21 ms·

A warning about Glassdoor

• lithos 6y ago
  So they’re sacrificing why they exist and the reason they have anyone visit their website. To become a PR company that is based on the memory of a community/purpose.
  • sippingjippers 6y ago
    Classic bait-and-switch. This essentially happens with every review site after they build up enough brand awareness to pull it off. I guess it happens because from the perspective of the company it makes total sense to try. Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time
    • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time When things are working well, the answer is because honesty is a better policy in the long run. Impartiality, and a reputation for impartiality, is why Which? still exists, at the age of 63. [0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F [1] https://www.which.co.uk/about-which/who-we-are https://www.which.co.uk/about-which/who-we-are
      • Tomte 6y ago
        Comparably, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung_Warentest has extremely high trust among the German public. Yes, every tech nerd is mocking their PC tests, because they are just like a vaccuum cleaner test: unbox, set-up, do mainstream stuff, like writing mails and Word documents. No discussion of GDDR5 vs. GDDR4 or such nonsense. It's a fantastic resource when you don't know what to look for (until today you never had any use for the tool you now consider buying) and it's not tech (then I tend to look to Wirecutter, for all its faults and controversies).
        • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
          > every tech nerd is mocking their PC tests, because they are just like a vaccuum cleaner test: unbox, set-up, do mainstream stuff, like writing mails and Word documents That still sounds like a useful test, if only to punish bundling of useless bloatware.
      • reaperducer 6y ago
        because honesty is a better policy in the long run SV doesn't optimize for the long run. It only cares about the next quarter, or until the buyout comes. Everyone knows the phrase "exit strategy," but nobody knows the phrase "quality and service." In my experience, 1%† of the people in the SV bubble are doing it to make a quality product. They're just there to make a quick buck. († Less than 1% in the Seattle bubble)
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • j4nt4b 6y ago
    > To become a PR company that is based on the memory of a community/purpose. This sounds like the angst-beat poetry of our current future.
  • stefanmichael 6y ago
    It seems like a desperation move, potentially a last resort? The premise of "let's get rid of the only reason anyone would ever visit our site for short term revenue" is just not where you would expect a company to do in normal circumstances. I know that Glassdoor recently laid off 300 employees[0]. So my read is that this is a dying breath of sorts. [0]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/glassdoor-lays-off-300-employees-amid-coronavirus-crisis/2293088/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/glassdoor-lays-off-300...
• Nuzzerino 6y ago
  In 2016, I wrote a scathing, negative Glassdoor review about a company that truly was a developer sweatshop. It had only 1 review at the time. The review got close to 50 upvotes and was one of the top Google search results for the company name. A second negative review came up not too long after that. Within weeks, the company had at least 20 5 star reviews added to this. The entirety of the company was no more than 30 employees, leading me to conclude that someone was directing employees to write positive reviews. This seemed to violate Glassdoor's rules on "incentivized reviews", but when contacting Glassdoor, the response I got was that they investigated the situation and determined that there was no violation of the rules. I stopped taking the site seriously after that.
  • ShakataGaNai 6y ago
    This is true of most companies reviews. If they are reasonably small enough (say under 500 to 1000 employees), they all have the same pattern (chronologically): Sparse to no reviews for a while. One or two negative reviews. A few days to weeks later... a huge influx of positive reviews for a few days. Then back to nothing.
  • redisman 6y ago
    I've seen this happen at a previous place I worked at too. One extremely on-point and constructive review with low stars and tons of likes that was then followed by a flood of junk 5 star reviews that obviously the CEO or his lieutenants wrote. There doesn't seem to be any way to combat those fake reviews now.
  • KingNoosh 6y ago
    I've seen the exact same thing as a small-mediumish (100-200 now) start-up I used to work for, there'd be an email sent around to encourage employees to leave a good review, seeing as you can't change your review after it's a scary way to waste your shot. But I guess that shots wasted anyways if the system is rigged to begin with.
    • ryandrake 6y ago
      I generally don't bad-mouth previous employers, as it risks limiting your career. However, the only review I ever left on Glassdoor was of the most toxic software job I ever had. The company basically had nothing but dozens of 1 and 2 star reviews. A few months later I checked again and there were about 10 brand new vague 5-star reviews that were all submitted within a day of each other. One of them even said right in the review something like "boss told us all to write 5 star reviews, so here's mine: This place is horrible." Just checked the company again, and my review has since been removed (but some other 1 star reviews are still there).
• astuyvenberg 6y ago
  It's the exact same play as Yelp - once they grew out of the community review forum stage, they turn to extortion to make it profitable.
  • kaffee 6y ago
    Is this true? I thought Yelp still did a decent job of moderating reviews.
    • diego_moita 6y ago
      Oh, they certainly do. They moderate reviews that are inconvenient to the business that accept their extortion. Their business model is to sell protection to businesses, like an extortion racket.
    • DoctorOW 6y ago
      Yelp is adamant that they don't affect reviews based on payment. That said the order and selection of reviews on preview pages in terms of positive vs. negative are based on how much a business pays.
      • kaffee 6y ago
        Thanks. This makes some sense. Honestly, I'm sympathetic to Yelp. The money has to come from somewhere. And there's at least superficial evidence that you cannot operate a honest review platform at a reasonable profit rate (e.g., glassdoor, consumer reports).
        • vkou 6y ago
          > The money has to come from somewhere. It can come from advertising in-app/sponsored results appearing at the top of search. That's not extortionate, and doesn't compromise the whole purpose of using the app. Either the ROI on those ads is terrible (Thus leading to low-margin businesses not advertising on Yelp), or they want more money, at the expense of long-term confidence in their website. It's possible that the current, bloated version of Yelp, with a headcount of 6,000 cannot survive on search ads revenue. [1] It's also possible that a smaller, leaner version of it could. [1] Facebook, by the way, employs ~40,000 FTEs. Facebook's revenues are 70 times that of Yelp's.
• shiftpgdn 6y ago
  I worked at a mid sized company that was going through a very rough patch (right before the inevitable bankruptcy.) During this time I got a call from a Glassdoor rep who /explicitly/ offered to remove bad reviews in exchange for us moving to a high paid tier and putting up X amount of job listings. Glassdoor is just corporate Yelp.
  • Quekid5 6y ago
    > Glassdoor is just corporate Yelp. I think this is the inevitable fate of all for-profit review sites which become popular. The incentives just don't align.
    • blocked_again 6y ago
      Some of the ways Glasdoor can make money by being ethical * Ask users to sign up for their job seeker plan to see the complete company interview questions/experiences. * Create an API and charge websites for giving access to their reviews score, salary data etc. * Charge money for job postings from companies who have decent reviews and want to post on Glassdoor. * Provide a paid dasbhoard for companies that will give them insights on how to pay employees.
      • Quekid5 6y ago
        I see a lot of potential legal liability for posters and/or companies here. They're not bad ideas, per se, but why even try that hard when you can just take money to remove bad reviews or inflate ratings? Again, misaligned incentives between one group of users (people) and the other group of users (businesses), while trying to act as a middle-man. The key is that one group of users has the upper hand in terms of 'investment' into the platform. ... until one group (people) grows increasingly disillusioned and skeptical and the other group (businesses) sense an opportunity to start up another iteration and the balance skews towards the other group (people)... until... So it goes.
• speeder 6y ago
  Today I was thinking about this kind of thing, for example Epic not allowing reviews at all, Valve "off topic" review hiding, metacritic changes to their system, or Netflix removing their review system... I concluded that review systems often are on the losing side when their income comes from what they are reviewing, reviews you can trust are those that are unrelated. For example a famous bastion of review is the Michelin Guide, although controversies happened to it, and often restaurant owners get mad at it for not "supporting the restaurant industry" when the guide doesn't do what they want, I realized the probable reason the guide works, is because it wants to sell car tyres, not food. Michelin Guide purpose is make people drive to places and use their tyres (there was even a controversy caused by confused restauranteurs that thought it was "unfair" restaurant you can't drive to, aren't in the guide), thus the only bad incentive they might have is to choose restaurants that might cause bigger tyre usage than normal. But Netflix for example can't piss off the movie companies or they risk losing their catalog. Metacritic depends on ads, can't let users piss off the advertisers, and so on.
  • bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Consumer's Reports is the canonical example of a review site where the incentives line up correctly. The only way they make money is by selling memberships, so the consumer and the customer are the same people.
    • Goronmon 6y ago
      Manufacturers either on purpose, or by accident, have made Consumer Reports reviews not super useful, at least from my experience. The ability to match a product reviewed by Consumer Reports to something I can actual purchase has become pretty difficult over the years. This would be less a problem if brands followed some kind of trend in overall reliability, but it seems like individual models vary widely in quality even within a specific brand. So when it comes down to trying to find the specific model of something being reviewed, it seems like that model was discontinued, replaced, or not available at the retailers I use.
      • 6y ago
• seibelj 6y ago
  Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope you re-evaluate your life's purpose - you only get so many years and using them to help Glassdoor seems really terrible. What an ethically bankrupt piece of worthless trash that place is.
  • sharadov 6y ago
    They are becoming Yelp.
    • elwell 6y ago
      I heard that Yelp lets you pay to have bad reviews sorted towards the bottom. I recently listened to a podcast episode [0], where the CEO claimed that is not true. Would be interested in evidence on either side. [0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918845338/how-i-built-resilience-jeremy-stoppelman-of-yelp https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918845338/how-i-built-resilie...
      • sharadov 6y ago
        Yelp has class action lawsuits filed against them. Scumbags!
        • elwell 6y ago
          This? https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-defeats-a-false-advertising-lawsuit-over-its-review-functionality-demetriades-v-yelp.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-d...
      • mlrtime 6y ago
        It's even worse than that, Yelp has been accused and proven that they write or have written bad reviews themselves.
• fugazithehaxoar 6y ago
  Luckily, it's pretty easy to spot fake reviews on Glassdoor. Unfortunately though, it kind of ruins the experience for most people. The two big mobile app stores have been flooded with spam reviews for over 5 years now unchecked. For those that know how to spot fake reviews, it's easy to tell which apps are not legit. For most consumers though, they just believe what they see.
  • thih9 6y ago
    > Luckily, it's pretty easy to spot fake reviews on Glassdoor. Could you elaborate? How?
    • mikestew 6y ago
      Not OP, but how many times have I seen, under Management Feedback, "keep doing what you're doing!"? No, I don't mean paraphrased, I mean word-for-word. That's was a few years back, back when I thought Glassdoor was worth paying attention to. I'm sure whatever HR conference they all communally go to has new guidance for gaming reviews, and the phrase has changed since.
  • sorokod 6y ago
    >Luckily, it's pretty easy to spot fake reviews on Glassdoor Care to automate your insight and create a meta Glassdoor?
    • tjungblut 6y ago
      Then you would just stare at an almost empty list of reviews. I don't think you'll get around storing actual negative reviews on top of that.
  • dllthomas 6y ago
    So... it's pretty easy to find reviews that you are confident are fake, and you're probably right about most of them. But that only leaves us an uncorrupted signal if, given a review you have deemed authentic, it actually has a good chance of being so. Do you know that that's the case? How? I'm not sure it's true in your case, but statements like this are often made when people don't realize they're (implicitly) marking their predictions against those same predictions.
• kaffee 6y ago
  Anyone spot an official response from Glassdoor to this?
• alisonatwork 6y ago
  My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews vanished from Glassdoor, and a lot of bland 4 star "well there's good and bad, some mistakes were made, but despite the past few months, overall it's good" appeared, pushing the handful of negative reviews that remained off the front page. I know from former colleagues that management had "suggested" staff write these sorts of reviews. Now the company rating is higher than it was before the layoffs and I am completely disillusioned with not only that company, and Glassdoor, but the fakeness of the industry as a whole. It's so disappointing that a site that originally felt like a useful resource for workers has become just yet another PR/branding tool.
  • andrei_says_ 6y ago
    If only they would be willing to leave the extra money they get for manipulating public opinion on the table, right? But it’s so easy! And so profitable! Joking aside, the reviewing-anything niche is getting very difficult in the age of sock puppet accounts. Any platform sooner or later becomes a space for dispute, manipulation and outright war between entities with competing agendas and no ethics. It’s a very difficult space to provide a good service - there are enough players ready to say anything and poison the well. We live in the era of everyone getting a dip in distorting reality :(
  • b0rsuk 6y ago
    I suspect it was a bait&switch scheme all along.
  • hhs 6y ago
    If interested, there was a long piece that talked about Glassdoor [0], and commenters also raised points about the validity of the information on that platform [1]. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-workplace-culture-one-review-at-a-time https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-work... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232898
• diego_moita 6y ago
  ... and then we realize that marketing, corruption, manipulation, extortion, influencers, bots and mechanical-Turks have finally taken control of the promise of "knowledge of the crowds". Putin's goons on Facebook, bots on Twitter, Yelp's "algorithm" being used to extort merchants, personal brand management on LinkedIn, black-hat hackers on HN and Reddit, ... why should Glassdoor be different?
  • AlexandrB 6y ago
    "Wisdom of crowds" as described in early internet essays is only sustainable when the crowds are motivated by some intrinsic purpose and not by financial gain. Financial incentives applied to "the crowd" generally lead to spam, rating extortion, and various other corruption.
• AlexandrB 6y ago
  Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong brand as a consumer review aggregator, the temptation to accept money for better ratings is extremely strong. When talking about a for-profit review aggregator, you might even say that accepting money for ratings is part of their responsibility to the shareholders because it can be so much more lucrative than serving accurate ratings to individuals.
  • zerop 6y ago
    Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more looking at the founding team.
    • gnicholas 6y ago
      I would guess that Quora's algorithm could be gamed pretty easily by having an employee leave a positively-biased answer to a question and then having a bunch of other employees upvote the answer. The company could even have an employee seed the question, then have other employees answer and upvote in order to bury other questions that have negative responses. Basically, Quora appears to tolerate quite a bit of spam, which would make it hard for them to be an authoritative source on anything other than "how do I game Quora's algorithm?" (since obviously whoever's answer is highest-rated has won ipso facto).
      • WilTimSon 6y ago
        I used to frequent Quora and stopped specifically due to this. Leave a few answers on popular topics, especially about apps, and your inbox is flooded with requests to answer questions like "Is it true that X company is the most amazing and affordable software development outsourcing service?" and "Why is Some_Random_App much better than Popular_App_That_Our_App_Copies?". Sometimes they were brazen enough to post questions about X app with names like XMary or XJohn.
• dpeck 6y ago
  Glassdoor == Yelp == “top places to work” == every other business that revolves around curating a group of people to promote and extort in equal measures.
  • elwell 6y ago
    == is a test, not a statement of equality.
• cj 6y ago
  In response to people in this thread claiming Glassdoor will remove reviews if you pay them: Maybe our company was just unlucky with the sales rep assigned to our profile, but altering reviews was something they made clear would not happen regardless of if we paid or not. At the time our company was getting negative reviews meant for a different company in a different country with a similar name. It was a major hassle to convince Glassdoor the bad reviews weren’t legitimate. Eventually they were removed but it required a lot of persistence emailing / calling them every week and providing evidence the reviewers never worked for our company. Meanwhile we were stringing their sales person along hoping that would make it easier, but I don’t think our sales rep had any sway. I dislike Glassdoor especially for small companies where 1 unhappy person on a team of 15 can ruin their employers reputation from the perspective of future hires. IMO they shouldn’t allow reviews on public company profiles until there is a critical mass of reviews such that any 1 review won’t dramatically swing the star rating.
  • monoideism 6y ago
    > IMO they shouldn’t allow reviews on public company profiles until there is a critical mass of reviews such that any 1 review won’t dramatically swing the star rating Are you this accomodating towards potential employees? Such as, if a potential employee got a single very bad recommendation from one past employer, or one negative past online experience or reputation hit? I don't know, you may well be, but I suspect most companies are not. Most reasonable people will take the size of a company into consideration when looking at reviews on GlassDoor (at least in the last, looks like it's no longer worth looking at now). So a single bad review for a small company would not be a deal breaker for me. It's the patterns I look for. Hopefully, you're doing the same when hiring.
    • cj 6y ago
      > Are you this accomodating towards potential employees? Yes. 1) Reference checks are the very last stage of our hiring process. If you made it that far, we've already made the decision to hire you (assuming references come back in check). 2) If a reference reveals something negative that we didn't know previously, we would give the candidate an opportunity to address it. But you're right, large companies may be less forgiving, especially if reference checks come early in the process. > one negative past online experience or reputation hit? Similarly, I dislike that it's not possible to dispute Google search results when someone searches your full name.
• SilasX 6y ago
  May I suggest that in this case the poster’s real problem was that he posted an identical review elsewhere, which is indicative of not behavior and will leak information about GD members which GD will then take the blame for? Not suggesting GD is all wine and roses but they may have a point here.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I'll admit that I was bit by Glassdoor astroturfing. The company had an almost 4-star average review and the first three pages were glowing 4 and 5 star reviews. My first week at the company was nothing like the great workplace describe on Glassdoor. I'll spare the details, but suffice to say it was the most abusive workplace I've ever seen. Later, I realized that all of the 4 and 5 star Glassdoor reviews started after a specific date and arrived in a short burst. If I went back far enough, the reviews were consistently 1 or 2 stars. I tried to leave a fair 2-star review using the most dry and basic facts without any exaggeration or hyperbole. It stayed up for a month before disappearing without explanation. Glassdoor is not a place to find honest company reviews.
  • ptmcc 6y ago
    I empathize, and I feel like I watched this happen a few times to new hires at my old job. A glowing Glassdoor profile is as much a reflection of engagement with Glassdoor as it is the quality of company and work environment. An "engaged employer" badge on a company's profile almost certainly means the numbers are juiced upward. My previous company of 7 years had 4.9 stars on Glassdoor. They cared a lot about maintaining their profile. My current company of 2 years has 3.5 stars on Glassdoor. They don't care much at all about maintaining their profile. Even accounting for the jadedness that comes with tenure, my current company is a much better place to work in many ways. Old company was fine, good even, but lol at 4.9/5. I won't be going back anytime soon, despite the standing invitation.
  • starchild_3001 6y ago
    Yup my experience isn't too far off.
  • iKevinShah 6y ago
    > Glassdoor is not a place to find honest company reviews. ... which genuinely raises the question, what is a place to find honest company reviews except actually personally knowing someone working there?
• mandeepj 6y ago
  It's better to cross-check rather than relying on a single source. Another option is Blind. Sometimes people also leave workplace reviews at Google.
  • perdid0 6y ago
    Had never heard of Blind. Thanks for that! will check it out
• Dig1t 6y ago
  This sounds like a market opportunity. If Glassdoor has pivoted to shilling for other corporations, someone should turn around and make a site that allows honest negative reviews of companies. Anyone interested?
  • peacefulhat 6y ago
    totally missing the underlying problem here. this sort of thing is endemic. you will end up pivoting too if your site displaces glassdoor.
  • b0rsuk 6y ago
    I think it's a systemic problem. A problem with incentives. Once the site gets big enough, inevitable pressure builds up in the top management to squeeze more money. Top of the hierarchy naturally attracts psychopathic and narcissistic types.
  • lowdest 6y ago
    I'm interested. I definitely think these kind of things are cyclic. Glassdoor is now owned by the same parent company as Indeed, so if a company is a client of Indeed's recruiting services there's definitely a conflict of interest present.
  • staticautomatic 6y ago
    Count me in. Already brainstorming ideas for safeguarding review integrity. Email in my profile.
    • lowdest 6y ago
      email sent
  • otoburb 6y ago
    I believe Team Blind does this and tries to deflect the gaming through blind anonymous reviews but where Blind validates the poster possesses a company email. The problem is that if it gets too successful then it's easy for companies to classify emails from the Team Blind domain as spam. Having said this, if that happens then that might already be a yellow flag on the part of the employee.
• zerop 6y ago
  Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more.
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  I've been pondering this idea. STEAL IT! Build a service that only hosts comments that were deleted from popular sites. Then for any given youtube channel or company review you'd be able to check what kinds of comments are deleted over there. Are there any legal issues to this?
  • andi999 6y ago
    Apart from copyright issues, probably if the comments were deletrf for hate speech etc, you might be in bigger trouble as well (singe technically your company posted it)
  • elwell 6y ago
    Hmm... crawl archive.org?
    • b0rsuk 6y ago
      That would be best, but in an effort to save space they don't make frequent snapshots.
• alexcroox 6y ago
  This is the same for sites like Checkatrade. The business owners can remove negative reviews which makes the entire site worthless.
• praptak 6y ago
  There's nothing like a network of people you actually know to find out whether something is shitty. Be it a company, a product, or a service - ask people you know personally. As a fallback, most online communities do have an "unrelated stuff" subforums or chats. Asking there lowers a chance of getting an answer from a marketer. I do sometimes get (and provide) good advice from a local gaming community. The key is to ask a community that is unrelated to what you are considering to buy, i.e. skip those groups which an unscrupulous company would swarm with fake advice.
• vaccinator 6y ago
  We need a review site for sites with reviews...
• throwaway77384 6y ago
  I had always suspected that Glassdoor would eventually succumb to this. Every metric is a gamed metric, after all. Why would Glassdoor be immune to this? Companies have very little to lose from bullying employees into leaving fake positive reviews. Yet they have much to lose from true negative reviews. I have checked every workplace on Glassdoor prior to applying, taking things with a pinch of salt / applying some awareness of what reviews seem fake (like the famous split between loads of 1-star and loads of 5-star reviews, which tells you something is fishy, like loads of products on Amazon have). I think I'll dial up the awareness for future purposes...shame.
  • Nextgrid 6y ago
    > Companies have very little to lose from bullying employees into leaving fake positive reviews. Glassdoor can always fix this problem by implementing a "ban hammer" system where if multiple employees provides credible evidence of a company forcing them to post fake reviews then the company permanently has a black mark on their Glassdoor page (and future reviews are disabled, so they can't even fight back with more fake reviews).
• freedomben 6y ago
  I used to use Glass door extensively to vet potential employers. After starting at one company however I realized the problem with this. Regularly in meetings the head of HR (which they called "People") would encourage us to go leave 5 star reviews on Glass door to help with recruiting efforts. It was really spun as a way to help the company. The problem though is that this company had some problems, things I would normally expect to see on glassdoor. Because of the way they encouraged it, glassdoor was flooded with 5 star reviews that made it impossible to find any negative ones. I no longer even check Glass door.
  • cdolan 6y ago
    Correct on the internal promotion - in addition to Companies compelling Glassdoor to confirm the Reviewer actually worked at the company. Often reviewers don’t respond, resulting in a removed review. I researched this a lot because I noticed companies I had intimate knowledge of had any sub-4 star review disappear. I detailed the practices in another comment elsewhere; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383
• Paul-ish 6y ago
  Do we have more evidence? I generally don't like to take the claims of a single anonymous poster at face value. I certainly appreciate the irony in this case.
  • cdolan 6y ago
    Not hard evidence, but I researched this a lot because I noticed companies I had intimate knowledge of had any sub-4 star review disappear. I detailed the practices in another comment; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383
• ab_testing 6y ago
  The customers for online review sites (like Glassdoor, Yelp, BBB) are not the people that leave reviews. Their customers are the business that pay them to host the reviews and show featured reviews. Every business needs to tak care of their customers. That is what they are doing in this case.
• john_moscow 6y ago
  The universal trick to understanding who's side somebody is on is to see who pays them. Companies are made to make money and if you are not a paying customer, you're the merchandise. And since these days most consumers don't expect to pay for online services, it's no wonder these services are not serving the interests of consumers. That said, based on the recent posts on HN and many other resources, more and more people are awaking to the fact that letting a bunch of monopolies decide who's voice should be heard is not a great idea. We might see a rise of some great decentralized alternatives in the near future.
• benzoate 6y ago
  I’ve witnessed this behaviour firsthand too. Several months after leaving MedShr I left what I still felt was a very honest review. 4 weeks after submission I got an email that they had taken it down (along with previous positive reviews about earlier employers). After prodding their support they told me it was because of some undisclosed behaviour on my part. Since then the page has become littered with reviews that are somewhat obviously fake. Most of them are written in a vaguely shielded corporate tone and they simply don’t have enough former employees with a positive opinion of them to have this kind of sudden influx of responses. Glassdoor has thoroughly outlived its usefulness and I can’t say that I will be basing any of my decisions on who to join on it in the future.
• tuna-piano 6y ago
  The problem with all review-centric companies is two fold: 1)Fake reviews are an actual hard problem to solve. Good reviews can really make or break your company so the incentive to game the systems is quite high. Positive reviews for your own company, negative reviews for your competitor, or cunningly, clearly fake positive reviews for competitors to get them in trouble with the review site. 2)Incentives lead these review-centric companies to some bad outcomes (or at least the lack of trust by consumers). Interestingly, companies with better revenue models outside of the reviews may end up building the most trust among consumers. I would think Google is very well positioned here. Both because they don't need to get the $$ from scammy tactics and because their user data can help them find fake reviews much more easily. Did user XXX use Google Maps to get directions to the location? Did user XXX get an emailed receipt from that company?
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    Fake reviews are an actual hard problem to solve No, free reviews are a hard problem to solve. But it's been done before. The reason there are famous restaurant and movie reviewers is because they are professionals paid enough by their publications to keep them honest. The problem is that SV wants content, but doesn't want to pay for it. Spending money doesn't "scale." So the bubble solicits reviews from random people with no vetting. Garbage in, garbage out. "Crowdsourced" is just another word for "amateur."
• redm 6y ago
  Glassdoor operates as a sort of extorsion to businesses. It provides a place for disgruntled employees to vent, and vent they do. It doesn't matter how much truth is in the posts; Glassdoor will stand behind it because ultimately, they want you to pay them to "clean it up," and most do. Companies try to compete with it by offering "incentives" or pushing employees to post positive things. The whole thing is ridiculous. I think Glassdoor's concept is excellent, but the business model ensures employees or employees can't trust it.
• the_only_law 6y ago
  > They would not tell me exactly what the issue was, just that I was banned from participating in their community I absolutely love when companies do this. I'm seemingly permabanned from certain Amazon products for reasons that no one will tell me. Some people have had similar issues, and a small subset seem to have gotten through via persistently harassing certain lines, but I don't have the energy.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  This should be unlawful if it already isn't. So I hope there are legal pursuits. And our government should be able to act. If that's really not possible then maybe we can create an AI that makes fake accounts and starts to write something that looks like reviews but actually just explains that Glassdoor is being dishonest and relating specific examples such as in this thread. Or maybe a link to an anti-Glassdoor website.
• fogetti 6y ago
  Wow. How can someone be so naive as the Reddit poster? It has been like this forever. Glassdoor in the US, Kununu in Germany, Vorkers in Japan are all company propaganda companies. Also it's just my pet peeve but I hate it when people call this bullshit public relations. This is simply corporate brainwashing and propaganda and makes one wonder when did it become OK to use such tools as purposeful deceit (something that countries used in order to indoctrinate their population) in order to gain profit?
• mywittyname 6y ago
  You can't trust ratings that you aren't paying to read. The business model for these review sites are all the same: be useful for long enough to corner the market, then institute a pay-to-clean policy. Sprinkle in a few fake negative reviews for those tough to close leads. The revenue they can extract for the businesses listed on their sites is much higher than what they could achieve through ad revenue alone.
  • colinmhayes 6y ago
    The dark web markets actually figured out a good way to solve reviews. 1. Only people who bought a product can review it. 2. the review includes how much was paid. 3. Heavily encourage everyone who buys the product to review it.
    • Nextgrid 6y ago
      > Only people who bought a product can review it. Can't this still be gamed? Why can't a merchant just buy their own product and get the bulk of their money back, essentially buying fake reviews for the cost of the market's commission/payment processing fees.
      • colinmhayes 6y ago
        The price is included. If the review is for a cheaper item you know it's probably fake. The fees are relatively high, so astroturfing $100+ items doesn't make sense when just a couple negative reviews tank you.
• DesiLurker 6y ago
  I have worked for a large company that told employees to go write 5* positive reviews on GD. I suspect it is a common practice. this just provides GD to turn into a Yelp of sorts that can do the 'reputation management' on the side. Sigh, I have come to believe that its impossible for the profit motive companies to stay neutral in long term, esp if thats their main revenue source. I wonder if there is a publicly funded entity that is also responsible for public good that can & should run something like this. but then if widely adopted that has a high probability of turning into china/black-mirror style reputation system.
  • TeeWEE 6y ago
    Its ok for companies to ask their employees to leave reviews at glassdoor right?
    • fl0wenol 6y ago
      No, it isn't. That's really scummy.
      • ivanche 6y ago
        Well... Asking employees to leave reviews isn't scummy. On the oter hand, asking them to leave _only 5* reviews_ is scummy.
        • Nuzzerino 6y ago
          I don't know. If someone is still employed at that location, presumably a higher percentage can implicitly be expected to vote 5* compared to the average former employee. It's similar to the controversy over mailing ballots to specific neighborhoods based on demographics to try to swing the votes.
• dsizzle 6y ago
  Separate from the review issue, but does it seem that Glassdoor's salary estimates are low? The estimates in Glassdoor seem lower than those in levels.fyi, e.g., although it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. It may also be because those who are lower paid are more likely to post, but it also seems worth pointing out that it would be in management's interest to report a lower salary estimate.
  • sct202 6y ago
    I think a lot of glassdoors data is really old. Just looking at some of my submissions, my 5-10 year old contributions are still showing up and seem to have a pretty large impact on titles where there's only a handful of contributions.
  • pcthrowaway 6y ago
    I was just wondering about this myself. I'm not sure if there's a clear incentive to game salary information. If a company posts a lower-than-real salary, they risk seeming less desirable than their competition to candidates, who may then apply elsewhere. If they post a salary that exceeds what employees are typically paid for the position, candidates will accidentally high-ball when asked about salary expectations. Falsifying details about employment happiness and health of culture do have clear benefits for deceitful companies however.
• phreack 6y ago
  Is there an alternative to Glassdoor we should be using?
• eigenvalue 6y ago
  It's the same problem with bond rating agencies getting paid by bond issuers instead of bond investors. Of course this ends up happening-- the incentive structure all but guarantees it. I think Glassdoor's service is useful enough, particularly for someone who is actively considering working for a specific company, that a version of the same idea (not Glassdoor, but a new company offering reviews of companies/management teams) could make sense with a limited subscription model. For example, a one-time membership for 3 months for $5.00 that automatically terminates, or maybe $10/year for an automatically renewing subscription. And if you submit your own review that receives enough "upvotes" or whatever the mechanism is, you can accrue credits that can be used towards the membership cost. I would probably sign up for that myself. Also, to keep the system honest and fair, the company being reviewed should have the right to respond specifically to any review to make their case, and this should be free for them to do so long as they can prove they represent the company.
• btbuildem 6y ago
  Does anyone know of reliable alternatives?
• bencollier49 6y ago
  I just visited the site and was met by a banner stating that trust was central to their product, and so they would never remove bad reviews. To my mind there must be some confusion here. I believe it's highly unlikely that they'd lie so directly. So something else must be going on, even if it happens to be the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. And even that's unlikely. More digging needed, I think.
  • cdolan 6y ago
    Ding ding ding! Three things actually occur here. 1. Companies pay the employee who left the review if they can identify them. $1,000 to the former employee to take the review down, along with an NDA. 2. Companies push Glassdoor to validate the reviewer was actually employed by the company. Some reviewers may not respond to Glassdoor’s confirmation requests, resulting in the review being taken down. 3. Companies’ HR or Talent Acquisition employees write reviews themselves and promote internally to other happy employees that adding “honest reviews” will help accelerate the company. Basically indirectly fishing for 5 star reviews. Any startup with more than ~300 total employees (current + former) generally has attention to their Glassdoor ratings. A local company I know of is a huge offender to removing negative reviews and flooding their page with 4.5/5 star reviews in quick succession.
  • daltonlp 6y ago
    > I believe it's highly unlikely that they'd lie so directly. That's why lying so directly works so well! In their T&C page, the "Removal of Content" section (6A) says they remove content, or portions thereof, at their sole discretion. Trust IS central to their product. A direct lie usually begins with a true (or unfalsifiable) statement.
• artemonster 6y ago
  What about systems with verifiable content? I.e. when a user leaves a review, that user can only append new versions, and the whole edit chain is verifiable - i.e. you can prove that no outside intervention (by a service host) was made. Are there such systems?
• A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  To be perfectly honest, I am now more concerned about disclosing the identities of users, who wrote the reviews to the affected companies. I wrote my share of reviews of previous employers. I did try to stay sufficiently vague and still informative, but they do have my actual email allowing for easy identification. What have I learned?
• jamesdhutton 6y ago
  Glassdoor explicitly denies that they allow employers to pay to remove negative reviews. See this FAQ on their website: https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Can-employers-pay-Glassdoor-to-remove-reviews/en_US https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Can-employers-pay-Glassdo... I am not offering an opinion on this. I am just noting what Glassdoor itself has to say about this.
  • ggm 6y ago
    This directly contradicts what the article says. The FAQ item is dated September 2019. The Reddit article is 9 hours old as I write in October 2020. The followup here, strongly suggests other un-related people have been called, even cold-called, and offered by people puporting to be glassdoor, to wipe the problem. I agree you aren't offering an opinion and I value that. I would also value some commentary to my note: What do people think, about what people said on reddit, and said here, regarding this, and what glassdoor said in September 2019? I know what I think: I do not believe this policy is well enforced, and I believe the posters who say they were invited to pay to clear their record. You notice they do not have "report breach here" links on that FAQ item. They do disclaim it has legal force. It may of course be unscrupulous non C* staff, or it may be intermediaries mis-representing their role, e.g. SEO leeches.
  • xnyan 6y ago
    I think it's instructive to look at how Yelp does it. There is no pay-to-delete button. There are however ways to have non-factual, incorrect, offensive or a myriad of other types of posts removed. How a review is judged as violating policy is an internal decision. Which reviews are surfaced on the front page or how the "average" review is determined or slew of other details that affect how a restaurant or company looks are are also under the control of yelp/glassdoor. There are enough ways to put the thumb on the scale that you can honestly say that you don't have a delete bad review button, yet money can still strongly influence how positive or negative an org looks on a review site.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kstrauser 6y ago
  My small SF-based employer got a (positive!) review from our Mumbai office. That was a problem for us because 1) we've never had a Mumbai office, and 2) we'd told potential customers that their data would never leave the United States and that all engineering was local. The last thing I wanted to deal with at that moment was having to explain to those same customers that it was all a big mistake and that we weren't lying to them. It took a rather undignified on my part Twitter rant to finally get someone from Glassdoor to look at the review and remove it -- not because it was bad, which it wasn't, but because it was factually impossible in a way that could cause real issues for us. Since then I've taken all of their reviews with a grain of salt.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• vanshg 6y ago
  Is the Glassdoor business model one that could truly benefit from blockchain?
  • mtnGoat 6y ago
    i think any review based platform is good, then things can magically disappear when someone ponies up the cash to make an opinion they dont like go away.
• offtop5 6y ago
  Wouldn't surprise me if informally once a company pays to become an " Engaged Employer" , they get rid of bad reviews. The amount of fake reviews here reminds me a bit of Catfishing ( check the FTC lawsuit against the Match Group- they own practically all dating apps). The root problem is your depending on a company which has a vested interest in lying to you. Glassdoor makes money when companies post jobs , you have a very real conflict of interest if Jill and Joe post about how shitty their employer is. Yet the same employer is spending 5k a year to post ads. I've been ignoring Glassdoor reviews for a bit though. Even word of mouth can be useless, a family member got fired from company X. My experience with company X has been great. The same family member can't hold a job for more than 6 months. In all fairness the people most likey to cry about an employer on Glassdoor are bitter with sour grapes. After I've had a bad experience , I'm on to the next glass of wine.
• acruns 6y ago
  This methodology also applies to the 'magic quadrant' about 10 years ago I was working for a small company that was making some great software addons for a MSFT product. They were contacted by the company I am implying and were told they would like to include them in the upper right quadrant but since they were not a "member" they couldn't, if they became a member then the company would be included in the next release. I heard this second hand from my CEO at the time.
• vmception 6y ago
  For more realistic compensation info use h1bdata.info and levels.fyi I practically never use Glassdoor, but if you are looking for reviews that was one way to do it. Its just when you are bouncing between startups and 12 big tech companies, you already know what to expect. So, this is very tech industry specific post, but we all know that Amazon is most likely going to be a problem, and you won't be able to get a review on your manager/team. Its very easy to narrow down.
• throwawayamzn1 6y ago
  What about blind..?
• jaxrtech 6y ago
  Honestly, this reminds me of the case of the rating agencies during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis[1] (with rating agencies rating CDOs of "junk" loans as now magically AAA)[2]. Practically speaking, these rating agencies were incentivized by the firms paying them for the ratings to rate -- and now a la Yelp and Glassdoor can be added to that list... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the_subprime_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
• croh 6y ago
  Can company owner see who gave bad review under 'anonymous employee' tag ? I mean if someone can steal instagram handle with the help of employee, how difficult it is to find 'anonymous employee' ?
• darth_avocado 6y ago
  It's a well known fact that Glassdoor is a PR machine for companies. The wages reflected on Glassdoor are almost always lower than what the company usually offers, so as to artificially deflate the wages. Anyone without enough research gets sucked into the company with lower than average wages. There's a reason why levels.fyi and blind took off.
• TooSmugToFail 6y ago
  I had an exactly the same experience with Trustpilot. They took down my negative review of a business, asking me to change it despite it being factually correct (I was reporting fraudulent bait-and-switch tactics used by a German air travel site), while they left a bunch of clearly suspect 5-star reviews, thus skewing the overall score of what was clearly a fraud of a service. The best part: the link that takes you from the vendor's Trustpilot page to their service is a referral link. The whole 'independent' review service concept is inherently flawed for at least two reasons: a disproportionate number of bad reviews (people will more likely go to such a service to vent their frustration about, rather then to lavish praise on a vendor), and a dependency on advertisement revenue, often coming from the very subjects of the reviews that you are featuring.
• darth_avocado 6y ago
  To everyone asking if there's an alternative, it's levels.fyi (for financial info) + blind (to really see anonymously what kind of people you'd work with)
• waylandsmithers 6y ago
  It's a shame they're being taken down because I find reading the negative reviews to be immensely satisfying and great theatre. Who doesn't love an epic quitting story? I've thought it's always been easy to spot the fake reviews that are five stars and clearly only use up the minimum characters for the pros and cons. I just assumed they came from real employees compelled by HR to help pump up the overall rating, rather than review farms and wherever astroturfing comes from.
• mshumi 6y ago
  Goodhart's law in action. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Nothing more, nothing less
  • Frost1x 6y ago
    Agreed, but I think the issue is the fact the measure becomes a target to begin with. We've structured so many aspects in society to be unforgiving of failure to meet metrics and thrust hypercompetitiveness upon everyone as an almost direct darwinistic mechanism of survival. Because of this, metrics become targets and systems are gamed as a survival mechanism. The argument for all of these metrics and push for competition is that it pushes out the lazy and leeches of society. What it really does is draws out the clever and lazy or clever leeches of society who are proficient at gaming systems and metrics, all while making plenty of proficient and productive peoples' lives more difficult and miserable. It also incentivizes everyone to focus more on manipulating systems and target metrics than doing what they're supposed to do. Metrics rule my life so why bother doing anything that doesn't focus on the metrics? Real successes outside the metrics go unrewarded. When failure is acceptable, metrics often don't become targets they become guidelines to help you achieve success. When I go to the gym, lifting a certain weight and performing a certain number of repetitions can be use to quantify success and improvement. I can cheat and lie to myself: perform a repetition incorrectly that makes it easier or add support and so forth. Ultimately though, gaming these metrics I know I'm only cheating myself. I may not see improvements and it may be discouraging but I know with perseverance, I have a strong chance of improvement. It works because I have no ulterior motivation that makes me want or need to game the metrics and am willing to accept my failures and success alike.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Well I don't want to suggest this is the whole answer, but game theory in economics and evolution tend to say that signalling has to be expensive in order to be honest. So peacock's feathers and money-back guarantees are the type of thing that people often quote as signalling fitness. The point of Glassdoor or any other review site it to make signalling cheap and reliable, so it's trying to square a circle. Word-of-mouth still has the your-rep-on-the-line quality if the person is somewhat close to you, and the decision is something important. Your buddy will say bad things about you if you recommend a crappy employee to them. A random stranger might not hear from you again, and knows that when you tell them this person is the best thing since sliced bread. In general, "How expensive is it for them to say this?" is a useful heuristic that you should pay attention to. It can give interesting results in several life situations: - School counselling. Once you're out the door of your school, the career counsellor is not gonna hear much from you. They say they care, and it sounds like they do (genuinely, I had one who was like the school mom), but at the end of the day they both don't know anything about careers other than "teacher" and they aren't affected by you not being able to find a job with your degree of choice. It does affect them that you get into a top uni, everyone wants credit for the Ivy League kids. - Every internet review but non-famous people. See the other comments. - Salespeople can be divided into relationship and transactional. If they guy is on the phone with you every day, his advice needs to not be crap. This can make it pretty defensive and useless. OTOH if he vanished once the sale is done, that's useless another way. - If someone says something that harms their own interests, that's honest. Of course be sure you understand their interest. - Life advice. Often if there's a great psychological cost, there's a story worth listening to. Painful things like why someone got divorced, especially if they paint themselves in a negative light, can often be trusted, or are at least worthwhile to listen to. Coming of age stories where something crappy happened because the narrator did something stupid, similar. Lottery winning stories of various sorts are often not, you can tell when the inevitable "I fought the odds" part arrives that it falls flat.
  • rocha 6y ago
    Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book (Skin in the Game) under a similar premise: “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
• Mc91 6y ago
  My main usage of Glassdoor is to see what kind of interview questions a company asks. I know for a fact I and others have gotten the same listed questions.
• chaos986 6y ago
  I never look at comments for Glassdoor. I do check Salary info and leave my Salary info. Is that aspect being gamed as well and in what direction? advertising higher salary then what they would actually offer?
  • milkytron 6y ago
    For the last two jobs I've taken, I looked at the Glassdoor salaries. The first was right in the middle of the range Glassdoor stated. The second was actually much higher than what Glassdoor said, likely because I was joining a new team on a new project with a good budget. Idk if it's being gamed. But if anything, I'd imagine it would be lower than what they would offer, simply because the data might be from employees that have started long ago and haven't gotten raises to match what a new offer would given for salary. As well as dated information (someone added their salary 3 years ago, but has gotten raises and hasn't updated their salary on Glassdoor).
• thelazydogsback 6y ago
  FWICT, all the job-finding and -reviewing sites are pure and utter scams (w/the exception of LinkedIn) -- they post false, misleading, repeated and outdated jobs intentionally as a bait-and-switch tactic, they mine and share all your info (so you can expect more spam and more crappy job-site offers) and many are un-unsubscibeable, so you will have to spam filter them out of your inbox for eternity.
• _nickwhite 6y ago
  Anyone who has ever dealt with the Better Business Bureau from a business perspective knows that this is also their business model. If you want your company to have a positive rating, you'd better pay them. Sad to see Glassdoor move to this business model, but hey, it works.
• ajb 6y ago
  Huh, that's interesting. At the moment it's still useful for being one of the few sites not full of recruiter spam, but I guess the star rating is no longer valid.
• nscalf 6y ago
  Reviews have always been a deeply flawed process, particularly anonymous reviews online. The rating system doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, and it is easily faked. Companies are incentivized to sell control over reviews to the parties being affected by the free crowd sourced reviews. Think of yelp and the people who give a restaurant 2 stars because another patrons child was crying. Or the onslaught of faked Amazon reviews. At a previous company, we had someone whose entire job was to talk to coworkers about what they posted on social media, getting good reviews for the shit company online, etc. The most shocking thing about this post to me is how many people actually valued the reviews on Glassdoor. Not sure if I'm too pessimistic/skeptical about this, or if others aren't pessimistic/skeptical enough.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• paulbjensen 6y ago
  Yep. I’ve seen negative Glassdoor reviews disappear from a company I worked at a few years ago (I took screenshots as backup). Scraping the site on a regular basis and taking screenshots is the only way to stop them from scrubbing the reviews.
• anonymousiam 6y ago
  So they are trying to emulate Yelp's business model now? Good luck to them.
• NoPicklez 6y ago
  Whilst I understand online reviews for products, services or jobs has always been a bit shady. I am very surprised that a company whose main offering is honest company reviews & remuneration statistics is gaming the responses.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• starchild_3001 6y ago
  My 20 something person startup managed their glassdoor ratings like a hawk. Any low star ratings were immediately challenged (through official channels at glassdoor to remove them) and current employees were asked to write glowing reviews to counterbalance. Glassdoor ratings are a joke. Please don't get fooled.
• TimJRobinson 6y ago
  I've always pondered the idea of an open source review site hosted on GitHub. All reviews are added as pull requests (the site could have a form that creates a PR in the background) so every change to the site is audited. This way the site can't just delete bad reviews or change ratings at will. For sites like glassdoor ID verification could be done with a group of people in which 2-3 of them check the ID and approve the PR. This model makes sense for any site which could be improved with a public log of why changes were made, a category most review sites fall into. The site also gets free hosting so can be run as a community project with donations without needing a profit model.
• xenihn 6y ago
  Blind reviews + levels.fyi salaries are the new Glassdoor for tech companies. I'm sure they will eventually face the same issues, but they're currently better (even if that doesn't mean much).
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]