases to be a good measure."[a]
</code></pre>
The same phenomenon is known in some contexts as Campbell's Law:<p><pre><code> "The more any quantitative social indicator is
used for social decision-making, the more subject
it will be to corruption pressures and the more
apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social
processes it is intended to monitor."[b]
</code></pre>
[a] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law</a><p>[b] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law</a>
You don't say! I used to work as an engineer at a <i>truly</i> awful little company, the worst I've been at, and when I left I gave them a <i>scathing</i> review. Not long after, several new reviews popped up. Here are some choice excerpts, get a load of this:<p>> Pros:
> For anyone reading these reviews, take it from someone who has been at this company for over 10 years, some people just like to use these review sites as a sounding board for their own distorted views of a company where they obviously were let go for good and obvious reasons.<p>> [skipping forward a bit]<p>>The truth is that every company will inevitably come across a "sour grape" that was not meant to be part of that companies future. Its just a shame that instead of trying to improve themselves they waste time trying to justify their irrational beliefs and convince themselves that writing negative reviews will somehow fortify their distorted view of what actually happened during their time there.<p>>Cons<p>>Former employees that sit in dark rooms and write negative reviews in between shifts at the local convenience store.<p>---------------<p>Then they separately put up some absurd propaganda reviews. This one was titled "Sunshine, Unicorns and GumDrops," if you can believe that:<p>> I have been with Snowbound for quite a long time(about 10 years) and I have been meaning to write a review.
I am inclined to agree with the "like a family and home away from home” reviews. At least on my side of the office it’s the land of Sunshine, Unicorns and Gumdrops. We like to work hard but also have a good time doing it.<p>Then they had another one titled "Like a family", here's an excerpt~<p>> You aren't just a number or a body behind a computer screen. If you're going through a personal issue, …<p>Yeah, like when I was fired and the CTO coldly told me "We can do better than you." This is the same guy who I watched stroke a waitress's hand as he passed her a tip during a company lunch outing and tell her "You have a smoking ass."<p>--------<p>There's another review titled "home away from home," and another called "long time here and worth it," but you get the point.
This article kind of misses the entire point; Glassdoor and the rest of these "professional review" sites sell reputation management services to the company. They use the negative reviews to push other high margin services to the companies. The only one who should care about Glassdoor being gamed is Glassdoor executives; anyone looking for a honest and balanced review of a company workplace on Glassdoor is already getting a manufactured picture.
"Jennifer Peatman, who headed Roostify’s human-resources team at the time many of the negative reviews were written, surmised they came from disgruntled former engineers who she said didn’t have the coding skills the company believed it needed.... Ms. Peatman said she left the company a month later, in December 2017, because of what she called poor leadership"<p>So I worked at Roostify and <i>none</i> of these engineers were fired. They all left for greener pastures. I think it is hilarious that Jenn can leave because of poor leadership, but when engineers leave and cite poor leadership it is because they suck.
My approach to Glasdoor reviews is similar to my approach to Amazon reviews... ignore the positive reviews, and focus on the negative ones. Now, "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", but a large number of negative reviews <i>is</i> a strong "stay away" signal. A small number of negative reviews is, more or less regardless of the positive reviews, a "neutral" indicator to me.
Glassdoor is a joke. I left negative reviews for FigureEight (previously Crowdflower) and they immediately went into review and were then deleted. The positive reviews there are so obviously fake. ("cons: only one shower") lol.<p>They have had several rounds of layoffs and yet their reviews stayed positive. Only now I see a few negatives are creeping through the cracks as I'm sure the onslaught of negative reviews is much greater than what's posted.<p>Anyway, stay away from FigureEight, they have extremely shady employee practices and have to be one of the worst companies in SF I've experienced or witness. The only condolence I have is I see the entire C-team has been fired or left. It's a dumpster fire.<p>Anyway, yeah, Glassdoor is trash.
They also sell your data now:<p>"We have updated our Privacy and Cookie Policy with changes to how we use and share information.<p>Among other things, our updated Privacy and Cookie Policy:
Allows Glassdoor to share data with Glassdoor affiliates.
Subject to user visibility and control, permits Glassdoor to share a user's Profile or resume with prospective employers when a user creates and saves a Profile and uploads a resume, and allows Glassdoor, or a Glassdoor affiliate, to recommend a Glassdoor user (and that user's Profile, resume or resume extract) to an employer with a presence on Glassdoor or a Glassdoor affiliate's site.<p>You do not need to take any further action upon receiving this email. By continuing to use our services, you agree to the updated policy. You can also update your account information at <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/member/account/settings_input.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/member/account/settings_input.htm</a>.
Thank you for being part of the Glassdoor community.<p>Who are Glassdoor affiliates?
Glassdoor is now part of Recruit Holdings, a leading HR company. Glassdoor affiliates include Recruit's family of companies. Sharing data with Glassdoor affiliates will help improve your experience and visibility in finding a job you love."
It's amazing, because I used to (naively perhaps) trust Glass Door reviews. Then I started at Canopy Tax and heard in almost every weekly company meeting, an encouragement to go on Glass Door and rate the company. They would also brag during those weekly meetings about the current Glass Door rating. The "Glass Door" rating was also reviewed in the meeting, with lamenting over any negative reviews that would pop up.
After that experience, I started viewing Glass Door with a <i>very</i> skeptical eye.<p>Overall Canopy Tax was a good place to work (for someone that meshes better with the culture than I did). I have many friends still there that are very happy, but I did find that Glass Door manipulation to be pretty distasteful.<p>If anyone from Glass Door is reading, please go back to your roots! You were such a valuable resource for me in the past, and an important force to help balance the power differential scales.
A few friends of mine work for a company that most would consider terrible. I know for a fact that when ex employees do leave bad reviews, they have a line to call Glassdoor, and get it taken down under promise of buying a new subscription or renew existing subscriptions.<p>I know this because it's one of my friend's responsibilities - He does this on a monthly basis (based on the whims of the owner)<p>The main use of Glassdoor as an employee is not the company reviews - it's for interview questions.
Is there any service that actually is fair? When Ubisoft makes Forbe's "Best Places to Work" I don't feel like I can trust anything to make an objective measure other than organic word of mouth and simply experiencing it for myself.
This happened at my previous company when they had bad glassdoor reviews. Every new person through the door, was sort of forced to write a glassdoor review. They would be given a nice welcome, some schwag, sell them on the company. People inevitably wrote good reviews, alas once the honeymoon period ended, they were in for a rude shock.
I worked for a company where we were told to post good reviews on Glassdoor. The engineering team was small, there was about six people in the room. The CTO called for our attention. He told us to go on Glassdoor and leave a good review. He explained that they are trying to hire more people and that good Glassdoor reviews really help. He also ended by telling us that management will be checking in to make sure that we all actually did leave reviews.<p>I felt really upset at the fact that we were _told_ to do this, and basically threatened that if we didn't, management would know, and presumably there would be some sort of consequences. When the CTO left the room we all kinda mumbled something along the lines of "um, that was kinda screwed up", but no one really voiced that opinion loudly or strongly. Probably due to the fear of getting punished for it.<p>This whole situation is really sad. It's probably in the companies best interest financially to do this. It forces employees to respond, because employees don't want to be punished. And there isn't a way to punish employers for this. I doubt that it is illegal. I doubt that Glassdoor would care if you went to them. If you publish a public review, you'll almost certainly lose your job, and even so, the company can just claim that you are lying, and probably pay to get the review removed.<p>On the other side of the coin, there is Glassdoor. They exist to make money, so if a company wants to pay them to remove bad reviews or something, why wouldn't they say yes. There is no third party monitoring them, making sure that they are being honest.<p>Maybe one day society will figure out a way around these issues, but for now, I think a good first step is to spread an understanding that what you read on sites like Glassdoor should be taken with a big grain of salt. And so I am glad to see this getting attention on Hacker News.
And that's why there is Blind <a href="https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics" rel="nofollow">https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics</a><p>I highly recommend everyone signs up their company and gives honest feedback there. Closing the Asymmetric Information gap will only help workers (the vast majority of us) make better choices about where to work, how much to charge employers and what really goes on (not the propaganda campaigns that are online resources and interviews)
Honestly, the only place where you can currently get genuine company reviews today is Blind, if you can stomach the trolling. The so-called 'kool-aid drinkers' or 'hr puppets' are called out (often humorously) all the time.<p>For Glassdoor, I am not surprised, this is not news. I interviewed at an awful company once which had stellar - I mean actually straight-A's 'nothing wrong here, we're the best, if God came down from heaven and founded a company, this would be it' reviews. Found out from an ex-employee after they've been acquired by the company I worked at that they were pestered daily to write positive reviews.
I've been fortunate to not have to use GD for anything other than a quick salary lookup and some reviews about the interview process.<p>Even then, it's been mostly useless as it forces you to sign in after viewing a couple of pages, and the reviews are written mostly by people who didn't get the job.<p>As you can imagine, most don't put a lot of thought into writing their reviews, or even recalling what the interview was like.<p>If knowing about company culture is important to you, you're better off messaging someone on LinkedIn and ask for a quick coffee chat or something.
Some of the worst companies I ever encountered also had the best Glassdoor reviews and scores.<p>Sounds ironic, but makes perfect sense when you consider:<p>1. When a system is so easy to game simply by acting dishonestly, score will correlate with unscrupulous willingness to lie to your future workforce.<p>2. For these kinds of unscrupulous terrible employers, Glassdoor is seen as nothing more than an easy way to market themselves. Certainly cheaper than investing in your workforce, trying to make your employees happy, or fixing any of your real issues.
Fakespot needs to get into the Glassdoor game. They already analyze Yelp.<p>Some companies are just not subtle about their reviews, just like on Yelp. You will see a flurry of positive reviews posted within days from each other. Or some have straight marketing talk.<p>I do find it interesting that some of the worst companies I have worked for have been averages than some of the good ones, but I guess that is the point of the article. These bad companies need to boost their ratings since they are bad.
I flagged some posts and reported a former employer who was posting fake positive reviews in the most obvious way possible: 2-3 short generic positive reviews per week, all posted from the office during normal business hours.<p>Glassdoor did nothing and the company has a great rating, despite being a terrible place to work.
FWIW, I used to work at one of the companies mentioned. Tara was a good employee who resigned. She was not fired as Ms. Peatman claims. Its sad that Glassdoor is just another gaslighting outlet on the internet.
I've worked at good and bad companies that do this, and their number one target (in enterprise software at least) tends to be the SDR team - Sales Development Representatives. These are usually fresh college grads or salespeople with limited experience that are excited to take their first steps into the world of tech sales.<p>I've seen companies initiate SPIFF programs and other competitions as a way to incentivize new employees, sometimes with only days of experience, to post a glowing review of their new employer.<p>Before you work for a company, make sure to filter on Glassdoor and understand how many positive reviews are coming from "Sales Development" and "Business Development" reps. Don't get me wrong, their opinions are valid, but if you see a flood of very generic 5-star reviews, that's not a good sign.
Glassdoor is paid by companies, not by employees, so nobody should trust it. Our HR department is frequently asking everyone to leave good reviews on Glassdoor. 0 credibility.<p>It's like that scummy business magazines who give awards are in. I worked at a place where I heard our VP of marketing say because we paid this really well-known travel magazine tons of money for ad placement that we should win a spa award. The only review site I trust is Consumer Reports, there should be a Consumer Reports alternative for Glassdoor.
Considering salaries listed on Glassdoor for tech companies in my area are about half of what engineers actually make, employers would be much better served by publishing accurate salary info (including RSUs, not just base) if they want to attract candidates.
Former company found out that they had more or less solid negative ratings on Glassdoor. The next day heads of HR and Marketing went around to every employee and stood behind them and had them write up a positive review of the company.<p>This was couched in: "It's not a bad place, these were just disgruntled people. Don't you want to be a team player and help out the company?"<p>Place has since cratered under the weight of its poor management.
I've got a Glassdoor story from a previous employer. The company went through a MAJOR restructuring and a series of smaller reorgs over the course of ~18 months. The work environment wasn't great, morale was really bad, and the exodus of employees was tough to handle.<p>The company rating really started to trend downwards on Glassdoor. Then probably 6 months into it, suddenly there were a lot of solid or glowing 4-5 star reviews from an office overseas. These basically overpowered the negative reviews in US/Europe and the company rating was basically back to where it was before.<p>I don't think they paid for good reviews. I suspect what they did was simply pressure new employees in that country to write reviews before they really knew what was going on in the company. It just looked very strange that all of a sudden everybody in that country wanted to write reviews, whereas before all the reviews were dominated by US/Europe. The distribution of values is also telling if you look at the differences in means between that country versus everywhere else.
It's not only about Glassdoor. There is also censorship in HN's "Who Is Hiring" threads. You can't say a bad word about a company, even if you reworded and your question is within the post rules.
The whole online referral "industry" piggy backs on people's old instinct: if another person says it's good, I'll probably like it too. This might have worked in the village.<p>Before you had online reviews, people were stuck with either newspaper product reviews, in which case there would be a paper name and a writer's name attached, or celebrity endorsements, where at least you knew they were being paid.<p>With online reviews, even with real names, the person is as good as anonymous to you. There's no knowing their motivations, and you have to shake your old instinct to trust social proof. This is not as easy as it sounds because it's probably deeply ingrained in people.<p>Nowadays I rarely believe any kind of online review, and it's a bit tragic. I'm sure there's a lot of honest ones there, but a few bad apples...
I was curious to see whether the Wall Street Journal itself had any anomalous reviews and was pleasantly surprised to find out that apparently they don't seem to have engaged in any of the behaviour they describe. Of course, that doesn't mean it's a great place to work [0].<p>Also, I guess the takeaway from the article is that there's no substitute for reaching out through one's own personal network or the networks of acquaintances and trying to speak to someone who actually works for the company in question.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wall-Street-Journal-Reviews-E22431.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wall-Street-Journal-Review...</a>
Isn't it possible to rig Glassdoor by using multiple accounts? It may be harder to achieve in huge corporations, but for small companies, it's way too easy to make the bad reviews seem meaningless.<p>In any case, it's easy to spot when a review isn't honest, good or bad. They often seem scripted, pointing out some bad aspects that aren't really bad, and highlighting the same upsides over and over again.<p>It's just a question of filtering those and getting to what really matters. As for the companies that are forcing employers to write good reviews... how can they be sure of which review was done by who? Can't they just give a bad review instead when asked? I can see that backfiring really quick.
This is absolutely true. Definitely trust your instincts when looking at Glassdoor reviews; do NOT accept them at face value. If there are positive reviews that sound a bit off, take that as a major red flag, as the company is not honest.<p>If you're just starting off, and you're an honest, hard-working person, it doesn't matter how much little experience or knowledge you have, you don't deserve to work at a dishonest company. They're always shit, you don't get too much out of it, and it mars your soul. It's okay to wait a little longer for the right company. So don't be afraid of them (or other pressures) when they try to screw you over. I wish I knew this.
I was taking a look at companies and saw a fair amount of this. The influenced positive reviews do appear to have a pattern to them and are fairly easy to spot, but it skews the numbers if you were not digging that deep.
Don't forget that there are also folks writing bad reviews and often not just one. Sometimes they are toxic and got fired for a good reason. We know all these borderliners where everybody wonders how they passed the interviews.<p>So, there are always two sides of a story. And compared to an Amazon review it's much harder to tell if the product is wrong or its user.<p>People also tend to forget that they just help Glassdoor's sales. Every negative review they write is another reason for the reviewed company to subscribe for Glassdoor. It's not cheap but even early stage startups can easily afford this.
The reviews tend to be extremely accurate from what I have seen. I used to complain about the salary quotes being low or outdated, but it seems like they have improved that quite a bit.<p>I'm sure that there are small, paranoid companies trying to manipulate it, but who cares about the actual ratings on glassdoor? I mean if 37% of the employees 'approve of the CEO' does that even matter?<p>I recommend just reading the negative reviews and ignoring the ones that seem like sour grapes. From what I can tell this gives a pretty good read on what you are getting into.
To be fair, people tend to post on Glassdoor when they have a negative experience.<p>I was dinged for having the audacity of asking a potential data analyst hire simple SQL questions...and SQL was listed on their resume.
Glassdoor is designed to be manipulated. Employers encourage positive reviews and censor negative ones. Employees with an axe to grind leave exaggerated negative reviews. Executives leave astroturfed positive reviews. Everything about Glassdoor is designed to encourage extremes, because that’s how they get “engagement” and, of course, upsell opportunities.<p>If you interpret Glassdoor reviews as anything more than a battleground of vocal minorities, you’re making a mistake. The sample is so biased that you’ll never know how representative they are.
Now I don't even post Glassdoor reviews until I have been gone for 6 months or more. And particularly with a small team, wait until there is significant turnover so my review won't be easily attributed to me.<p>I have worked at a few places, when responding to Glassdoor reviews, have sent out a solicitation to current employees to leave review to drown out the negative ones.<p>It's too bad what started as a good way to get some insight into companies has turned over once it monetizes...
I made a Portuguese alternative to Glassdoor (IT only), and I confirm that is a daily challenge and time consuming find what reviews are honest or not. Fortunately many HR and marketeers use their company email to create fake IT reviews, and a cross check with linkedin handle many cases. Using blockchain is also useful to guarantee that reviews are not manipulated or deleted. I don't want to create spam here, but if anyone has curiosity check for Teamlyzer.
See <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law</a>
These review sites come and go and all end up “going” for the same reason—-it becomes a polluted mess of marketing and manipulated data. Then some new site comes out claiming to be the “new” raw review site where none of this happens... until it does. Rinse and repeat.<p>Glassdoor is now going through it’s jumped the shark moment where everyone catches on that it’s the same BS as all the sites Glassdoor claimed to be replacing. History repeats itself again.
At a past startup that had become overrun with back-stabbing middle-management obsessed with building their own respective empires and in permanent cover-your-ass mode, regularly throwing people from engineering or operations under the bus, the glassdoor reviews predictably became overwhelmingly negative.<p>Every all-hands meeting started concluding with requests that the staff make glowing company reviews. It was a scene straight out of the movie Office Space. The first couple times they did this, the Glassdoor reviews would get a bunch of 5-star contrived "Everything's perfect, best company ever." additions within the same day or two. We in engineering and operations knew they were coming out of the sales & marketing departments, since we all wanted to burn the place to the ground thanks to the awful management.<p>I've seen very similar patterns on other glassdoor company pages. When you see a bunch of positive reviews clustered around the same time period for a company otherwise full of negative stuff, the positive is probably more sales & marketing propaganda, it's their job.
Having worked with a company that does shady stuff like this I eventually changed how I worked to match it.<p>I had a boss who thought it would be useful to track line of code changes per developer, number of features implemented and bugs fixed weighted by original estimates and other non-useful metrics to grade employees during their reviews. I was asked to implement the tools to scrape that info.<p>So what did I do? I used the same metrics and automated my todo list to make sure that I was always in the top 1% of the results. Since I was a lone wolf on a massive multi-year project it wasn't hard to find stuff to do. But when I got to the end of the month and it was trending to show I wouldn't drop a spot my scripts informed me that I was done working. I would also prioritize the level of effort to time left in the month. So if there was only two days left I'd pick up more small tasks to pad my output rather than taking on a bigger task I wouldn't complete in that month.<p>I started doing this after having been there 10 years. 10 years of me doing other jobs that were not mine "for the good of the company." 10 years of me traveling when travel wasn't part of the job. During this time having great number not much happened with regards to compensation. I went from being a team player to doing just as much as I needed to.<p>When I finally left and had my exit interview one of my managers noticed my marks were always top 1%...even in months when the company's total output was shitty. Since I was on my own projects there was no reason why I would have had a dip when other divisions dropped. So I asked, "if I had output 30% more than any other group...would you have given me a 30% raise? a 3% raise?" He said, "no we probably wouldn't have done anything beyond the standard cost of living increase."
I recently quit a software company that spent <i>a lot</i> of time doing two things: fluffing the employees with various benefits, and asking them to write reviews on Glassdoor.<p>Pretty much everyone understood that the actual job sucked in several ways, but the company also had fairly low requirements for acceptance (i.e. don't necessarily need CS degree). Since this type of job is usually considered out of reach for many people, they feel thankful for being accepted, take advantage of the benefits (free dinners and drinks, yearly vacations), and try to work through the daily pain. (pain such as: working in places with low quality of living/food, working for clients who have employees that pee on the bathroom floor, using very small desks in small offices)<p>Every once in a while I would review them on Glassdoor, describing the very real pitfalls of working for the company in various ways. It doesn't take long for the review list to be flooded with people praising the benefits, and I felt like the more honest reviews get buried.
There are so many comments here complaining about Glassdoor's business model.<p>I'm really genuinely curious -- what do you folks thing is a better option for them?<p>Given the constraints that they are a job review site, and they have to make the service free to the people leaving reviews (low barrier to entry), how do you propose they make money as a sustainable business?
I have long suspected this, I actually discussed this about a year ago in an HN comment: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17027287" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17027287</a><p>To restate- I think there are tells you can use to figure out when reviews are being manipulated:<p>Does the distribution make sense? Is it "hollow" in the middle and surrounded by 1's and 5's? Are the 5's just a bit over the top, do they sound overly generic, like there is no passion behind them and/or written in the same style?<p>Does the data add up? Does everyone seem to love the CEO but the overall rating is low, or vice versa?<p>Are the complaints a lot more consistent with the compliments? Even if they aren't being manipulative, if everyone is bitching about the hours or deadline pressure, then there is probably something to it. That can also work the other way too.
A past colleague of mine reached out to see if I had written a negative review on glassdoor. I left on good terms, but the company was going through some very real challenges.<p>Several scathing, albeit somewhat accurate, reviews had been written.<p>Looking now, all but one of the negative reviews have been removed.<p>In short, glassdoor is worthless.
We know what Glassdoor is supposed to do, but it doesn't because the incentives for Glassdoor aren't aligned with its mission. Their real customers are companies that are willing to pay to have good reviews/ratings. They tell you as much if you have ever contacted them about a review problem. For a site like a Glassdoor, to be honest, its customers need to be the job seekers or the job seekers + and the companies.<p>Additionally, people driven to write reviews are often unhappy as most people don't bother. That provides a skewed view of a company and leads to employers trying to encourage employees to post. I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with because that's the system that Glassdoor built. Either way, it's hard to trust it.
If only we had had indications that centralizing all reputation management into one or few places might have adverse effects.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law</a>
>"Ms. Jacobson took credit for the campaigns on her LinkedIn profile, writing that she executed “company-wide employer branding campaigns” on Glassdoor, increasing the number of reviews by more than 1,000, raising the company’s overall rating to 4.4 stars from 3.8 and resulting in SpaceX landing on Glassdoor’s “Best” list two years in a row.<p>Ms. Jacobson didn’t respond to requests for comment. She removed the reference to Glassdoor on her LinkedIn page in mid-December after being contacted by the Journal."<p>So they used a shitty website to boast about an "achievement" that they carried out using another bullshit website. Meanwhile the same HR department is probably ghosting and flaking on candidates. That sounds about right.
This sounds like a system that is no longer valuable for it's original intended use case.<p>I am just thinking out loud, but maybe one feasible response would be for people to create their own anonymous blogs about their experience at a company. I consider that a more distributed approach that may be more difficult for companies to game. If I were to create such a blog, I might use a disposable email address and create a blog on something like neocities [1] and other free static web site providers. Perhaps some of these sites would even allow access via Tor or other proxies.<p>Can you think of any other mediums that may be useful for this purpose?<p>[1] - <a href="https://neocities.org/" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/</a>
FWIW, my company is highly ranked on Glassdoor and they applied the opposite of pressure to leave a review - in fact they said to please wait a few months post-onboarding before reviewing so that reviews were substantive rather than honeymoon period stuff.
I saw that at my old company. All of the people who left our office gave scathing reviews but all of the people who remained mostly from the main office, gave great reviews.<p>Of course the company ignored the bad reviews but thanked everyone who gave great reviews.
Absolutely. I worked in a small software firm in the midwest. I felt bullied and victimised on certain occasions. It was absolutely horrible, and I later came to know that many former employees agreed. I left it about 5 years ago. (I'm keeping the name of the company and the area vague just because I think that they are dangerous, and scour media for former employees dissing on them - reading "Bad Blood" by Carreyrou only confirmed that companies actually do this.) Just out of curiosity, I looked up the company on Glassdoor recently. It was one of the best rated companies in that area. The disingenuousness is unbelievable.
I'm well aware of the last company I worked for requiring reviews of all fresh-from-college hires. HR would press them right after onboarding, and boom, you'd see 6-7 new reviews all following a similar style and template before they even touched code.<p>More recently (and I'm years gone from the company at this point yet can still recognize it) they've been doing the same to their offshore teams in India, and by no means are they in a position to refuse.<p>It isn't even close to hidden, as you can discern the pattern/template six ways from Sunday. If it weren't for those forced reviews, they'd be tanked.
Here's a fun one: <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Backtrace-Reviews-E1742217.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Backtrace-Reviews-E1742217...</a><p>Excerpts from one of the reviews obviously written by the CTO:<p>> Also two other huge tech companies I can't name without getting fired; their names start with letter A.<p>> Co-founders do talk about successes like winning Amazon's contract (huge!)<p>This silly thing of saying the first letter of a client (and then forgetting that they did this and revealing the client anyway) is a dead giveaway. The CTO did that all the time.<p>Never work there!
Textbook case of Goodhart's law: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law</a>
Not too surprising. On my last job hunt I looked around and a lot of the praise felt buzzword-ish and such.<p>Then again the negatives too seemed very specific to a user or department or just weird.
I still do think reviews are the best way to get aggregated feedback on established (companies, products, restaurants etc).<p>In order to normalize reviews for myself, I try go through them and sort by least and quickly skim a few reviews to see if it was something that was very personal/one-off to the affected person or more systematic and then it gives me a better picture. Obviously, no perfect way but would love to hear if/how others take review feedback into consideration.
Also lot of times current or even former employees wont speak out things like this for fear of being identified and retaliated against. The bay area startup world is a small and dare I say insecure place in particular and people are wary of what people will say. The number of miserable employees putting on a happy face for their managers every day is way bigger than I ever understood until I took a break from mgmt and started working alongside them as an IC.
The capture of rating agencies by the entities they would rate seems to be common if not inevitable given the incentives - the companies being rated have a strong financial incentive to fix their ratings while at the same time, the consumers don't pay for the service. So, the agencies eventually go after the only money in play and turn into a protection racket, and perhaps make room in the market for a new agency subject to the same incentives.
Is this actually a surprise to anyone?<p>In my own experience I've seen/heard of this many times, and heard of it from many friends (inside and outside of tech).
What if Glassdoor added a checkbox on the review that says "This review was requested by my employer" or "This review was coerced by my employer".
That information would be anonymous but shown with the company rating so the person submitting the review would be able to secretly rat them out while still appearing to comply with the employer's request.
I've been a little skeptical at how overwhelmingly positive some of the reviews on glassdoor seem. There's ones that turn the cons into positives and seem like they were written by fake accounts. All jobs have at least some bad things, to say that there are none seems a little strange to me.
Nobody should on Glassdoor to determine if they should work at a company. One should always rely on back channel contacts, preferably of people who no longer work at that company.<p>Can one of you smart people here at HN develop a Glass Door competitor that only allows FORMER employees to review a company?
I experienced this at a small cyber security business. They didn't pressure but they REALLY insisted that we review them on GlassDoor in order to get more people to apply for the jobs. In reality, their problem was they were paying ALL the staff compared to the market average.
I won't name the company, but I watched a prominent startup CEO stand in front of the entire company and angrily scold everyone about bad reviews on Glassdoor. He didn't understand why someone would post a negative review online instead of just coming straight to him.
My company recently started a campaign of leaving "honest positive" reviews of your work experience. There was quite a bit of pressure on me since I have only been here a year. They also have been bugging the guy who was hired onto my team six months after me.
Why would be otherwise?<p><a href="https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/1088375928646967297" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/108837592864696729...</a><p>Good rankings help them hire, why wouldn't they optimise the ranking?
I'm not surprised.<p>If you're interested in looking up the pros that a company has to offer, then Glassdoor is great.<p>If you're interested in the cons, then you have to go into Glassdoor knowing that information can be manipulated and/or inflated.
I was approached by a manager at a previous employer & asked if a scathing review on GD was mine. (It was.) He then asked me to remove it (I did) because he feared the topic would be broached on a quarterly investor call.
Was recently looking at ratings for Revolut again and they massively increased their overall ranking in comparison to a year ago, seemed really fishy to me, I presume they did this as their reputation is atrocious.
This is the yelp problem too and the Better Business Bureau as well. It turns out, the business is the party with the money. So in the end, the only viable business is to let them pay to take down reviews.
I'm from Levels.fyi and we're in early stages of launching Company reviews. Would love suggestions on how we can build the best review experience. Feel free to comment or DM at: hello@levels.fyi
This is not even news... I know of one tech outsourcing company, and another utility provider who requires all new hires to complete a (predictably positive) Glassdoor review as part of on boarding.
Look, Glassdoor is complete bullshit. It's unbelievably biased against companies and the CEOs. Basically, the simplest way for an unhappy employee is to write a stupid review to Glassdoor. I used to work in a company which didn't suite everyone and the Glassdoor reviews were brutal. The HR tried to adress these issue and encouraged people to talk with their managers and with HR if they had issues. None of my coworkers ever did that, they just wrote a Glassdoor review and never bothered to talk it out with the managers.<p>The company was receiving calls on daily basis from Glassdoor and their affiliates offering to remove the negative reviews for thousands of dollars. If somthing, this is at least unethical business practice.
It is very known thing. Whatever reasons were to create Glassdoor, but now in practice, it became an instrument of misdirection and is used to _deliberately_ and _intentionally_ mislead people.
Fake news, fake reviews, fake users, fake user groups.. How does one have a relationship with the Internet that is not as abusive as it is today? Can this network work without any trust?
If people game Yelp and Google reviews, why not Glassdoor? I’ve seen companies go from 3 to 4.5 after a concerted push.<p>The truth comes out though. The pie in the sky reviews just aren’t believable.
Welcome to reality. Human nature and behavior doesn't magically change just because there's a webapp. Trust is incredibly hard to create, perhaps harder than ever before.
I worked with a woman whose father owned the company and she openly bragged to us she was dating a guy a Glassdoor and had him remove all our company's negative reviews.
nooo ... you don't say ... unthinkable!<p>this has been well known for so long. but yeah, it deserves to be exposed. unfortunately, it's behind a paywall and outline.com isn't working (did wsj C&D them?), but my guess is they are not comparing the business to yelp.<p>glassdoor == yelp.<p>so this is completely expected and actually the desired behavior.
I haven't bothered to leave reviews. The Dunning-Kruger effect would cause many to see it as the ramblings of a loser, anyway. Sucks that the average two year tenure looks like:<p>Year one: "You aren't doing everything you need to be doing for a promotion."
Year two: "You did everything we asked. Unfortunately, things are little tight right now."<p>A little reason annual reviews are still a thing...stringing people along.
Yeah this happened at my old employer. They got one bad (warranted) review and told everyone to get on their phones (off the company network) to give good reviews.<p>They'd push this initiative occasionally.<p>I reported it to Glassdoor and they never did anything about it.
As a reader, I skip the fake positive reviews and pay attention to the negative reviews. As a reviewer, I make sure my review stays posted, otherwise I will choose to repost.