6 ms·

Sorry OP, but my feeling is, without quantitative metrics, this is useless. As others have said, each company will choose only positive things, and it will be h

Sorry OP, but my feeling is, without quantitative metrics, this is useless. As others have said, each company will choose only positive things, and it will be hard to tell companies apart. What I really want, and no one has made, is for some comprehensive scraping of LinkedIn and Crunchbase to help answer the following questions for each company: - Average turn over time for different job types - Average experience of new engineers (new grad vs. 10 years) - Distribution of management vs. engineers vs. PMs etc. - Are management promoted from engineering or hired from outside? - Have the founders had successful companies before? In the same area or different? - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? - what's the gender/race/etc. make up? (Does the company actually value diversity) etc. Answer those, comprehensively, and I'd easily pay for access to that service. Alternatively, if you are having companies post jobs, have them answer those questions (and tell them you'll check against LI/CB). i.e., get actual transparency where it matters, not just fake/propaganda transparency like you have here. That would actually help me make a decision to apply or not.

ravenstine 7y ago
Some of those things you can figure out on Glassdoor, though I guess having quantitative metrics are better than reviews from disgruntled employees. I like this idea, but unfortunately it hangs on the existence of LinkedIn. If for whatever reason LinkedIn changes its structure in a way that makes it impossible to easily obtain this data, such a service would probably sink. > - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? How would you interpret this information? EDIT: On a somewhat related note, I had a side project a while ago that was kind of the inverse, which was a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company. I decided not to finish it because I thought it would be a terrible thing to have exist.
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  >a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company While I applaud you for taking the social/ethical value of your work into consideration, I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place?
  - zdragnar 7y ago
    If it were only used by recruiters, that would be a nice tool to improve cold contact outcomes- I still manage to get no shortage of recruiter contacts even though I have virtually no linkedin activity (I don't even log in or browse the site). I'm not really sure how one would go about letting recruiters use it but not HR / managers, though. Very much a double-edged blade.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    > I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place? I don't know. It just seemed like a funny, evil idea that I could test my skills with. I wasn't that intent on actually making a business around it, though I won't pretend like I wouldn't have tried if I thought I could make millions. The person I am now definitely would be totally against such a thing.
bwb 7y ago
Yep, in all of this we strive to provide quantitative metrics to back up the values and traits. For example, we were writing a profile today for a company and shared data on how many engineers had been internally promoted to IC and management roles in the last year. And, we backed that up with specific stories from the last 6 months about how that was done. Plus we fill in Q&A questions to share that the IC/Manager paths are equivalent in pay and other common questions we know engineers have. Thanks for that list of data points as that is very helpful! We hope to expand to offer more of those as we get going too. And, break them out into a less narrative structure when it makes sense.
JamesBarney 7y ago
Also core business hours, 8-5 vs 10-7 makes a huge difference in terms of commuting time.

ravenstine 7y ago

Some of those things you can figure out on Glassdoor, though I guess having quantitative metrics are better than reviews from disgruntled employees. I like this idea, but unfortunately it hangs on the existence of LinkedIn. If for whatever reason LinkedIn changes its structure in a way that makes it impossible to easily obtain this data, such a service would probably sink. > - What schools did employees go to? What is the education distribution of employees? How would you interpret this information? EDIT: On a somewhat related note, I had a side project a while ago that was kind of the inverse, which was a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company. I decided not to finish it because I thought it would be a terrible thing to have exist.

ghostpepper 7y ago
>a tool for employers where they could track their employee's LinkedIn activity to determine whether an employee was actively looking for another job or likely to quit soon, allowing employers to preemptively fire employees that didn't have a future with the company While I applaud you for taking the social/ethical value of your work into consideration, I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place?
- zdragnar 7y ago
  If it were only used by recruiters, that would be a nice tool to improve cold contact outcomes- I still manage to get no shortage of recruiter contacts even though I have virtually no linkedin activity (I don't even log in or browse the site). I'm not really sure how one would go about letting recruiters use it but not HR / managers, though. Very much a double-edged blade.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  > I have to wonder how this even seemed like a good idea in the first place? I don't know. It just seemed like a funny, evil idea that I could test my skills with. I wasn't that intent on actually making a business around it, though I won't pretend like I wouldn't have tried if I thought I could make millions. The person I am now definitely would be totally against such a thing.

bwb 7y ago

Yep, in all of this we strive to provide quantitative metrics to back up the values and traits. For example, we were writing a profile today for a company and shared data on how many engineers had been internally promoted to IC and management roles in the last year. And, we backed that up with specific stories from the last 6 months about how that was done. Plus we fill in Q&A questions to share that the IC/Manager paths are equivalent in pay and other common questions we know engineers have. Thanks for that list of data points as that is very helpful! We hope to expand to offer more of those as we get going too. And, break them out into a less narrative structure when it makes sense.

JamesBarney 7y ago

Also core business hours, 8-5 vs 10-7 makes a huge difference in terms of commuting time.