11 ms·

Glassdoor and its effect on workplace culture

128 points by PascLeRasc 9y ago

ilamont 9y ago
The very idea of a website that encourages people to anonymously critique employers is ludicrous and irresponsible. I think its use is widespread because it makes money. That fact impresses HR executives and the public, leading them all to base business decisions on admittedly untrustworthy information. Just think about it: Any disgruntled employee or job applicant can trash a company publicly. An HR department can spam Glassdoor, singing its own praises. (It seems this happened with the company you quit.) Honest comments will get lost. Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable. (The argument for anonymity is that people wouldn’t post honest comments if employers knew who they were. Duh. That justifies graffiti?) They make money with every posting. That’s how Glassdoor is like the job boards. In fact, Glassdoor is a job board. Like LinkedIn, the site uses the honeypot of “community” to lure you into an ulterior revenue model. https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-reviews https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-...
- mandelbrotwurst 9y ago
  "Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable" Is this true? Do the users not value quality? Surely they'd be more likely to use and continue to use the site (and by extension, increasing Glassdoor's revenue) if they perceive it to contain useful, objective reviews?
- xchip 9y ago
  I see it as a TripAdvisor for jobs, why would that be a bad thing?
  - tomasien 9y ago
    This person has had to recruit for companies with bad Glassdoor reviews and it has made their job harder.
    - empath75 9y ago
      Yeah I have turned down multiple recruiters flat because of glass door reviews. They often don’t even want to tell me the company until I drag it out of them.
      - FireBeyond 9y ago
        I've had recruiters tell me that I will have to go through interviews with them and potentially even someone from the company before they will reveal the name. No. I'm not playing "hour for something good" with my interview time.
      - sidlls 9y ago
        This is probably more because they're afraid you'll skip the middle man and apply directly than because they fear you'll look something up on Glassdoor.
  - bmelton 9y ago
    Because without strong fraud prevention, stuff like this happens: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...
    - perl4ever 9y ago
      There is no source of information that doesn't require engaging with a critical mindset in order to make it useful. Anything that you interpret by rote is easily gamed. As other people have said, this particular fraud is meaningless because it doesn't fit the profile of the sort of thing that would cause problems for users. Misinformation about a real restaurant is an actual problem. Ratings of non-existent restaurants don't matter.
      - bmelton 9y ago
        If you can defraud a site like TravelAdvisor to turn your shed into the best restaurant ever, then you can defraud a site like TravelAdvisor to turn you bad restaurant into a good one, or a competitor's good restaurant into a bad one.
        perl4ever 9y ago
        Do you have an argument to support your opinion? I think your assertion is obviously false. If the restaurant doesn't exist, nobody will provide real reviews. If it does, they may.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I'm not exactly surprised that as head hunter would dislike a service that makes his job harder by reducing information asymmetry.
  - tomasien 9y ago
    Exactly
  - hux_ 9y ago
    How do you tell if it's increasing Information corruption or reducing Information asymmetry? Nobody has an objectitive view. Glassdoor isn't going to come out and say they are producing negative population scale effects, just like Facebook didn't. Once upon a time when Wikileaks/Arab Spring was unfolding everyone thought reducing information asymmetry would be net positive. But here we are with a 24*7 fake news culture in the "information age", and Snowden sitting in Russia of all places.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I don't think "fake news" is actually a uniquely modern issue.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        It's not. It's the norm. It was once called "Yellow Journalism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Reading the opening paragraph, to me it describes just about any news source today: Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a US term for a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism.
      - hux_ 9y ago
        Ya but what nobody gets is simplicity and scale has changed. Some guy with too much time on his hands on twitter or YouTube or FB can unintentionally (cause it's all chaotic) topple a govt or force change policy change.
holydude 9y ago
I found glassdoor insanely accurate. It just really reflects the reality most of the time. I observed at least 3 workplaces and it was exactly like the reviews mentioned. Obviously it is harder to know if it applies to the whole company or just your team but if you can do your research it is fairly accurate
- tdumitrescu 9y ago
  I've always found the reviews much more grim than the reality of places where I've worked. No surprise since it's a venue for departing and departed employees to vent (and then for HR teams to try to counteract by encouraging embarrassing good reviews from current employees), but in either case I've always found myself laughing at reviews of my workplaces, it's like "what company are these people actually working for? Because I'm pretty sure I don't go into a toxic hellscape of an office every day."
  - spynxic 9y ago
    This overall problem might be solved by offering periodic reporting where each subsequent report by a user is a bit more credible.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Individual Glassdoor reviews aren't worth much because you never know the context or background of the author. Sure, it's possible that there is no mentorship and the place is cutthroat -- but it's also possible that reviewer was dead weight, actively rejected offered mentorship, and finally got let go after months of trying to work it out. Impossible to know in any specific instance, unless you already know the author. It's really about the aggregation of reviews. If everything is fine until 6 months ago, and then there is a steady periodic stream of negative reviews referencing a management change, then you can pretty well-assured there was a legitimate shift in the organization that made things worse. If it's just a trickle of some positive (HR lackeys posting fake reviews and/or current employees trying to reassure themselves about how they work at the coolest place in town) and some negative (often bitter people who've been laid off or dismissed trying to project blame onto the company), then you just have to look for the consistent elements and take what you can from them. No easy formula.
draw_down 9y ago
I worked at a place that started featuring Glassdoor reviews on pages about companies (stock ticker pages). Shortly thereafter, they became one of Glassdoor’s top places to work! Wow! Probably a coincidence.
aluminussoma 9y ago
Despite what the article says, Glassdoor still hasn't solved the fake review problem. The pay data is also woefully inaccurate. It works best only with a combination of other sources. The biggest impact to my career has been the semi-anonymous mobile app Blind. I realized I was getting underpaid and I quickly fixed it. I thought I negotiated hard in previous jobs but maybr it was all a ruse to make me feel like I was getting the best salary. Glassdoor and Paysa had lower total compensation numbers for my position.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I concur.. but talking about pay is no longer illegal (until Trump figures that out). So what we should do is talk with each other.
- tdumitrescu 9y ago
  Don't feel too bad about this - salaries (at least in engineering) really have been rising and offers that would have seemed great a few years ago are no longer competitive. It's hard to keep your expectations adjusted to a shifting market.
  - nappadbz 9y ago
    Keep interview-ready and interview every year/two if compensation is significant to your happiness.
- aok1425 9y ago
  Best source of pay data I've seen is H1B pay info: h1bdata.info
  - aluminussoma 9y ago
    I used to think so but I think that is incorrect for the following two reasons: - Stock compensation is not included. This is significant now. - I believe the salary numbers are purposely underreported. The numbers are given to show they are paying a professional wage. I heard (not confirmed) that someone getting paid $200k/year in base salary can be reported as $150k/year, since 150k clears the threshold. I saw salaries in my company that did not reflect what I understand to be the market rate.
noemit 9y ago
Anything that strikes fear in the hearts of employers is good.
jordache 9y ago
glassdoor pay data is stupidly innacurate. Take a company that is headquartered in bay area. If they have an office in location X where X != bay area, the est salary for that company in the context of location X is always going to be much higher due to the bay area HQ. I suspect they may not even filter out bay area salary estimates for location X estimates. There is no way company will pay for bay area salaries for sat location in Omaha.
- perfectstorm 9y ago
  I believe you can filter salaries by location.
tdumitrescu 9y ago
I love this analogy: "Glassdoor upended workplace power dynamics in the same way that Ratemyprofessors.com altered the power dynamics of college lecture halls, where, suddenly, professors had to worry about whether their students found them to be “inspirational” or “hot.”" As a former professor I have always found that site unbelievably odious. Did higher education improve when students (as paying "customers" of the university) got the upper hand in areas like grading practices and curriculum-setting? Does anyone think college education is in a better place today than 20 years ago, except the bizdev and admin staff? Surely Glassdoor could work the same wonders for workplaces...
- marcell 9y ago
  I agree with the concerns about professor rating. Students are in a weird position where they are a “customer” in a sense but their incentives are not aligned with the university for grading. They may ensure up paying $20k to have a professor give them a (justified) failing grade. For employees, it’s a bit better. It is reasonable to look for a good work environment, and employers won’t always be upfront in an interview setting. Having the inside scoop helps the potential employee.
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    Separating teaching and grading might fix this.
    - jimmybot 9y ago
      Is this realistic?
      - bowlich 9y ago
        Sure, my understanding is that's how Oxford works.
      - solidsnack9000 9y ago
        Standardized testing is effectively that.
lkrubner 9y ago
Consider a company that only has 1-Star and 5-Star reviews: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-Reviews-E659519.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-Reviews-E659519.htm What should you think about a company that has no 2 or 3 or 4 star reviews? It only has the extremes, nothing in the middle. Someone writes: "Take a look at the distribution of reviews - either 5 star or 1 star. Seems a bit fishy to me. Nonetheless, I would still rate my experience a 1." Perhaps there are many companies like this?
- kelnos 9y ago
  I think it's just selection bias: the people most likely to take the time to write a review are those who either had an amazing experience or an abysmal one. People with feelings in the middle usually aren't as motivated.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    I would say it is selection bias, but the people who had a miserable experience wrote their reviews, and then management/ownership flooded the site with 5 star reviews to offset the bad reviews (instead of fixing the company of course).
code4tee 9y ago
Glassdoor has a big problem with fake or bad data. The salary data is often very inaccurate (at my last company we had people posting data for offices in cities where we didn’t have offices and with salaries that were just not true). Fake reviews is also a problem—both positive and negotive reviews. Glassdoor does little to help employers correct obviously bad information although they are happy to sell you “premium” services where you can bury things you don’t like further down the display of data. Their sales people call this “featuring” content. Sigh.
- new299 9y ago
  From what I've seen, it's often employers posting fake (positive) reviews anyway.
- erikb 9y ago
  I love how you put the whole business case into a single comment. Officially they track an objective interpretation of the company. Only few companies would really get positive review though. So they also offer a way for the companies to improve their reviews for cash. And that is the main income probably.
danieltillett 9y ago
The question is if there is any signal in all the noise. In aggregate I assume yes, but for individual companies with small numbers of reviews I have my doubts.
kazuki 9y ago
A few months ago I've been interviewing with small startups (say companies with 20 employees) and Glassdoor wasn't useful at all. These companies either have no review at all (everyone is working so hard and don't have time to write a review; or just is afraid writing something and later identified), or have lots of 5-star review (which probably indicates management team asked employees to write good reviews for hiring).
Yabood 9y ago
My experience with Glassdoor has been terrible. A couple of months ago I found an email notification in my inbox that someone had left us a review. I was surprised because we're an early stage three-person startup. We never hired any employees or contractors. The review was bad, and the reviewer who was anonymous claimed that he/she had done an internship with us. As the "owner" of our company's profile on Glassdoor, I had no access to any information about the reviewer, nothing. I flagged the review hoping that Glassdoor would take care of it. A day later I received an email saying, we're sorry, there's nothing we can do, the review stays. They told me that my only option was to reply to the review and hope they'd see that its not for us and remove it. Needless to say, I was not happy. I took a closer look at the review, and found out that the reviewer had mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did some digging and found another company with the same name in Singapore. I reached out to Glassdoor again with all this info, screenshots, website links, etc and there response was basically the same. Something about their community policy. I was forced to reply to the reviewer who eventually realized we were not the same company and ended up removing the review. The whole process was a huge waste of time and energy. Never again will I trust Glassdoor or anything on it. By the way, there's no way to remove your company's profile. Think long and hard before you create a profile there.
- RhodesianHunter 9y ago
  This all seems quite reasonable though. You want people to be able to signal terrible employers to the rest of the market. It really sucks that you got stuck in that situation, but if Glassdoor starts agreeing to take down bad reviews then they just turn into a shakedown racket like Yelp.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    The review was for the wrong company though! I took a closer look at the review, and found out that the reviewer had mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did some digging and found another company with the same name in Singapore. I reached out to Glassdoor again with all this info, screenshots, website links, etc and there response was basically the same.
  - 9y ago
sidlls 9y ago
I find the Glassdoor website unbearably slow and a terrible experience all around. The negative reviews for the engineering department at the company I work for are mostly accurate. The positive reviews are almost all too generic or over the top to be useful. Some of them are clearly written by HR in a PR campaign. I'm actually surprised it has much of an impact, given how slow and horrible the UX is and how easily gamed the review system is.
Zaheer 9y ago
Glassdoor's effect in this space is undoubtedly huge and typically the first stop for most people seriously considering an offer from a company. There are several new players though that I think importantly complement Glassdoor in different areas: Salaries - www.Paysa.com General Discussion - us.teamblind.com - Important because this is for current occupation rather than Glassdoor's focus on future occupation Leveling / Titles - www.levels.fyi - Disclosure: I work on this
deviationblue 9y ago
The pay data on glass door is almost always lower than the market.
- drdeadringer 9y ago
  How can I tell?
  - deviationblue 9y ago
    Use other sites to compare, like Paysa.
calvinbhai 9y ago
As an employee, I had a bad experience with Glassdoor. I got shafted by my employer who promised to start the green card process immediately on joining, managed (knowingly or not) to delay the start, and by the time it started, they prepared the petition so weak, that it was too late to complete the process before my 6yrs of h1b expired(because they had to redo the petition a few times). Now I explained this very clearly in my review and just mentioned that if you are an high skilled immigrant who has precarious requirements, then don’t join this company. In fact I added all the good things about the company, but always made a point to glorify the fact that they screwed me and left me jobless (because my authorization ended). What happened to that review? It never showed up in Glassdoor reviews for that company. And my account was suspended. I thought there was some “pay to remove negative review” option for employers. Now, that employer has more than 4.5 stars average reviews, and its glowing overall. If this is how Glassdoor works, I don’t think it is meant to help the past, current, prospective employees.
- Judgmentality 9y ago
  I've seen something similar with my company. I actually regularly check it, and will notice negative reviews almost always disappear within a couple days (positive reviews never disappear though). I emailed Glassdoor asking about their community guidelines and how to ensure I could leave a review that wouldn't be removed, and they responded with nothing of substance. As far as I'm concerned, Glassdoor makes their money by pandering to the companies who have a vested interest in hiding negative reviews and is an unreliable source of information.
  - Udik 9y ago
    Same here, the company I used to work for had a lot of strongly negative reviews by disgruntled employees (in fact the turnover was pretty high). Magically most of them disappeared, while glowing positive ones have filled up the void (all written in the same upbeat language that is the trademark of HR-written job descriptions: "we work hard and play hard", etc.). Glassdoor claimed some of the reviews were removed because they violated this or that community standard. However, this wouldn't justify removing the numerical score, would it?
DickScarington 9y ago
Glassdoor routinely removes negative comments on companies.
- xchip 9y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing any evidences of that, do you have any?
DickScarington 9y ago
Glassdoor routinely removes negative reviews.
stevenwoo 9y ago
It's interesting to me they are using human moderators and Americans at that (for what seems to be American/British companies) - I don't know much about machine learning but it seems like this is the only way to do this somewhat accurately given the expressiveness of written English. The current attempts by the (admittedly much larger) Facebook and Google to use English literate in foreign countries to moderate content is almost self parody at this point from the examples given in that documentary that made the front page of hacker news last month.
bgutierrez 9y ago
I personally saw the reaction within Zillow Group when Spencer Rascoff got a bad rating on Glassdoor. The reviewer was located, the review was quickly deleted, and Spencer's rating continues to be a source of pride for him. Don't get me wrong. He's extremely capable and will probably continue to run ZG very well for years to come. But his Glassdoor rating should be lower and it irks me every time I hear it touted.
goddamnsteve 9y ago
Have been having a touch time fighting Glassdoor to remove fake reviews. I have no clue whatsoever how Glassdoor verifies their reviews, and their support is probably the worst I've ever experienced with any American company. Not sure how much this is going to change or affect them. But still, thought I should tell this out.
px1999 9y ago
It's a shame that people don't see glassdoor for what it probably is - just another shakedown racket (like yelp, tripadvisor, BBB etc).
perfectstorm 9y ago
former Glassdoor employee here. I see lot of people complaining about their reviews being removed from Glassdoor (GD) site and the occasional allegation that GD take money to remove negative reviews. AFAIK glassdoor doesn't take money from any company to remove negative reviews. I left GD a year ago so things could've changed since then but I doubt it. People complain because their reviews were removed but have you read it objectively ? Do you single out a particular person because that's against GD rules. I know a former coworker of mine (@GD) who left a 1 star review. His review was promptly removed from GD page because he was bashing his manager. For a small company like GD it's easy to figure out who that manager is based on the employer title. After removing his review, he was given an opportunity to edit it but he refused to edit it. I wrote an OK review for GD after I left and it's still up there on GD site. As for fake reviews it's hard to remove them automatically. A good number of people uses those temporary email addresses to leave a review (10min emails) so you can't really compare the email addresses. I guess they could compare the IP addresses and remove duplicate submissions from the same IP ? But sometimes multiple users share same IP (correct me if I'm wrong) so that would result in more confusion and allegations. When I joined GD any engineer could access the reviews table on production/admin page but they have tightened it up since then. only selected engineers have access to production table and they started implementing granular controls on the admin page. I remember seeing fake reviews on my previous employer's page but I chose not to flag them. My former employer's CEO himself left more than three 5 star reviews to bump up his ratings. Nowadays I use GD for job search, reviews, interviews and benefits research. Salary data is very unreliable especially for engineers in the Bay Area. I know they keep talking about archiving old salary data or making adjustments but I don't know if they ever implemented it. The thing about reviews is that you have to read it between the lines. If it's a 5 star review and the only con says something like the commute sucks there's a good chance that it's a fake review. About Salary: they did release a Know Your Worth tool sometime in 2016 which is pretty accurate in my case (Bay Area + Sr. Software Engineer). Ironically I know a few people who left GD because of this tool :)

128 points by PascLeRasc 9y ago

The very idea of a website that encourages people to anonymously critique employers is ludicrous and irresponsible. I think its use is widespread because it makes money. That fact impresses HR executives and the public, leading them all to base business decisions on admittedly untrustworthy information. Just think about it: Any disgruntled employee or job applicant can trash a company publicly. An HR department can spam Glassdoor, singing its own praises. (It seems this happened with the company you quit.) Honest comments will get lost. Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable. (The argument for anonymity is that people wouldn’t post honest comments if employers knew who they were. Duh. That justifies graffiti?) They make money with every posting. That’s how Glassdoor is like the job boards. In fact, Glassdoor is a job board. Like LinkedIn, the site uses the honeypot of “community” to lure you into an ulterior revenue model. https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-reviews https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-...

mandelbrotwurst 9y ago
"Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable" Is this true? Do the users not value quality? Surely they'd be more likely to use and continue to use the site (and by extension, increasing Glassdoor's revenue) if they perceive it to contain useful, objective reviews?
xchip 9y ago
I see it as a TripAdvisor for jobs, why would that be a bad thing?
- tomasien 9y ago
  This person has had to recruit for companies with bad Glassdoor reviews and it has made their job harder.
  - empath75 9y ago
    Yeah I have turned down multiple recruiters flat because of glass door reviews. They often don’t even want to tell me the company until I drag it out of them.
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      I've had recruiters tell me that I will have to go through interviews with them and potentially even someone from the company before they will reveal the name. No. I'm not playing "hour for something good" with my interview time.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      This is probably more because they're afraid you'll skip the middle man and apply directly than because they fear you'll look something up on Glassdoor.
- bmelton 9y ago
  Because without strong fraud prevention, stuff like this happens: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top-rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    There is no source of information that doesn't require engaging with a critical mindset in order to make it useful. Anything that you interpret by rote is easily gamed. As other people have said, this particular fraud is meaningless because it doesn't fit the profile of the sort of thing that would cause problems for users. Misinformation about a real restaurant is an actual problem. Ratings of non-existent restaurants don't matter.
    - bmelton 9y ago
      If you can defraud a site like TravelAdvisor to turn your shed into the best restaurant ever, then you can defraud a site like TravelAdvisor to turn you bad restaurant into a good one, or a competitor's good restaurant into a bad one.
      - perl4ever 9y ago
        Do you have an argument to support your opinion? I think your assertion is obviously false. If the restaurant doesn't exist, nobody will provide real reviews. If it does, they may.
emodendroket 9y ago
I'm not exactly surprised that as head hunter would dislike a service that makes his job harder by reducing information asymmetry.
- tomasien 9y ago
  Exactly
- hux_ 9y ago
  How do you tell if it's increasing Information corruption or reducing Information asymmetry? Nobody has an objectitive view. Glassdoor isn't going to come out and say they are producing negative population scale effects, just like Facebook didn't. Once upon a time when Wikileaks/Arab Spring was unfolding everyone thought reducing information asymmetry would be net positive. But here we are with a 24*7 fake news culture in the "information age", and Snowden sitting in Russia of all places.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I don't think "fake news" is actually a uniquely modern issue.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      It's not. It's the norm. It was once called "Yellow Journalism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism Reading the opening paragraph, to me it describes just about any news source today: Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a US term for a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism.
    - hux_ 9y ago
      Ya but what nobody gets is simplicity and scale has changed. Some guy with too much time on his hands on twitter or YouTube or FB can unintentionally (cause it's all chaotic) topple a govt or force change policy change.

holydude 9y ago

I found glassdoor insanely accurate. It just really reflects the reality most of the time. I observed at least 3 workplaces and it was exactly like the reviews mentioned. Obviously it is harder to know if it applies to the whole company or just your team but if you can do your research it is fairly accurate

tdumitrescu 9y ago
I've always found the reviews much more grim than the reality of places where I've worked. No surprise since it's a venue for departing and departed employees to vent (and then for HR teams to try to counteract by encouraging embarrassing good reviews from current employees), but in either case I've always found myself laughing at reviews of my workplaces, it's like "what company are these people actually working for? Because I'm pretty sure I don't go into a toxic hellscape of an office every day."
- spynxic 9y ago
  This overall problem might be solved by offering periodic reporting where each subsequent report by a user is a bit more credible.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Individual Glassdoor reviews aren't worth much because you never know the context or background of the author. Sure, it's possible that there is no mentorship and the place is cutthroat -- but it's also possible that reviewer was dead weight, actively rejected offered mentorship, and finally got let go after months of trying to work it out. Impossible to know in any specific instance, unless you already know the author. It's really about the aggregation of reviews. If everything is fine until 6 months ago, and then there is a steady periodic stream of negative reviews referencing a management change, then you can pretty well-assured there was a legitimate shift in the organization that made things worse. If it's just a trickle of some positive (HR lackeys posting fake reviews and/or current employees trying to reassure themselves about how they work at the coolest place in town) and some negative (often bitter people who've been laid off or dismissed trying to project blame onto the company), then you just have to look for the consistent elements and take what you can from them. No easy formula.

draw_down 9y ago

I worked at a place that started featuring Glassdoor reviews on pages about companies (stock ticker pages). Shortly thereafter, they became one of Glassdoor’s top places to work! Wow! Probably a coincidence.

aluminussoma 9y ago

Despite what the article says, Glassdoor still hasn't solved the fake review problem. The pay data is also woefully inaccurate. It works best only with a combination of other sources. The biggest impact to my career has been the semi-anonymous mobile app Blind. I realized I was getting underpaid and I quickly fixed it. I thought I negotiated hard in previous jobs but maybr it was all a ruse to make me feel like I was getting the best salary. Glassdoor and Paysa had lower total compensation numbers for my position.

sjg007 9y ago
I concur.. but talking about pay is no longer illegal (until Trump figures that out). So what we should do is talk with each other.
tdumitrescu 9y ago
Don't feel too bad about this - salaries (at least in engineering) really have been rising and offers that would have seemed great a few years ago are no longer competitive. It's hard to keep your expectations adjusted to a shifting market.
- nappadbz 9y ago
  Keep interview-ready and interview every year/two if compensation is significant to your happiness.
aok1425 9y ago
Best source of pay data I've seen is H1B pay info: h1bdata.info
- aluminussoma 9y ago
  I used to think so but I think that is incorrect for the following two reasons: - Stock compensation is not included. This is significant now. - I believe the salary numbers are purposely underreported. The numbers are given to show they are paying a professional wage. I heard (not confirmed) that someone getting paid $200k/year in base salary can be reported as $150k/year, since 150k clears the threshold. I saw salaries in my company that did not reflect what I understand to be the market rate.

noemit 9y ago

Anything that strikes fear in the hearts of employers is good.

jordache 9y ago

glassdoor pay data is stupidly innacurate. Take a company that is headquartered in bay area. If they have an office in location X where X != bay area, the est salary for that company in the context of location X is always going to be much higher due to the bay area HQ. I suspect they may not even filter out bay area salary estimates for location X estimates. There is no way company will pay for bay area salaries for sat location in Omaha.

perfectstorm 9y ago
I believe you can filter salaries by location.

tdumitrescu 9y ago

I love this analogy: "Glassdoor upended workplace power dynamics in the same way that Ratemyprofessors.com altered the power dynamics of college lecture halls, where, suddenly, professors had to worry about whether their students found them to be “inspirational” or “hot.”" As a former professor I have always found that site unbelievably odious. Did higher education improve when students (as paying "customers" of the university) got the upper hand in areas like grading practices and curriculum-setting? Does anyone think college education is in a better place today than 20 years ago, except the bizdev and admin staff? Surely Glassdoor could work the same wonders for workplaces...

marcell 9y ago
I agree with the concerns about professor rating. Students are in a weird position where they are a “customer” in a sense but their incentives are not aligned with the university for grading. They may ensure up paying $20k to have a professor give them a (justified) failing grade. For employees, it’s a bit better. It is reasonable to look for a good work environment, and employers won’t always be upfront in an interview setting. Having the inside scoop helps the potential employee.
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  Separating teaching and grading might fix this.
  - jimmybot 9y ago
    Is this realistic?
    - bowlich 9y ago
      Sure, my understanding is that's how Oxford works.
    - solidsnack9000 9y ago
      Standardized testing is effectively that.

lkrubner 9y ago

Consider a company that only has 1-Star and 5-Star reviews: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-Reviews-E659519.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-Reviews-E659519.htm What should you think about a company that has no 2 or 3 or 4 star reviews? It only has the extremes, nothing in the middle. Someone writes: "Take a look at the distribution of reviews - either 5 star or 1 star. Seems a bit fishy to me. Nonetheless, I would still rate my experience a 1." Perhaps there are many companies like this?

kelnos 9y ago
I think it's just selection bias: the people most likely to take the time to write a review are those who either had an amazing experience or an abysmal one. People with feelings in the middle usually aren't as motivated.
- Clubber 9y ago
  I would say it is selection bias, but the people who had a miserable experience wrote their reviews, and then management/ownership flooded the site with 5 star reviews to offset the bad reviews (instead of fixing the company of course).

code4tee 9y ago

Glassdoor has a big problem with fake or bad data. The salary data is often very inaccurate (at my last company we had people posting data for offices in cities where we didn’t have offices and with salaries that were just not true). Fake reviews is also a problem—both positive and negotive reviews. Glassdoor does little to help employers correct obviously bad information although they are happy to sell you “premium” services where you can bury things you don’t like further down the display of data. Their sales people call this “featuring” content. Sigh.

new299 9y ago
From what I've seen, it's often employers posting fake (positive) reviews anyway.
erikb 9y ago
I love how you put the whole business case into a single comment. Officially they track an objective interpretation of the company. Only few companies would really get positive review though. So they also offer a way for the companies to improve their reviews for cash. And that is the main income probably.

danieltillett 9y ago

The question is if there is any signal in all the noise. In aggregate I assume yes, but for individual companies with small numbers of reviews I have my doubts.

kazuki 9y ago

A few months ago I've been interviewing with small startups (say companies with 20 employees) and Glassdoor wasn't useful at all. These companies either have no review at all (everyone is working so hard and don't have time to write a review; or just is afraid writing something and later identified), or have lots of 5-star review (which probably indicates management team asked employees to write good reviews for hiring).

Yabood 9y ago

My experience with Glassdoor has been terrible. A couple of months ago I found an email notification in my inbox that someone had left us a review. I was surprised because we're an early stage three-person startup. We never hired any employees or contractors. The review was bad, and the reviewer who was anonymous claimed that he/she had done an internship with us. As the "owner" of our company's profile on Glassdoor, I had no access to any information about the reviewer, nothing. I flagged the review hoping that Glassdoor would take care of it. A day later I received an email saying, we're sorry, there's nothing we can do, the review stays. They told me that my only option was to reply to the review and hope they'd see that its not for us and remove it. Needless to say, I was not happy. I took a closer look at the review, and found out that the reviewer had mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did some digging and found another company with the same name in Singapore. I reached out to Glassdoor again with all this info, screenshots, website links, etc and there response was basically the same. Something about their community policy. I was forced to reply to the reviewer who eventually realized we were not the same company and ended up removing the review. The whole process was a huge waste of time and energy. Never again will I trust Glassdoor or anything on it. By the way, there's no way to remove your company's profile. Think long and hard before you create a profile there.

RhodesianHunter 9y ago
This all seems quite reasonable though. You want people to be able to signal terrible employers to the rest of the market. It really sucks that you got stuck in that situation, but if Glassdoor starts agreeing to take down bad reviews then they just turn into a shakedown racket like Yelp.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  The review was for the wrong company though! I took a closer look at the review, and found out that the reviewer had mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did some digging and found another company with the same name in Singapore. I reached out to Glassdoor again with all this info, screenshots, website links, etc and there response was basically the same.
- 9y ago

sidlls 9y ago

I find the Glassdoor website unbearably slow and a terrible experience all around. The negative reviews for the engineering department at the company I work for are mostly accurate. The positive reviews are almost all too generic or over the top to be useful. Some of them are clearly written by HR in a PR campaign. I'm actually surprised it has much of an impact, given how slow and horrible the UX is and how easily gamed the review system is.

Zaheer 9y ago

Glassdoor's effect in this space is undoubtedly huge and typically the first stop for most people seriously considering an offer from a company. There are several new players though that I think importantly complement Glassdoor in different areas: Salaries - www.Paysa.com General Discussion - us.teamblind.com - Important because this is for current occupation rather than Glassdoor's focus on future occupation Leveling / Titles - www.levels.fyi - Disclosure: I work on this

deviationblue 9y ago

The pay data on glass door is almost always lower than the market.

drdeadringer 9y ago
How can I tell?
- deviationblue 9y ago
  Use other sites to compare, like Paysa.

calvinbhai 9y ago

As an employee, I had a bad experience with Glassdoor. I got shafted by my employer who promised to start the green card process immediately on joining, managed (knowingly or not) to delay the start, and by the time it started, they prepared the petition so weak, that it was too late to complete the process before my 6yrs of h1b expired(because they had to redo the petition a few times). Now I explained this very clearly in my review and just mentioned that if you are an high skilled immigrant who has precarious requirements, then don’t join this company. In fact I added all the good things about the company, but always made a point to glorify the fact that they screwed me and left me jobless (because my authorization ended). What happened to that review? It never showed up in Glassdoor reviews for that company. And my account was suspended. I thought there was some “pay to remove negative review” option for employers. Now, that employer has more than 4.5 stars average reviews, and its glowing overall. If this is how Glassdoor works, I don’t think it is meant to help the past, current, prospective employees.

Judgmentality 9y ago
I've seen something similar with my company. I actually regularly check it, and will notice negative reviews almost always disappear within a couple days (positive reviews never disappear though). I emailed Glassdoor asking about their community guidelines and how to ensure I could leave a review that wouldn't be removed, and they responded with nothing of substance. As far as I'm concerned, Glassdoor makes their money by pandering to the companies who have a vested interest in hiding negative reviews and is an unreliable source of information.
- Udik 9y ago
  Same here, the company I used to work for had a lot of strongly negative reviews by disgruntled employees (in fact the turnover was pretty high). Magically most of them disappeared, while glowing positive ones have filled up the void (all written in the same upbeat language that is the trademark of HR-written job descriptions: "we work hard and play hard", etc.). Glassdoor claimed some of the reviews were removed because they violated this or that community standard. However, this wouldn't justify removing the numerical score, would it?

DickScarington 9y ago

Glassdoor routinely removes negative comments on companies.

xchip 9y ago
I'd be interested in seeing any evidences of that, do you have any?

DickScarington 9y ago

Glassdoor routinely removes negative reviews.

stevenwoo 9y ago

It's interesting to me they are using human moderators and Americans at that (for what seems to be American/British companies) - I don't know much about machine learning but it seems like this is the only way to do this somewhat accurately given the expressiveness of written English. The current attempts by the (admittedly much larger) Facebook and Google to use English literate in foreign countries to moderate content is almost self parody at this point from the examples given in that documentary that made the front page of hacker news last month.

bgutierrez 9y ago

I personally saw the reaction within Zillow Group when Spencer Rascoff got a bad rating on Glassdoor. The reviewer was located, the review was quickly deleted, and Spencer's rating continues to be a source of pride for him. Don't get me wrong. He's extremely capable and will probably continue to run ZG very well for years to come. But his Glassdoor rating should be lower and it irks me every time I hear it touted.

goddamnsteve 9y ago

Have been having a touch time fighting Glassdoor to remove fake reviews. I have no clue whatsoever how Glassdoor verifies their reviews, and their support is probably the worst I've ever experienced with any American company. Not sure how much this is going to change or affect them. But still, thought I should tell this out.

px1999 9y ago

It's a shame that people don't see glassdoor for what it probably is - just another shakedown racket (like yelp, tripadvisor, BBB etc).

perfectstorm 9y ago

former Glassdoor employee here. I see lot of people complaining about their reviews being removed from Glassdoor (GD) site and the occasional allegation that GD take money to remove negative reviews. AFAIK glassdoor doesn't take money from any company to remove negative reviews. I left GD a year ago so things could've changed since then but I doubt it. People complain because their reviews were removed but have you read it objectively ? Do you single out a particular person because that's against GD rules. I know a former coworker of mine (@GD) who left a 1 star review. His review was promptly removed from GD page because he was bashing his manager. For a small company like GD it's easy to figure out who that manager is based on the employer title. After removing his review, he was given an opportunity to edit it but he refused to edit it. I wrote an OK review for GD after I left and it's still up there on GD site. As for fake reviews it's hard to remove them automatically. A good number of people uses those temporary email addresses to leave a review (10min emails) so you can't really compare the email addresses. I guess they could compare the IP addresses and remove duplicate submissions from the same IP ? But sometimes multiple users share same IP (correct me if I'm wrong) so that would result in more confusion and allegations. When I joined GD any engineer could access the reviews table on production/admin page but they have tightened it up since then. only selected engineers have access to production table and they started implementing granular controls on the admin page. I remember seeing fake reviews on my previous employer's page but I chose not to flag them. My former employer's CEO himself left more than three 5 star reviews to bump up his ratings. Nowadays I use GD for job search, reviews, interviews and benefits research. Salary data is very unreliable especially for engineers in the Bay Area. I know they keep talking about archiving old salary data or making adjustments but I don't know if they ever implemented it. The thing about reviews is that you have to read it between the lines. If it's a 5 star review and the only con says something like the commute sucks there's a good chance that it's a fake review. About Salary: they did release a Know Your Worth tool sometime in 2016 which is pretty accurate in my case (Bay Area + Sr. Software Engineer). Ironically I know a few people who left GD because of this tool :)