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Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

• pnutjam 8y ago
  paywalled, but I've seen this in action.
  • longerthoughts 8y ago
    Meaning you were pressured by an employer? Would be interesting if Glassdoor periodically reached out to users to revise reviews and capture sentiment "before and after" working at a given company.
    • expathacker 8y ago
      Glassdoor does provide the ability to review the interview process itself which somewhat fits the bill.
    • pnutjam 8y ago
      CEO newsletter high-lighted recent glassdoor reviews and "refuted" them internally, along with a soft recommendation to leave a good review. Not necessarily under handed, but still gaming the system.
• Benlights 8y ago
  url to get around the paywall https://outline.com/y4krPm https://outline.com/y4krPm
• sharadov 8y ago
  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.
  • vageli 8y ago
    > 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. There is no harm in disclosing the company at which this occurred. If anything, there should be a website cataloguing the companies that do this.
  • test6554 8y ago
    There's also the potential for skewed reviews when companies offer bonuses for financial or recruiting performance
  • yoz-y 8y ago
    But when the people left they changed their review to something awful no? I mean, in the long run such behavior should not work.
    • Profan 8y ago
      Consider that if they know when you wrote your review, they know which your review is, if you then change your review, that's a pretty blatant way of telling them exactly who you are, which might not go over well if they have any sway at all (or if they know someone who might be able to block your progress later).
      • yoz-y 8y ago
        I see. I suppose this is also a problem in small companies in which the reviews could be easily identified as well.
    • sharadov 8y ago
      Some folks did, but most people by the time they are out of the door don't care.
  • johnrogers0 8y ago
• SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  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.
  • TheAnig 8y ago
    I have friends who say working for Ubisoft isn't as bad. Especially in the gaming industry. But obviously its not as good as working for a real tech company.
    • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      I believe that Ubisoft may not be that bad, but it's still in an industry that succeeds on the backs of it's employees, I can't see how it would stack up against industries that don't make it a habit of brutal overtime and low pay.
  • duxup 8y ago
    Nothing beats knowing someone there who you know their general perspective on work so you know how to frame their input. These sites like Glassdoor, Yelp, etc.... there's no context.
  • lallysingh 8y ago
    Just people you talk to. And even then it depends on where they are, and their own criteria.
  • alexandercrohde 8y ago
    It's the natural cycle of the internet. 1. Be a nobody company 2. Utilize generous user content to build up an important knowledge-base/economy 3. People begin to trust the information in the system and come to rely on it 4. Sell-out entirely and make a lot of money letting people buy influence 5. People abandon the site realizing it has no signal anymore (Digg, Reddit, Amazon, Glassdoor, experts-exchange, facebook, google search ~ish) Notable exceptions: Craigslist, HN, stackoverflow, wikipedia, youtube
• duxup 8y ago
  Not too surprising. On my last job hunt I looked around and a lot of the praise felt buzzword-ish and such. Then again the negatives too seemed very specific to a user or department or just weird.
• momentmaker 8y ago
  Glassdoor was acquired by Indeed which was acquired by Japan's Recruit Co. Ltd. So keep that in mind.
  • telecuda 8y ago
    Therein lies my gripe with Glassdoor. Once we started hearing Glassdoor mentioned by candidates during interviews, we created a Company Page then shared it with current employees. Yes, we got a few positive reviews, then immediately staff started receiving daily recruiting emails along the lines of, "You could make $10,000 more at the same job in your city. Apply here." As the employer on the account, we of course were not getting these emails. It's not that I have an issue with employees getting solicitations - it's the natural process - it's just a bit deceptive to employers who think creating a company page is all positive, then immediately their staff gets recruited harder.
  • clamprecht 8y ago
    I just searched "Glassdoor acquired" and the results say that Glassdoor was acquired by Recruit, not by Indeed. As a former Indeed employee, I hope they don't mix the Glassdoor review slime with Indeed.
    • momentmaker 8y ago
      https://www.geekwire.com/2018/glassdoor-acquired-1-2-billion-japan-based-hr-giant-recruit-holdings/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/glassdoor-acquired-1-2-billion... I stated Indeed was acquired that holding company.
• sharms 8y ago
  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.
  • colechristensen 8y ago
    Looking at the dates of reviews really helps. They tend to cluster when people are being asked to review.
• aerovistae 8y ago
  You don't say! I used to work as an engineer at a truly awful little company, the worst I've been at, and when I left I gave them a scathing review. Not long after, several new reviews popped up. Here are some choice excerpts, get a load of this: > 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. > [skipping forward a bit] >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. >Cons >Former employees that sit in dark rooms and write negative reviews in between shifts at the local convenience store. --------------- Then they separately put up some absurd propaganda reviews. This one was titled "Sunshine, Unicorns and GumDrops," if you can believe that: > 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. Then they had another one titled "Like a family", here's an excerpt~ > You aren't just a number or a body behind a computer screen. If you're going through a personal issue, … 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." -------- There's another review titled "home away from home," and another called "long time here and worth it," but you get the point.
  • sevensor 8y ago
    Run from any prospective employer who tells you, "we're like a family." They mean it an all the worst ways. Feuding, dysfunction, racist uncles, getting kicked out of the house.
    • NorthOf33rd 8y ago
      I just sat through a company wide "Sensitivity Training" at my company (which I'm very much looking forward to leaving, and leaving a review for,) where "We're a family" was repeated ad nausium. I was a little shocked that this was coming from HR and Staff. It was almost a cultish call and response of bullshit. The reality is, we're not family. I don't have to be sensitive to my family. If I don't like them, I can say and do as I please. If they don't like me, the same. I don't have to care about their feelings, I don't have to accept their life choices. I don't have to see them every day. I don't have to accomplish tasks with them. I can quarrel with them, and eventually they may choose to forgive me because of kinship, or not. Point being, there are precisely zero commonalities between family and work peers. And there shouldn't be. The contrarian jerk in me really wanted to yell an epithet during training and say something along the lines of "What, if we're a family, I'm the racist uncle that your dad keeps inviting to dinner despite his offensive tirades and uncomfortable leering at your sister. Deal with it."
• ticmasta 8y ago
  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.
  • gtirloni 8y ago
    Their policy on negative reviews seems pretty decent. https://help.glassdoor.com/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-I-do-about-negative-reviews-on-Glassdoor/en_US/Legal_FAQs https://help.glassdoor.com/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-...
    • i_cant_speel 8y ago
      Their Legal Action section sounds vaguely threatening. > Also, if we feel strongly that your lawsuit is primarily intended to chill free speech, we may take extra steps to let the world know what you are up to.
      • FireBeyond 8y ago
        "may" is such a weasel word. If you're a cellular company, "may" means "will". "If you are in the higher tiers of data use, we may throttle your bandwidth". If you're Glassdoor who sells reputation management and HR services to the very employers being reviewed, "may" means "we're paying lip service to our critics".
        • smelendez 8y ago
          May throttle doesn't necessarily mean "will throttle." The company is giving itself the latitude not to throttle, or to not throttle exactly at the data cap. In other words, you can't rely on that throttling if you're, say, connecting to some cloud service that's charging you by the gigabyte to transfer data.
• portugu 8y ago
  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.
  • blotter_paper 8y ago
    I just read the crypto-reporter piece on Teamlyzer. My understanding is that you're just putting hashes of reviews on chain and not the full reviews (correct me if I misunderstand). I'm really glad you're doing this, it seems like a move in the right direction, but I have questions about the details. How do you intend to handle posts that need to be taken down for legal reasons? This could be libel or links to illegal content (copyrighted torrent files, child pornography). Do you intend to remove these from your stored review log, and replace them with a message explaining why? Do you prescreen reviews? Prescreening should work in most cases, but could fail when links point to content that changes, and libel laws are tricky (I assume hiring lawyers to review reviews would be prohibitively expensive). Prescreening also raises some of the same questions that redactions do, albeit without the retroactive element. If reviews do start getting redacted, leaving obvious unaccounted for hashes in your blockchain records, how are users supposed to know whether you're responding to legitimate legal problems or just playing the same game Glassdoor is? I'm really interested in your answers, because I like this direction but I don't see obvious answers to the problem of laws (besides hosting on the darknet).
    • portugu 8y ago
      Hi. We store the complete review in IPFS using the Po.et network. Before that, each review is manually checked by the community (similar reputation and moderation system in stackoverflow) and controversial or danger content is just rejected. The trusted timestamp is locked, some implementations like BigchainDB (if i remember correctly) use versions to handle the needed of update a previous hashed content. Po.et doesn't have that feature currently. Thanks
• BlameKaneda 8y ago
  I'm not surprised. If you're interested in looking up the pros that a company has to offer, then Glassdoor is great. If you're interested in the cons, then you have to go into Glassdoor knowing that information can be manipulated and/or inflated.
  • Cofike 8y ago
    I go into it thinking the opposite. Reviews clearly written by management or someone trying to paint a better picture of the company than there really is. Cons can still be misleading but I’d be more weary of a fake positive review than a negative one. Maybe I’m being gamed too.
  • subpixel 8y ago
    Unless the complany can delete or edit previously posted reviews, I feel like I can still use the site to find valuable information. If they can do that - game over, Glassdoor is useless. But I am capable of filtering through some fluff to get the honesty.
• jt2190 8y ago
  Could LinkedIn be mined for a more reliable stat, say turnover by job title?
  • LoSboccacc 8y ago
    Likely but they API access is throttled. They sell recruiting services after all. The % of actively searching in a company (by job title) could also be a proxy or part of the mix.
• scarface74 8y ago
  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. Of course the company ignored the bad reviews but thanked everyone who gave great reviews.
• dccoolgai 8y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
• shiftoutbox 8y ago
  NO SHIT .
• lordnacho 8y ago
  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. 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. 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. 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...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• fuzz4lyfe 8y ago
  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).
  • lgleason 8y ago
    I've had this happen as well! Basically I think they use the removal option as their revenue model....until people figure out that their reviews are not accurate.
    • _Microft 8y ago
      Next-level revenue model: users can pay to read removed reviews.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • ducktypegoose 8y ago
        Somebody give this guy a raise.
      • lowercased 8y ago
        Double dip surprise(?) - they'll still have ads around them.
      • jstarfish 8y ago
        I've often thought about setting up a scraper for sites like this and republishing the deleted content.
• pseudolus 8y ago
  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]. 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. [0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wall-Street-Journal-Reviews-E22431.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wall-Street-Journal-Review...
• thisisweirdok 8y ago
  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. They'd push this initiative occasionally. I reported it to Glassdoor and they never did anything about it.
  • gtirloni 8y ago
    For Glassdoor, it's your word against that of whoever wrote the positive/fake review you're complaining about. It's a tie unless there are some signals they could use to infer that your complaint is more legit than that positive review.
    • thisisweirdok 8y ago
      Yeah I get that. In retrospect I should have forwarded the emails to Glassdoor directly.
  • iamdave 8y ago
    They'd push this initiative occasionally. I wonder if anyone has any experience in flat out refusing to participate in this sort of thing. I did it once, but was already on my way out the door/in my two week notice period and HR would ask me once a day, every day for almost two weeks to write a review before I left. I say "almost two weeks" because I finally told the HR person that I would be talking to the local workforce commission if they came to my desk one more time and asked me to write a review.
    • thisisweirdok 8y ago
      I never participated. They had no way to enforce it without being really creepy. Younger employees always did it, a lot of people generally felt like they weren't doing their job if they said no.
      • ben509 8y ago
        Just do it and write, "Cons: we're pressured to leave positive reviews here."
• sonaltr 8y ago
  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. 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) The main use of Glassdoor as an employee is not the company reviews - it's for interview questions.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • 52-6F-62 8y ago
    > The main use of Glassdoor as an employee is not the company reviews - it's for interview questions. I'll add that it's salary survey information as well. Similarly with Indeed. They've saved me a lot of time when I've had companies want to set me up with unpaid hours upon hours of interviews and testing while offering effectively half of what I was seeking, with few other benefits. At one company, the reviews did inform me, and in numbers, that they promoted pair programming to the extent that you were assigned a fixed station and shared that station with another—not as onboarding, but as a fixture of your role. I killed that one, and fast. That said, I view all the other reviews with a high degree of skepticism. I prefer to talk to people directly to get a feel.
    • digitalixus 8y ago
      > I'll add that it's salary survey information as well. Not really. Here in Germany (where Glassdoor isn't even as popular as in US/English speaking countries) I've noticed the salary skews towards the low end because A) employers are bombing their profiles with fake salary figures and/or B) entry-level to lower-mid tier employees are more likely to drop numbers. Can't imagine how much worse the propagation of false info is in other countries where Glassdoor is more popular. Specifically in Berlin, where "bErLiN iS a PoOr N cHeAp CiTy So ThE sAlArIeS aReN't HiGh" might as well be a meme because it's the standard welcome message for foreigners, if you negotiate your pay based on Glassdoor info, you're going to be screwing yourself out of thousands of €€€. None of the non-tech crowd is going to admit they're being paid 55-65k brutto (before taxes) with 3-5 years of experience. I know people like this and have seen their payslips so I know they aren't lying. You only hear about the non-techies making 24-35k from their small startups or Zalando. Same for dev/tech. You'll only hear the same bit of info that "45-60k is a LOT for a dev with 5-10 years experience, because cost of living in Berlin is low (it's not) so come on over and relocate!". The devs/engineers making 65k starting with 2 years of experience, mid-level devs pulling 70-90k and management/directors pulling 120-200k in Berlin aren't opening their mouths. If I put my tinfoil hat on, I'd say there's a concerted effort in Europe to keep salaries down by keeping information suppressed/spreading lies (I see this a lot on Reddit/HN too in the form of comments)
• clavalle 8y ago
  To be fair, people tend to post on Glassdoor when they have a negative experience. I was dinged for having the audacity of asking a potential data analyst hire simple SQL questions...and SQL was listed on their resume.
  • ionforce 8y ago
    Wait, this needs context. You, a current employee of a company, are interviewing a person who listed a skill on their resume, and then you got reprimanded for asking that candidate to demonstrate that skill?
    • clavalle 8y ago
      Not by the company, of course; the candidate.
      • ionforce 8y ago
        That makes even less sense. How does the candidate "ding" you? That's just a rude, incompetent interviewee. "How dare you ask me about this thing I claimed to know!"
        • clavalle 8y ago
          They go on Glassdoor, write up a bad review for the company, and mention me, specifically. I mean, it's not affecting me in any real way but I have to admit, it bugs me.
  • sct202 8y ago
    A parallel team just hired a contractor that said they knew SQL, Access, VBA, etc. I've been training them and they were mad struggling to write a left join during training; I am 100% for making people write simple SQL to prove it. There were even examples readily available.
• painful 8y ago
  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.
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  nooo ... you don't say ... unthinkable! 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. glassdoor == yelp. so this is completely expected and actually the desired behavior.
• realNamePolicy 8y ago
  Definitely been pressured by my company. By middle managers, who are intimidated by C level officers, in meetings, on phone calls. By HR. Please leave a good review. Use your real name. Yes. This happens.
• mindcrime 8y ago
  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 is 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.
  • goldcd 8y ago
    I didn't apply for a job based on the reviews. Wasn't that they were 'all bad' - were pretty mixed with no standout embittered ex-employee, nor sudden influx of positives. Just reading through them a common complaint got made pretty often - and as am currently annoyed by similar issue with current job, decided it wasn't worth the leap.
  • 3minus1 8y ago
    Right, or a review that includes positive and negative feedback is also more credible.
  • Udik 8y ago
    > a large number of negative reviews is a strong "stay away" signal. A small number... Unfortunately that's unreliable, because negative reviews are removed, so numbers are fake.
    • mindcrime 8y ago
      Unfortunately that's unreliable, because negative reviews are removed, so numbers are fake. Right, but there is no one signal that is definitive (IMO). So looking at this is just one part of evaluating a prospective employer. That said, I have seen negative reviews on Glasdoor, so we know they don't all get removed.
      • ataturk 8y ago
        It's 2019, all online reviews are bullshit.
  • 8y ago
• liam_mc 8y ago
  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.
• acroback 8y ago
  Oh yes, we were asked to write positive reviews on Glassdoor. Guess heat I did? :)
• ta1548177231 8y ago
  And that's why there is Blind https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics 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)
  • towaway1138 8y ago
    Sounds interesting, but presumably non-employees have no access?
    • ta1548177231 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure you can find the threads about any company with their search?
  • OldFatCactus 8y ago
    I looked through some of the discussions and they come off as pretty gross and unprofessional. Wouldn't trust such a place for honest feedback.
    • ta1548177231 8y ago
      "Unprofessional" Is you actually seeing what the people who work there are like when no one is looking.
      • Dibes 8y ago
        There is a difference between unprofessional and just outright toxic. I just tried it out and for our company with over 2900 members it was sparsely used and most of it was just outright insults with little to no discourse minus one or two decent threads.
      • iosonofuturista 8y ago
• mevile 8y ago
  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. 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.
• decebalus1 8y ago
  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. 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.
  • yasp 8y ago
    What is Blind? Went to blind.com and didn't seem to be what you were referring to.
    • decebalus1 8y ago
      Say goodbye to the rest of your day: https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics
      • ddebernardy 8y ago
        Just took a brief look, and it all looked like whining and trolling. Am I missing something?
        • 52-6F-62 8y ago
          I got the same impression. Not to mention ill-informed in many cases...
        • jurassicfoxy 8y ago
          Agree. I was "invited" to Blind and every thread or comment were useless, antagonistic personal attacks, complaining, etc. It was very immature.
      • yasp 8y ago
• rchaud 8y ago
  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. 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. As you can imagine, most don't put a lot of thought into writing their reviews, or even recalling what the interview was like. 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.
  • souprock 8y ago
    I can tell you that the salary can be ridiculously wrong. For a high-experience specialist position in a high-cost city, Glassdoor has a salary number that is well below what we would pay for a freshman college intern in our lowest cost-of-living location. I hope you didn't decline to apply to us based on Glassdoor.
• throwawaysldf 8y ago
  HubSpot does this.
  • lazlohollyfeld 8y ago
    HubSpot is the king of BS and turned BS into a business model. Just read Dan Lyons' book.
• richeyrw 8y ago
  You need look no farther than Theranos.
• sandrobfc 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
  • throwaway032120 8y ago
    > Isn't it possible to rig Glassdoor by using multiple accounts? Yes, they don't check your identity. And HR departments have paid to improve companies public perception... It's easy to guess they'll spend time rigging Glassdoor.
• dunpeal 8y ago
  Some of the worst companies I ever encountered also had the best Glassdoor reviews and scores. Sounds ironic, but makes perfect sense when you consider: 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. 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.
  • throwaway032120 8y ago
    I've seen and heard plenty of horror stories from companies with good Glassdoor scores. I wonder how many people lie to themselves when evaluating their jobs.
    • dunpeal 8y ago
      From what I know, it's not that "people lie to themselves" about those terrible jobs, but more like the article describes: concerted effort by the employer to flood their reviews pool with inaccurate positive reviews, and muzzle accurate negative ones.
• freedomben 8y ago
  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 very skeptical eye. 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. 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.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • StreamBright 8y ago
    I think monetization is the problem here and this is why they moved towards removing negative reviews. We should invent a platform where altering past is not possible and not incentivized financially.
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    What’s amazing is that it’s 2019 and there are still people who trust online reviews written by people they don’t know! Show me one online review system out there that is not gamed in some way by the entities that stand to gain or lose money due to the content in the reviews.
    • dabockster 8y ago
      > it’s 2019 and there are still people who trust online reviews written by people they don’t know! I feel it's an extension of the old "innocent until proven guilty" thing. In the Western world, especially in the United States, we have this belief of trusting unless we are given a very high confidence level reason not to. It's this belief that is being taken advantage of via online review systems. We do not doubt them by default because it would be mean or rude to doubt the entity behind the review (entity meaning person or bot).
• _bxg1 8y ago
  Yikes. Guess I won't be using it any more.
• coderintherye 8y ago
  They also sell your data now: "We have updated our Privacy and Cookie Policy with changes to how we use and share information. 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. 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 https://www.glassdoor.com/member/account/settings_input.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/member/account/settings_input.htm. Thank you for being part of the Glassdoor community. 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."
  • paavoova 8y ago
    Do any such services not engage in similar practices? Including LinkedIn? I'm kind of dismayed at the state of the modern application process, where you typically have to give your info to one or more third parties instead of being able to submit directly to the company/recruiters.
• code4tee 8y ago
  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. 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.
• klenwell 8y ago
  I'm enjoying this thread. Maybe HN needs a new monthly "Glassdoor HN" or "Who's Reviewing" thread.
  • abraae 8y ago
    Would the coverage include YC companies?
• josh_carterPDX 8y ago
  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.
  • cdolan 8y ago
    Was this company based out of Pittsburgh perhaps? Because I've heard of the same.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• ltbarcly3 8y ago
  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. 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? 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.
• descentintomael 8y ago
  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.
• rogerkirkness 8y ago
  All review sites eventually learn who their real customers are.
• burtonator 8y ago
  YCombinator is a great VC.. I sware!
• an4rchy 8y ago
  I still do think reviews are the best way to get aggregated feedback on established (companies, products, restaurants etc). 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.
  • AJ007 8y ago
    The whole issues of reviews and ratings remains a pretty big issue across all platforms. Some of these shortfalls may be unsolvable, like predicting a high consequence, low probability future action, like being murdered by your Uber driver. A larger issue is platforms enabling the reviewed parties to game their reviews, e.g. Yelp, Glassdoor, and employee corruption. This is preventable.
• mancerayder 8y ago
  So isn't this a business opportunity for a Glassdoor 2.0 competing company?
  • TomMckenny 8y ago
    There's only one possible barrier (but it's a big one) Do they hold a broadly worded patent making competition impossible?
• ortl 8y ago
  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.
• aiisahik 8y ago
  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. Can one of you smart people here at HN develop a Glass Door competitor that only allows FORMER employees to review a company?
  • AngeloAnolin 8y ago
    Having FORMER employees do some authentic reviews for companies they've last left is also quite difficult - in the sense that this person may fear the repercussions should they write something about the company that places the organization in a bad light. One way I can think of is a service, where companies sign up, and let potential employees be able to speak in an anonymous manner with real (albeit anonymized) employees so that real feedback on actual working conditions are provided. The key here though is that all current employees should feel safe that they are speaking about what's the real conditions of work at the workplace, as well as providing enough credibility to the applicant that they are actually speaking to someone working there. Of course having companies sign up for this will be inherently difficult, as each company always wants to maintain their shining standards in any form, and does not want for only a group of certain individuals to tarnish their good(?) reputation.
• CedarHill 8y ago
  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.
• man2525 8y ago
  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: 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." A little reason annual reviews are still a thing...stringing people along.
• midway 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
• LarryDarrell 8y ago
  This is not the late stage capitalist dystopia I was looking forward to.
• bad_premise 8y ago
  Premise Data is the perfect example of this happening. Things got so bad that literally every engineer in SF (their headquarters) left. Lots of them left reviews, and lots of them were voted "helpful." Yet... https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Premise-Data-Corporation-Reviews-E952471.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Premise-Data-Corporation-R... Look at the last ~10 reviews. None of them are marked helpful, yet only 5 star reviews are at the top and marked as "featured." They don't even have 10 engineers left to make these good reviews, they're all left by the sales guys. Those bad reviews aren't even all of them. 5 or 6 were just outright deleted, and none of us can figure out why. They didn't violate any rules, didn't call out people by name, they simply shed a negative light on the company.
• rurp 8y ago
  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. Glassdoor did nothing and the company has a great rating, despite being a terrible place to work.
• wrkdatroostify 8y ago
  "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" So I worked at Roostify and none 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.
• all_blue_chucks 8y ago
  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.
  • throwaway032120 8y ago
    Glassdoor seems to be very biased toward low salaries globally - unsurprisingly. That only benefits employers in general.
• etjossem 8y ago
  ... news at 10.
• yingw787 8y ago
  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. 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.
• NegativeLatency 8y ago
  Is this actually a surprise to anyone? In my own experience I've seen/heard of this many times, and heard of it from many friends (inside and outside of tech).
• johnmarcus 8y ago
  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. 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. 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. Anyway, yeah, Glassdoor is trash.
• manigandham 8y ago
  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.
• Cyclone_ 8y ago
  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.
• weliketocode 8y ago
  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. Several scathing, albeit somewhat accurate, reviews had been written. Looking now, all but one of the negative reviews have been removed. In short, glassdoor is worthless.
• apohn 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
• Animats 8y ago
  This is a great opportunity for a union. The organization that should be running a site like Glassdoor is the AFL-CIO.
  • mushufasa 8y ago
    I agree there should be some opportunity for them to participate somehow. Any ideas of what that would look like? ALF-CIO and other unions aren't setup to be tech companies themselves, and I don't think they have the internal talent to build and operate a popular web app well on their own. It would have to be some other way for them to interact with a tech company in a mutually beneficial manner.
    • Animats 8y ago
      There are more union tech people than you might think.[1] [1] https://www.unions-america.com/ https://www.unions-america.com/
• dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Bad companies try to manipulate perception rather than fix problems. Good companies fix problems and let perception take care of itself.
• justapassenger 8y ago
  Crow-sourced data being manipulated? I'm shocked! /s
• michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  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. 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?" Place has since cratered under the weight of its poor management.
• bogomipz 8y ago
  >"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. 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." 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.
• Zaheer 8y ago
  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
  • Phlarp 8y ago
    Read the thread and it should be relatively obvious: Don't sell out and let companies alter, remove, bury, hide or disguise negative reviews (or do so on the companies behalf). If you really want to beat the incumbents scrape their sites and rehost the deleted content. (If they DMCA you then publish the DMCA notice and note which company the content was related to and when it was published/removed/DMCA'd so as to preserve a record of removed reviews related to that company)
• hsnewman 8y ago
  Don't believe anything you read on the internet (except this).
• liquid153 8y ago
  To get some juicy details try reading thelayoff.com of your employer or future employer. But remember take things with a grain of salt lol
• black_puppydog 8y ago
  If only we had had indications that centralizing all reputation management into one or few places might have adverse effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
• mushufasa 8y ago
  There are so many comments here complaining about Glassdoor's business model. I'm really genuinely curious -- what do you folks thing is a better option for them? 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?
  • eutropia 8y ago
    If you wanted to be the "honest" review site ideologically then you'd have to run it super cheap like craigslist and do something like have paid job postings, but it would have to be a small operation with a lot of automation.
  • mratzloff 8y ago
    Why does everything need to be a business? It's a review site. You could run it for next to nothing.
    • mushufasa 8y ago
      Unfortunately I don't think that's the case. There's substantial work that goes on beyond server hosting costs, for which you would need human staff. I agree that VC-style astronomical expectations may be misplaced, but they need to have a team of talented people, which means steady income of some sort.
  • adjkant 8y ago
    I think problems like this is why we need to consider opening up the idea of what is a "public utility" in the modern world. There are simply many things that are valuable to a large number of people that don't have good business models in a capitalist society. Honest workplace reviews sound like a great candidate for that.
• redm 8y ago
  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. 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.
  • mushufasa 8y ago
    I think you've nailed the problem. What's the solution? (I have no affiliations with Glassdoor, I'm just curious). I don't think you can charge jobseekers to use the site (they are looking for a job, after all). It has to be free to use by the end user. How can you build a business that aligns revenue with the end-user incentives, when the end-users are unlikely to pay directly?
• babyslothzoo 8y ago
  Are any online reviews even vaguely reliable? What's the percentage that are either from insiders or marketers or spammers?
• kevstev 8y ago
  I have long suspected this, I actually discussed this about a year ago in an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17027287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17027287 To restate- I think there are tells you can use to figure out when reviews are being manipulated: 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? Does the data add up? Does everyone seem to love the CEO but the overall rating is low, or vice versa? 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.
• SalesDevRep 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
• endlessvoid94 8y ago
  In other news, the sky is blue.
• newnewpdro 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
• graphememes 8y ago
  Just like yelp.
• miguelmota 8y ago
  Glassdoor never published my review that had a negative outlook on a company. Never gave me an explanation why
• RomanPushkin 8y ago
  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.
  • ghostly_s 8y ago
    Well, they also allow companies to publish want ads to the front page with comments disabled, and no indication that they are paid placements. But HN also doesn't bill itself as a neutral review aggregator.
    • rcfox 8y ago
      I always assumed that was a free service for YC companies.
• BadassFractal 8y ago
  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?
• jameane 8y ago
  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. 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. It's too bad what started as a good way to get some insight into companies has turned over once it monetizes...
• AndyKelley 8y ago
  Here's a fun one: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Backtrace-Reviews-E1742217.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Backtrace-Reviews-E1742217... Excerpts from one of the reviews obviously written by the CTO: > Also two other huge tech companies I can't name without getting fired; their names start with letter A. > Co-founders do talk about successes like winning Amazon's contract (huge!) 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. Never work there!
• jethro_tell 8y ago
  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.
• tomashertus 8y ago
  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. 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.
• zahreeley 8y ago
  Upgrade, inc CEO asked employees few times to give ratings
• donretag 8y ago
  Fakespot needs to get into the Glassdoor game. They already analyze Yelp. 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. 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.
  • mikestew 8y ago
    Some companies are just not subtle about their reviews Here, let me help seed that ML algorithm: "Advice to management: keep doing what you're doing!" Not hotdog. I'm shocked at how many times I see that. It's like the HR people all went to the same convention at some point.
    • cdolan 8y ago
      This is on at least one review for companies I’ve seen actively game the system. It’s truly absurd
• cs702 8y ago
  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. GlassDoor, in short, has become a textbook example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[a] The same phenomenon is known in some contexts as Campbell's Law: "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] [a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
  • DamnInteresting 8y ago
    > a textbook example of Goodhart's Law I had never heard of Goodhart's Law by name until about 45 minutes ago, while listening to an episode of Planet Money that originally aired last November. And here it is again. This is one of the more striking examples of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon I've experienced in recent years.
    • d23 8y ago
      I just saw it in another thread today and am seeing it again here. It's pretty apropos for what I'm dealing with at the company I'm at right now too.
    • shlomok 8y ago
      Once I learned about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon it seemed to pop up everywhere.
      • tatami 8y ago
        It's spreading on HN this past week, you could say it's viral.
  • mushufasa 8y ago
• LinuxBender 8y ago
  This sounds like a system that is no longer valuable for it's original intended use case. 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. Can you think of any other mediums that may be useful for this purpose? [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
• scottlocklin 8y ago
  What? Next thing you'll tell me Yelp takes protection money to remove bad reviews.
• kansface 8y ago
  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.
  • mushufasa 8y ago
    Yes this is the dynamic. Is it inevitable? Are there solutions, or at least mitigations? This is also a problem (huge problem) with credit ratings and investment rating agencies.
    • kansface 8y ago
      > Is it inevitable? How would you change the incentives? The incentive for a restaurant to leave a fake review is much higher than the incentive for a customer to leave any review. For crowd sourced reviews, introducing a trust model opens the door to account selling/paid reviews. You can't really punish the bad actors or you open yourself to a different kind of abuse. You really need a PageRank equivalent for reviewers? Is there some feedback loop (like following clicks) to the things you recommended (and seeing engagement on that page from GA)?
      • mushufasa 8y ago
        I'm not affiliated with glassdoor, but I would hope that they already do some data analysis to weed out biased reviewers. You're right that reviewers have less incentive to participate than the targets of the review, employers. Is there a different business model where a site like Glassdoor could align their incentives with the free-user employees?
• chasingthewind 8y ago
  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.
• eclat 8y ago
  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.
• adamzerner 8y ago
  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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
• zapita 8y ago
  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. 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.
• arthurjj 8y ago
  Anyone have a good alternative to Glass Door. Googling the company is probably the easiest but then you run the risk of data biased the other way.
  • arthurjj 8y ago
    https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft seems like the best one.
• eecc 8y ago
  Well I guess this is the nail that seals the coffin of Glassdoor.
• pthomas551 8y ago
  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.
• mathattack 8y ago
  If people game Yelp and Google reviews, why not Glassdoor? I’ve seen companies go from 3 to 4.5 after a concerted push. The truth comes out though. The pie in the sky reviews just aren’t believable.
• jecxjo 8y ago
  Having worked with a company that does shady stuff like this I eventually changed how I worked to match it. 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. 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. 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. 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."
• gavman 8y ago
  Textbook case of Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
• vanadium 8y ago
  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. 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. 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.
• mangatmodi 8y ago
  Sign up required :(
• sn41 8y ago
  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.
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  • java_script 8y ago
    You should make a quick landing page and post this as a "Show HN".
• artaak 8y ago
  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.
• dgzl 8y ago
  I recently quit a software company that spent a lot of time doing two things: fluffing the employees with various benefits, and asking them to write reviews on Glassdoor. 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) 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.
• mud_dauber 8y ago
  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.
• unclebucknasty 8y ago
  Nothing is real anymore.
• randycupertino 8y ago
  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.
• amai 8y ago
  Is that a surprise to anyone?
• xtat 8y ago
  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.
• stefek99 8y ago
  Why would be otherwise? https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/1088375928646967297 https://twitter.com/marsxrobertson/status/108837592864696729... Good rankings help them hire, why wouldn't they optimise the ranking?