7 ms·

I treat Glassdoor reviews like Amazon reviews. I immediately go to the 1 and 2 stars, and read all the negative reviews. I then look for trends in those negati

by pierat 3y ago

I treat Glassdoor reviews like Amazon reviews. I immediately go to the 1 and 2 stars, and read all the negative reviews. I then look for trends in those negatives. If I see no real trend, and instead people being dumb, I ignore them. If I see distinct trends of faulty thing, or fails to perform, then I know to avoid. I assume (well, rightfully so) that any 4's and 5's are gamified and or just outright fraudulent. Companies who run these review sections are directly complicit, and usually rely on these ratings to "make the sale" or otherwise hold mind share. There's not much we can do here. Just hope we hit jackpot on the employer lottery.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
scottLobster 3y ago
The flip side: There are always bad apples at any company. The negative reviews may be legit, but not relevant to the manager/program you'd be working under. As someone who's worked at a 100k+ employees company, there were literally dozens of programs in the same building living largely separate/parallel existences. Unless the reviews called out a program/manager by name they'd be completely useless in gauging job satisfaction.
- pierat 3y ago
  Too true, and the larger orgs definitely have that as a concern. And some specific managers who would be better not leading people (aka fired) are a weird case where the in-person interview can kind of discern that. Basically, one has to learn what to ask and how to ask to suss out which team leads are good and which ones aren't. Then again, it's a definite problem where you are in an org can make or break you. However, we have to separate "shitty manager" from "shitty organization forcing managers to enact shitty policies". And this is where I think Glassdoor 1 and 2 star reviews can show policy trends (versus bad manager trends). And of course, you may get a company that avoids most of the reviews in scummy ways. I know that the company I worked for that got bought out had a clause they wanted us to sign that stated "no negative comments about us anywhere". What's funny is this is actually illegal under the NLRB. But to me this was a massive red flag to get the hell out (and I did).
  - thx-2718 3y ago
    Personally in my experience, regardless of the size of the organization (small family business to thousands of employee orgs) if management is toxic, it's because it's tacitly approved from higher ups. Culture starts at the top.
    - dimitrios1 3y ago
      Culture is preserved at the top. It starts at the bottom. The problem is too many leaders read an Adam Grant or Simon Sinek book and all of a sudden think they are the latest incarnation of the tech leadership buddha and impose their will on the team.
  - regentbowerbird 3y ago
    What questions should one ask to suss out the good team leads?
    - pierat 3y ago
      1. Efforts to conceal in an interview reveal potential toxic areas. NDA issues aside, this is more about concealing and making things look better than they actually are. 2. Ask "What do you like about working here?". If there's pushback or defensiveness, red flag. 3. Ask "If you were in my position, would you take this job?". Would they gladly take this job, or is there hesitation/defiance/pushback? 4. Ask "What does your organization know and believe about psychological safety?" - This is an institutional question about https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety 5. Ask "What are your values and how do you hold people accountable to live them?" (Does the org follow their own guidance, or is it just for show?) 6. Ask "What happens to employees who make mistakes?" - is this a 1 and done? This also pairs with psychological safety. 7. Ask "What happens to employees when they challenge the status quo?" (As an engineer or similar lead technological role, you will be continually pushing tech. How does the company respond to that?) 8. And for you to ask yourself: "Is the interview conversational or scripted?" 9. Was the interview genuine happiness, or faked? Would the people you would work with actually happy what they're doing? 10. How do you feel after the interview? Is there something that felt off? Can you identify it?
- JustSomeNobody 3y ago
  It's still a huge red flag against the company that one team can be toxic and another great.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - somsak2 3y ago
    i mean, in a sufficiently large organization, this is essentially unavoidable
- cortesoft 3y ago
  It depends on what is driving the dissatisfaction. If it is something like how the company handles promotions and raises, than it doesn’t matter which department is providing the review.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- importantbrian 3y ago
  This is very true. I've worked in an organization where most people on most of the other teams would negatively rate the company, but I was fortunate to have a great boss. So I look back on my time there as positive, although I recognize that most other people had a very different experience of that company.
- byby 3y ago
  [dead]
- stemlord 3y ago
  I don't think it's too difficult to infer that siloed irrelevance etc may be the case, doesn't seem like much of a flipside to critically studying negative reviews
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
carlivar 3y ago
My company has had legitimate 1-2 star reviews removed. I know this because one in particular struck a chord with me, and a month later it was gone. At the same time I saw that many other lower scored reviews were gone. Glassdoor is simply compromised by money and can't be trusted whatsoever.
- AaronM 3y ago
  Is it possible for a company like glassdoor to not eventually be compromised?
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    No. Cloud compute and egress is expensive.
  - carlivar 3y ago
    Perhaps if they charged job seekers for access instead of job posters. Alternatively, run it as a non profit like Wikipedia and solicit donations.
- whamlastxmas 3y ago
  I’ve had two employers that are impossible to leave 1 star reviews for. Doesn’t matter how mundane and kind the review is, it never makes it past moderation.
- smcin 3y ago
  If only a third-party archived/screenshotted Glassdoor reviews to preserve them. Then we could see the pattern of deletions by date/location/dept/position/timing of layoffs/stock price/etc. Also, someone could construct a RottenTomatoes-type aggregate of RealGlassdoor vs PurgedGlassdoor (vs Blind) metascore over time. To see when things were being manipulated. [UPDATE: hedora already said archive.org does this earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36084679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36084679]
mejutoco 3y ago
In a lot of platforms less than good reviews are removed. Some people post 4 or 5 star reviews that sound vaguely positive, but in the text itself one can clearly read a bad opinion. I do not know how effective this is versus a bad review, but the ones that survive are often gems.
fatnoah 3y ago
> I treat Glassdoor reviews like Amazon reviews. This is my approach as well. Probably my favorite moment was reading a review for my own company. It was very recent and mentioned that "management had stupid delusions of being acquired by company X." That review was posted literally days before the acquisition was publicly announced.
- bigtunacan 3y ago
  If they were a public company then 100% that review should have been removed. That's leaking insider information. Leaking insider information in and of itself is a violation of insider trading laws.
  - fatnoah 3y ago
    The catch there was that it was our stated goal, but the person leaving that review wouldn't have known about the imminent acquisition, which is what made it all the more ironic.
flashgordon 3y ago
The reality most (all) companies exist for the benefit of well the company. And all the power plays, motivations, passive aggressiveness, politics, misaligned manager motivations, bureaucracy are to be expected (sadly). Yes you could go much smaller to reduce process but you are taking that risk or loosing out on reward (and as I get older I am realizing how much I've been under appreciating peace of mind). I used to scoff at a friend when he suggested this - but his strategy of choosing a company based on who he knew and who he could work with has been looking amazing lately!
paulddraper 3y ago
Agreed. Qualitative trends are the interesting thing, not the quantitative result.
walrus01 3y ago
What's fascinating about reading Amazon 1-star reviews for anything that's even slightly technically complicated is seeing people who clearly have no idea what they're doing, and have broken the thing themselves when trying to install it or use it. Or similar.
- bookofjoe 3y ago
  I prefer the ones where people have ordered the wrong size/color, to wit: "I meant to order a black one but I ordered a white one by mistake."
belter 3y ago
If I want to leave a bad review, I always do exactly the opposite. Both for Glassdoor or Amazon reviews. Always give five stars, start with innocent paragraph and leave the full details and scathing review in the second paragraph. It helps reaching the target audience...
mancerayder 3y ago
I like 3 and 4 stars reviews, too, since there's the sense people are making a calculated balancing attempt to perhaps be fair. If you want to tarnish the average give it a 1, a 2 if you want to be read, whereas a 5 will tarnish only you as an HR person. I think the lesson here is to ignore the overall average and to read subjective stuff and look for patterns.
fmajid 3y ago
More like Yelp. There is no evidence Amazon commissions or condones fake reviews (apart from being wilfully negligent in policing them), whereas review extortion is a core part of both Yelp and Glassdoor's business model ("nice business you've got there, shame if bad reviews happened to it, but if you buy an advertising package, we will push them down so low they don't matter")

by pierat 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

scottLobster 3y ago

The flip side: There are always bad apples at any company. The negative reviews may be legit, but not relevant to the manager/program you'd be working under. As someone who's worked at a 100k+ employees company, there were literally dozens of programs in the same building living largely separate/parallel existences. Unless the reviews called out a program/manager by name they'd be completely useless in gauging job satisfaction.

pierat 3y ago
Too true, and the larger orgs definitely have that as a concern. And some specific managers who would be better not leading people (aka fired) are a weird case where the in-person interview can kind of discern that. Basically, one has to learn what to ask and how to ask to suss out which team leads are good and which ones aren't. Then again, it's a definite problem where you are in an org can make or break you. However, we have to separate "shitty manager" from "shitty organization forcing managers to enact shitty policies". And this is where I think Glassdoor 1 and 2 star reviews can show policy trends (versus bad manager trends). And of course, you may get a company that avoids most of the reviews in scummy ways. I know that the company I worked for that got bought out had a clause they wanted us to sign that stated "no negative comments about us anywhere". What's funny is this is actually illegal under the NLRB. But to me this was a massive red flag to get the hell out (and I did).
- thx-2718 3y ago
  Personally in my experience, regardless of the size of the organization (small family business to thousands of employee orgs) if management is toxic, it's because it's tacitly approved from higher ups. Culture starts at the top.
  - dimitrios1 3y ago
    Culture is preserved at the top. It starts at the bottom. The problem is too many leaders read an Adam Grant or Simon Sinek book and all of a sudden think they are the latest incarnation of the tech leadership buddha and impose their will on the team.
- regentbowerbird 3y ago
  What questions should one ask to suss out the good team leads?
  - pierat 3y ago
    1. Efforts to conceal in an interview reveal potential toxic areas. NDA issues aside, this is more about concealing and making things look better than they actually are. 2. Ask "What do you like about working here?". If there's pushback or defensiveness, red flag. 3. Ask "If you were in my position, would you take this job?". Would they gladly take this job, or is there hesitation/defiance/pushback? 4. Ask "What does your organization know and believe about psychological safety?" - This is an institutional question about https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety 5. Ask "What are your values and how do you hold people accountable to live them?" (Does the org follow their own guidance, or is it just for show?) 6. Ask "What happens to employees who make mistakes?" - is this a 1 and done? This also pairs with psychological safety. 7. Ask "What happens to employees when they challenge the status quo?" (As an engineer or similar lead technological role, you will be continually pushing tech. How does the company respond to that?) 8. And for you to ask yourself: "Is the interview conversational or scripted?" 9. Was the interview genuine happiness, or faked? Would the people you would work with actually happy what they're doing? 10. How do you feel after the interview? Is there something that felt off? Can you identify it?
JustSomeNobody 3y ago
It's still a huge red flag against the company that one team can be toxic and another great.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- somsak2 3y ago
  i mean, in a sufficiently large organization, this is essentially unavoidable
cortesoft 3y ago
It depends on what is driving the dissatisfaction. If it is something like how the company handles promotions and raises, than it doesn’t matter which department is providing the review.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
importantbrian 3y ago
This is very true. I've worked in an organization where most people on most of the other teams would negatively rate the company, but I was fortunate to have a great boss. So I look back on my time there as positive, although I recognize that most other people had a very different experience of that company.
byby 3y ago
[dead]
stemlord 3y ago
I don't think it's too difficult to infer that siloed irrelevance etc may be the case, doesn't seem like much of a flipside to critically studying negative reviews

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

carlivar 3y ago

My company has had legitimate 1-2 star reviews removed. I know this because one in particular struck a chord with me, and a month later it was gone. At the same time I saw that many other lower scored reviews were gone. Glassdoor is simply compromised by money and can't be trusted whatsoever.

AaronM 3y ago
Is it possible for a company like glassdoor to not eventually be compromised?
- datavirtue 3y ago
  No. Cloud compute and egress is expensive.
- carlivar 3y ago
  Perhaps if they charged job seekers for access instead of job posters. Alternatively, run it as a non profit like Wikipedia and solicit donations.
whamlastxmas 3y ago
I’ve had two employers that are impossible to leave 1 star reviews for. Doesn’t matter how mundane and kind the review is, it never makes it past moderation.
smcin 3y ago
If only a third-party archived/screenshotted Glassdoor reviews to preserve them. Then we could see the pattern of deletions by date/location/dept/position/timing of layoffs/stock price/etc. Also, someone could construct a RottenTomatoes-type aggregate of RealGlassdoor vs PurgedGlassdoor (vs Blind) metascore over time. To see when things were being manipulated. [UPDATE: hedora already said archive.org does this earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36084679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36084679]

mejutoco 3y ago

In a lot of platforms less than good reviews are removed. Some people post 4 or 5 star reviews that sound vaguely positive, but in the text itself one can clearly read a bad opinion. I do not know how effective this is versus a bad review, but the ones that survive are often gems.

fatnoah 3y ago

> I treat Glassdoor reviews like Amazon reviews. This is my approach as well. Probably my favorite moment was reading a review for my own company. It was very recent and mentioned that "management had stupid delusions of being acquired by company X." That review was posted literally days before the acquisition was publicly announced.

bigtunacan 3y ago
If they were a public company then 100% that review should have been removed. That's leaking insider information. Leaking insider information in and of itself is a violation of insider trading laws.
- fatnoah 3y ago
  The catch there was that it was our stated goal, but the person leaving that review wouldn't have known about the imminent acquisition, which is what made it all the more ironic.

flashgordon 3y ago

The reality most (all) companies exist for the benefit of well the company. And all the power plays, motivations, passive aggressiveness, politics, misaligned manager motivations, bureaucracy are to be expected (sadly). Yes you could go much smaller to reduce process but you are taking that risk or loosing out on reward (and as I get older I am realizing how much I've been under appreciating peace of mind). I used to scoff at a friend when he suggested this - but his strategy of choosing a company based on who he knew and who he could work with has been looking amazing lately!

paulddraper 3y ago

Agreed. Qualitative trends are the interesting thing, not the quantitative result.

walrus01 3y ago

What's fascinating about reading Amazon 1-star reviews for anything that's even slightly technically complicated is seeing people who clearly have no idea what they're doing, and have broken the thing themselves when trying to install it or use it. Or similar.

bookofjoe 3y ago
I prefer the ones where people have ordered the wrong size/color, to wit: "I meant to order a black one but I ordered a white one by mistake."

belter 3y ago

If I want to leave a bad review, I always do exactly the opposite. Both for Glassdoor or Amazon reviews. Always give five stars, start with innocent paragraph and leave the full details and scathing review in the second paragraph. It helps reaching the target audience...

mancerayder 3y ago

I like 3 and 4 stars reviews, too, since there's the sense people are making a calculated balancing attempt to perhaps be fair. If you want to tarnish the average give it a 1, a 2 if you want to be read, whereas a 5 will tarnish only you as an HR person. I think the lesson here is to ignore the overall average and to read subjective stuff and look for patterns.

fmajid 3y ago

More like Yelp. There is no evidence Amazon commissions or condones fake reviews (apart from being wilfully negligent in policing them), whereas review extortion is a core part of both Yelp and Glassdoor's business model ("nice business you've got there, shame if bad reviews happened to it, but if you buy an advertising package, we will push them down so low they don't matter")