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The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

244 points by shsachdev 3y ago

brucethemoose2 3y ago
Has anyone here on HN actually "ordered" such fake reviews? Or were maybe involved in their creation. I kinda get it... The pressure for a perfect 5 stars is immensive when every single competitor has it.
collaborative 3y ago
I have operated a organigram app for the past 5 years. One of the bigger user segments is these so called ORM agencies. They use the app to keep track of their large "teams", assign tasks, etc. A team can be as large as 12,000 members At first I didn't know what to think. Then I learned that their teams are mostly made up of illiterate people who need a few bucks to survive. I don't blame them. Online reviews are useless, if you need to know something ask someone you know, don't just take the opinion of someone on the griftnet
gnicholas 3y ago
> And I’d say that the above answer [from chatgpt] was better than 95% of the fake reviews I came across. Perhaps this is because the easily identifiable fake reviews are poorly written? The real question is how many fake reviews are good enough to avoid detection?
- shsachdev 3y ago
  Yes very good point - unfortunately the ones that are good enough to avoid detection, well, we won’t be able to track :)
andrei_says_ 3y ago
Reading these comments it sounds that manipulating reviews is the economy.
glonq 3y ago
I was too afraid to leave an accurate/bad review of my previous employer because the CEO was petty and litigious. I don't trust glassdoor to keep me anonymous. Plus I already knew that HR was producing good reviews to drown out the bad ones.
sunpazed 3y ago
In my last role, I built an education reviews site at scale — challenge is remaining objective given that your audience are actively airing the dirty laundry of your paying customers. Commercially it didn’t stack up, so we had to monetise the traffic through display ads. Same case with Glassdoor — dissing paying customers through your audience is never good for business.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
If you want an example of fake positive reviews, look at a former employer of mine trying to cover up their toxicity, weirdos… https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339... Their Google reviews are even stranger
tomcam 3y ago
Can someone tell me what this nifty-looking code does? fdict = dict((s,f) for (s,f) in zip(SCHEMA, funcs))
atesti 3y ago
We had a nasty review from one ex employee and in Germany it was easy to find a cheap lawyer/agency who wrote a letter to glassdoor demanding removal and a few days later the negative review was gone.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  Was the review truthful?
  - atesti 3y ago
    From his perspective yes, objectively I'd say half of it was reasonable
sizzle 3y ago
How are there no watchdog groups who can be the intermediary and rule against companies playing dirty with reviews, short of filing a lawsuit and using a judge? Like a BBB with teeth. Trustpilot seems to game reviews too.
sizzle 3y ago
I suspect businesses will use ChatGPT to mass write unique sounding fake reviews indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.
bnjmnmlclm 3y ago
[dead]
dmonitor 3y ago
Article focuses on fake positive reviews, but I wouldn't be surprised if leaving fake negative reviews on a competitor was also a thing
- UglyToad 3y ago
  The real 4D chess move is fake negative reviews of your own company that are so unreasonable in content they cast doubt on other negative reviews. This seems like an unsolvable problem with online reviews in general. However I generally find Google Maps reviews for restaurants fairly reliable. You'd think with the amount of data they slurp up they could cut out fake reviews based on location data alone. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my end though.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Fairly solvable with an actual identity/employment verification system, and that's not exactly an exotic idea.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      For something like Glassdoor, the problem is you risk being fired if you identify yourself and the info leaks or is sold. Can you trust them not to sell it?
      - nine_k 3y ago
        It would be great to be able to prove your employment without identifying yourself. In a company with 1000+ employees it would work especially well. Too bad the employer would be an adversary here.
      - everybodyknows 3y ago
        > info leaks Exactly. Do you really want to trust your ability to keep paying your bills to Glassdoor's infosec? In return for nothing but the satisfaction of speaking your mind to an audience of non-responsive strangers?
shippintoboston 3y ago
I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston. When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment. At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company. The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when I contacted Glassdoor they said there was no issue. A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation. Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.
- pubutil 3y ago
  I definitely believe that. Years ago, I had an interview scheduled with a bank’s IT department. Checked their Glassdoor page and it was littered with negative reviews, with obviously fake positive reviews peppered in. I took the interview anyway because I really needed work at the time. Got some 1-on-1 time with the IT guys and the first thing they said was, “You read the reviews on Glassdoor, didn’t you?” “Yes..” “Well, don’t worry, IT is pretty isolated from all that” Cool, I guess? Next, I got some time with a VP. He saw on my resume that I’d done some work for a Christian church. He said, “Yeah, I love to debate religion at the water cooler!” Had he taken some time to get to know me, he’d know I’m not religious and probably would have held his tongue. I got offered the job. Naturally, I didn’t take it. Like others have said, Glassdoor is good to see problem spots in negative reviews. Positive reviews are meaningless in my eyes. For reference, the bank was called Bank of Internet at the time. They’ve since rebranded to Axos and I continue to recommend against them. I know nothing about their financial credibility, but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment. This is likely some cultural issue (I'm not from the United States), but I don't get what some person of power who loves debating religion at the water cooler makes the company a hostile work environment. Quite the opposite: in my gut feeling the fact that religion (a topic that has a tendency to cause heated discussions) can be discussed at the water cooler is rather a point of evidence that the work environment is really healthy.
nickpeterson 3y ago
I remember working at a company that got frequently mentioned as “one of the best places to work in CITY”, and a few months into my tenure one of the HR employees circulated the website to go vote for our company on the “best places to work in CITY” website. I think Glassdoor is basically grievances by employees, some of whom are unreasonable, and fake counter-reviews by HR/marketing. I generally just look at the complaints and gauge how unrealistic they sound.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Yes, I don’t understand how someone who is basically content with their employer decides they’re going to write a Glassdoor review. Why bother, you have better things to do. But if you’re pissed you might. Most reviews are glowing and decidedly fake or really negative.
- IlPeach 3y ago
  Same here. It does sound like Amazon reviews tbh.
- nine_k 3y ago
  This. Also, some details are useful if seen statistically: details about work / life balance, intensity of employee turnover, particular broken processes. When they are not the centerpiece of a review, and you see them in 10 reviews, they likely correlate with something. Of course, reviews like "all good, none bad" or "all bad, the worst" are not informative. Some interesting data can be gleaned about salaries, or the interview process. But, again, it needs to be taken as statistics, not as honest detailed descriptions.
triyambakam 3y ago
> One of the companies that he’s offering his services to includes a Y-Combinator backed startup. I'd love to know
paradox460 3y ago
I once worked at a company that started getting a slew of bad Glassdoor reviews. The reviews were real; the company leadership had been making some bad choices and the reviews reflected it. So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  Same situation except mine offered a day of pay upon spinning positivity. After this personal whoring, I was sure to leave a complementary negative review from a shill account.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    You know, the account you wrote the positive review with was the shill account.
    - aorloff 3y ago
      The grift is real
      - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
        Once you've been grifted enough times you realize you were the grifter all along...
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        I fear that I wake up one day and the meaning of 'shill' has drifted so much it is meaningless like 'troll'.
        ProllyInfamous 3y ago
        In my initial writing I had meant "pseudo-anonymous" instead of "shill."
- 3y ago
23B1 3y ago
The Yelp of employment sites. Glassdoor generates revenue through advertising and 'employer branding solutions'. Companies looking to advertise their job listings and showcase their reputation are charged for these services. Reviews in general have grown unreliable as incentive alignments have shifted.
beastcoast 3y ago
Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.
- azemetre 3y ago
  Blind already has company reviews, they also have a recruiting service (hard to tell if it's a service or another job board) for companies too.
  - avree 3y ago
    Blind company reviews are way more trustworthy because they have a way to verify that you're a current employee with your email.
mhzsh 3y ago
And then there are the fake reviews left by shady reputation management services. $previous_company (which was very small) had many negative reviews pop up in a short time frame, which at first was thought to be a disgruntled employee making multiple accounts, but then a reputation management service "came to the rescue" just at the right time and offered to get them removed. IIRC, Glassdoor did actually remove these eventually after being contacted, but whoever offered to get them removed was told to fuck off.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
I'm old enough to remember when "the wisdom of the crowd" on collaborative web sites was going to solve all our problems, but every platform that could have delivered on such a promise has sold their soul to make an extra buck from people gaming their systems, and killed the golden goose in the process. The only reviews I trust are on Steam, and even then, I take them with a grain of salt.
jdwithit 3y ago
He mentions ChatGPT in passing but you could write a whole separate article about that. These bogus review companies are going to be able to pump out so many more reviews, of higher quality, with access to LLM-generated content. This problem is only going to get even worse.
- avereveard 3y ago
  They could already do that with pockets deep enough, what openai allows is for the common people to fight back
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > what openai allows is for the common people to fight back How so?
    - avereveard 3y ago
      instead of having to invest a million into traning a model to compete, you can apply the same spam with ai techniques paying cents for it.
nerdjon 3y ago
To me the entire idea of Glassdoor is fundamentally flawed so there is a part of me that can't exactly blame for things like this going on. It has been shown time and time again that most people won't go out of their way to leave a positive review for something and will only make the effort when they want to complain. Mix this with something like a job where generally the only reason people will leave is likely due to something negative going on (while I don't have numbers to back this up, I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. But maybe I am wrong about this assumption?). So the people leaving would only have negative views that strongly skew the actual appearance of how a job may be. I have left 3 Glassdoor reviews (once for an interview that was so bad I walked out) and all of them negative. But for 2 of them if I look back honestly I realize that much of what I was leaving for was not an issue for the entire company and was more specific to my team. That doesn't mean that those negative reviews are not valuable, they are. But I don't think they really paint a good picture, I know I don't trust it if I am looking at a company knowing both what I mentioned and what is mentioned in this article.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. This is why I've left 90% of the jobs I've left. In none of those cases was my leaving a reflection of anything bad about the company.
guiriduro 3y ago
Isn't it fairly widely known that the overall Glassdoor rating isn't worth looking at, and that short and wildly positive (or short and negative) individual reviews aren't useful either, because of the widespread fake review problem. Usually the ones clearly written by humans with real knowledge of the company are a little longer and contain particular story snippet that will add to the credibility. In my experience those skew toward the negative however, as I would mentally discard short positive reviews more frequently even if genuine, being so hard to distinguish from paid or incentivised corporate hr-wash.
michaelteter 3y ago
I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic. And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading. Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site). I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits. If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  When I search a job, I'd like to know both work environment and the salary, in the end both are really important
- sahila 3y ago
  https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ is a grest site for actual salary information on tech related jobs. The data reported very much matched my last round of interviews and the data granularity is good, being able to see levels, location, pay breakdowns, and even dates when the salary was posted.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    Why are people downvoting this? Glassdoor numbers are BS and levels.fyi is extremely accurate.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Aren't all these sites limited by (and biased by) the selection of offer data they collect? Unless they are working directly with payroll companies to obtain a uniformly random sampling of offers, they're not going to be accurate. What incentivizes employees who get below-average offers and companies who give below-average offers to share that data with these salary sites? Example: Everyone who even knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook seems to love posting about it here, but nobody who makes $100K there seems to feel the need to boast about it.
newah1 3y ago
Despite high turnover, and lots of complaints, my last company had one of the highest Glassdoor ratings I'd ever seen> How? Simple, they'd pay their employees to do so.
nottorp 3y ago
Hmm that ChatGPT review doesn't sound like it was written by a real human either. Because it's in corporatese not English. And back to Glassdoor, they seem to be desperate for reviews? Maybe non fake? I wanted to check a company last month so I went to them and found out you now have to register. Alright, I made the effort. Then they didn't let me see anything before I uploaded a review of my current job. I don't know if this is to prevent fakes but they lost me, at least for now.
whatwhatnewacct 3y ago
Glassdoor is a hellscape for employees and employers. Current and former employees can write literally anything they want, true or false, and it gets published. Employers have no cause for recourse except apparently paying people to write fake reviews. So a brand can be damaged by fake reviews or lies in reviews, and have to go through backchannels to fix it. It's basically a place for legal libel and puts everyone in a worse spot. I never trust Glassdoor.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  This is surprisingly pro-corporate take. This same argument could be made for literally anywhere that people provide feedback on anything. In such cases I tend to favor the interests of the least powerful rather than the interests of the most powerful.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    That certainly is one way to try and pick a side, but in practice it's no better than flipping a coin. Anytime you hear one side of the story, we'll you're hearing one side of the story. Most situations are not black and white, most have context and nuance. I've seen employees leave because the company behaved badly. I've seen employess leave when they behaved badly. I've seen situations where both sides had legitimate complaints. Obviously no person posts something like "they fired me cause I'm a dick". But plenty of people do get fired for perfectly valid reasons. Companies will very seldom talk about firings publically, it's too dangerous to do so. So basically just be aware that people who have been fired are, well, unreliable witnesses to how that came about. Of course there are plenty of bad companies. It eould be good yo know who they are. Im not sure employee reviews from ex-workers is meaningful. I -know- reviews from current employees is not meaningful. Which makes the value of review sites questionable.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
About the IP addresses: If the users are behind CGNAT you cannot rely on the IP address. I don't know what Glassdoor does in that case though.
paddw 3y ago
Glassdoor's model suffers from intrinsic problems such that... it's hard to imagine a site as it could ever work well for a sustained period of time before becoming a target for abuse. It also seems inevitable that such sites, will exist. Can you really blame Glassdoor here? Are they supposed to do a thorough investigation for every review? At least it gives some sort of weak signal about the place.
pushswap 3y ago
I left a review on the BBB, when I was a student, after being promised a gift card for a video interview of a product for one of the large tech companie's PMs. I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process. Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue. Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.
- IronWolve 3y ago
  The BBB is geared for companies, if you have an open issue, it becomes a back and forth ping pong match to see who can outlast each other. Companies HR will respond to the BBB update, they wear you out, and it gets closed as resolved. Its not. Its utterly useless. Same goes for some state agencies, file a complaint, but turns into a response back and forth, until someone finally gives up responding, and default closed. Systems are designed to make you give up and go away.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Once I requested an insurance reimbursement for a transportation expense of about $20.00, on the basis that their chosen service failed me that night. The reimbursement was denied, so I appealed. COVID lockdowns were active, and the petty bureaucrat on charge of my appeal barely knew how to use her phone. She said the request was denied due to illegible documentation, which was bullshit. They announced that the appeal was still undecided, but they wanted to grant themselves an extension of several weeks to study it more closely. I appealed the extension, and presently I was mailed a check for the full amount. How much is your time worth? Is $20 worth an hour of wrangling bureaucracy?
    - IronWolve 3y ago
      I would log into the BBB couple times a week and respond, "Still not resolved, did not receive refund", and click the "not resolved". The business would reply "We sent the check", after 90 days, I didnt log in for a week, auto closed as resolved.
praptak 3y ago
The society as a whole would benefit from more information transparency (in the job market and several other areas) but the economic incentives just don't align to make this happen. Which is kinda funny because the free market itself is advertised based on how great it is - when there's information transparency.

244 points by shsachdev 3y ago

Has anyone here on HN actually "ordered" such fake reviews? Or were maybe involved in their creation. I kinda get it... The pressure for a perfect 5 stars is immensive when every single competitor has it.

collaborative 3y ago

I have operated a organigram app for the past 5 years. One of the bigger user segments is these so called ORM agencies. They use the app to keep track of their large "teams", assign tasks, etc. A team can be as large as 12,000 members At first I didn't know what to think. Then I learned that their teams are mostly made up of illiterate people who need a few bucks to survive. I don't blame them. Online reviews are useless, if you need to know something ask someone you know, don't just take the opinion of someone on the griftnet

gnicholas 3y ago

> And I’d say that the above answer [from chatgpt] was better than 95% of the fake reviews I came across. Perhaps this is because the easily identifiable fake reviews are poorly written? The real question is how many fake reviews are good enough to avoid detection?

shsachdev 3y ago
Yes very good point - unfortunately the ones that are good enough to avoid detection, well, we won’t be able to track :)

andrei_says_ 3y ago

Reading these comments it sounds that manipulating reviews is the economy.

glonq 3y ago

I was too afraid to leave an accurate/bad review of my previous employer because the CEO was petty and litigious. I don't trust glassdoor to keep me anonymous. Plus I already knew that HR was producing good reviews to drown out the bad ones.

sunpazed 3y ago

In my last role, I built an education reviews site at scale — challenge is remaining objective given that your audience are actively airing the dirty laundry of your paying customers. Commercially it didn’t stack up, so we had to monetise the traffic through display ads. Same case with Glassdoor — dissing paying customers through your audience is never good for business.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

If you want an example of fake positive reviews, look at a former employer of mine trying to cover up their toxicity, weirdos… https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/CaseGuard-Reviews-E7449339... Their Google reviews are even stranger

tomcam 3y ago

Can someone tell me what this nifty-looking code does? fdict = dict((s,f) for (s,f) in zip(SCHEMA, funcs))

atesti 3y ago

We had a nasty review from one ex employee and in Germany it was easy to find a cheap lawyer/agency who wrote a letter to glassdoor demanding removal and a few days later the negative review was gone.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Was the review truthful?
- atesti 3y ago
  From his perspective yes, objectively I'd say half of it was reasonable

sizzle 3y ago

How are there no watchdog groups who can be the intermediary and rule against companies playing dirty with reviews, short of filing a lawsuit and using a judge? Like a BBB with teeth. Trustpilot seems to game reviews too.

sizzle 3y ago

I suspect businesses will use ChatGPT to mass write unique sounding fake reviews indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.

bnjmnmlclm 3y ago

[dead]

dmonitor 3y ago

Article focuses on fake positive reviews, but I wouldn't be surprised if leaving fake negative reviews on a competitor was also a thing

UglyToad 3y ago
The real 4D chess move is fake negative reviews of your own company that are so unreasonable in content they cast doubt on other negative reviews. This seems like an unsolvable problem with online reviews in general. However I generally find Google Maps reviews for restaurants fairly reliable. You'd think with the amount of data they slurp up they could cut out fake reviews based on location data alone. Maybe it's just confirmation bias on my end though.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Fairly solvable with an actual identity/employment verification system, and that's not exactly an exotic idea.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    For something like Glassdoor, the problem is you risk being fired if you identify yourself and the info leaks or is sold. Can you trust them not to sell it?
    - nine_k 3y ago
      It would be great to be able to prove your employment without identifying yourself. In a company with 1000+ employees it would work especially well. Too bad the employer would be an adversary here.
    - everybodyknows 3y ago
      > info leaks Exactly. Do you really want to trust your ability to keep paying your bills to Glassdoor's infosec? In return for nothing but the satisfaction of speaking your mind to an audience of non-responsive strangers?

shippintoboston 3y ago

I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston. When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment. At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company. The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when I contacted Glassdoor they said there was no issue. A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation. Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.

pubutil 3y ago
I definitely believe that. Years ago, I had an interview scheduled with a bank’s IT department. Checked their Glassdoor page and it was littered with negative reviews, with obviously fake positive reviews peppered in. I took the interview anyway because I really needed work at the time. Got some 1-on-1 time with the IT guys and the first thing they said was, “You read the reviews on Glassdoor, didn’t you?” “Yes..” “Well, don’t worry, IT is pretty isolated from all that” Cool, I guess? Next, I got some time with a VP. He saw on my resume that I’d done some work for a Christian church. He said, “Yeah, I love to debate religion at the water cooler!” Had he taken some time to get to know me, he’d know I’m not religious and probably would have held his tongue. I got offered the job. Naturally, I didn’t take it. Like others have said, Glassdoor is good to see problem spots in negative reviews. Positive reviews are meaningless in my eyes. For reference, the bank was called Bank of Internet at the time. They’ve since rebranded to Axos and I continue to recommend against them. I know nothing about their financial credibility, but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment. This is likely some cultural issue (I'm not from the United States), but I don't get what some person of power who loves debating religion at the water cooler makes the company a hostile work environment. Quite the opposite: in my gut feeling the fact that religion (a topic that has a tendency to cause heated discussions) can be discussed at the water cooler is rather a point of evidence that the work environment is really healthy.

nickpeterson 3y ago

I remember working at a company that got frequently mentioned as “one of the best places to work in CITY”, and a few months into my tenure one of the HR employees circulated the website to go vote for our company on the “best places to work in CITY” website. I think Glassdoor is basically grievances by employees, some of whom are unreasonable, and fake counter-reviews by HR/marketing. I generally just look at the complaints and gauge how unrealistic they sound.

spacemadness 3y ago
Yes, I don’t understand how someone who is basically content with their employer decides they’re going to write a Glassdoor review. Why bother, you have better things to do. But if you’re pissed you might. Most reviews are glowing and decidedly fake or really negative.
IlPeach 3y ago
Same here. It does sound like Amazon reviews tbh.
nine_k 3y ago
This. Also, some details are useful if seen statistically: details about work / life balance, intensity of employee turnover, particular broken processes. When they are not the centerpiece of a review, and you see them in 10 reviews, they likely correlate with something. Of course, reviews like "all good, none bad" or "all bad, the worst" are not informative. Some interesting data can be gleaned about salaries, or the interview process. But, again, it needs to be taken as statistics, not as honest detailed descriptions.

triyambakam 3y ago

> One of the companies that he’s offering his services to includes a Y-Combinator backed startup. I'd love to know

paradox460 3y ago

I once worked at a company that started getting a slew of bad Glassdoor reviews. The reviews were real; the company leadership had been making some bad choices and the reviews reflected it. So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago
Same situation except mine offered a day of pay upon spinning positivity. After this personal whoring, I was sure to leave a complementary negative review from a shill account.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  You know, the account you wrote the positive review with was the shill account.
  - aorloff 3y ago
    The grift is real
    - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
      Once you've been grifted enough times you realize you were the grifter all along...
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      I fear that I wake up one day and the meaning of 'shill' has drifted so much it is meaningless like 'troll'.
      - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
        In my initial writing I had meant "pseudo-anonymous" instead of "shill."
3y ago

23B1 3y ago

The Yelp of employment sites. Glassdoor generates revenue through advertising and 'employer branding solutions'. Companies looking to advertise their job listings and showcase their reputation are charged for these services. Reviews in general have grown unreliable as incentive alignments have shifted.

beastcoast 3y ago

Seems like Blind should get in on this game, since the premise of the app is that it requires a company email address. Use an LLM to extract insights from the comments and give them to prospective job hunters for a small fee, or even just run ads.

azemetre 3y ago
Blind already has company reviews, they also have a recruiting service (hard to tell if it's a service or another job board) for companies too.
- avree 3y ago
  Blind company reviews are way more trustworthy because they have a way to verify that you're a current employee with your email.

mhzsh 3y ago

And then there are the fake reviews left by shady reputation management services. $previous_company (which was very small) had many negative reviews pop up in a short time frame, which at first was thought to be a disgruntled employee making multiple accounts, but then a reputation management service "came to the rescue" just at the right time and offered to get them removed. IIRC, Glassdoor did actually remove these eventually after being contacted, but whoever offered to get them removed was told to fuck off.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

I'm old enough to remember when "the wisdom of the crowd" on collaborative web sites was going to solve all our problems, but every platform that could have delivered on such a promise has sold their soul to make an extra buck from people gaming their systems, and killed the golden goose in the process. The only reviews I trust are on Steam, and even then, I take them with a grain of salt.

jdwithit 3y ago

He mentions ChatGPT in passing but you could write a whole separate article about that. These bogus review companies are going to be able to pump out so many more reviews, of higher quality, with access to LLM-generated content. This problem is only going to get even worse.

avereveard 3y ago
They could already do that with pockets deep enough, what openai allows is for the common people to fight back
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > what openai allows is for the common people to fight back How so?
  - avereveard 3y ago
    instead of having to invest a million into traning a model to compete, you can apply the same spam with ai techniques paying cents for it.

nerdjon 3y ago

To me the entire idea of Glassdoor is fundamentally flawed so there is a part of me that can't exactly blame for things like this going on. It has been shown time and time again that most people won't go out of their way to leave a positive review for something and will only make the effort when they want to complain. Mix this with something like a job where generally the only reason people will leave is likely due to something negative going on (while I don't have numbers to back this up, I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. But maybe I am wrong about this assumption?). So the people leaving would only have negative views that strongly skew the actual appearance of how a job may be. I have left 3 Glassdoor reviews (once for an interview that was so bad I walked out) and all of them negative. But for 2 of them if I look back honestly I realize that much of what I was leaving for was not an issue for the entire company and was more specific to my team. That doesn't mean that those negative reviews are not valuable, they are. But I don't think they really paint a good picture, I know I don't trust it if I am looking at a company knowing both what I mentioned and what is mentioned in this article.

JohnFen 3y ago
> I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. This is why I've left 90% of the jobs I've left. In none of those cases was my leaving a reflection of anything bad about the company.

guiriduro 3y ago

Isn't it fairly widely known that the overall Glassdoor rating isn't worth looking at, and that short and wildly positive (or short and negative) individual reviews aren't useful either, because of the widespread fake review problem. Usually the ones clearly written by humans with real knowledge of the company are a little longer and contain particular story snippet that will add to the credibility. In my experience those skew toward the negative however, as I would mentally discard short positive reviews more frequently even if genuine, being so hard to distinguish from paid or incentivised corporate hr-wash.

michaelteter 3y ago

I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic. And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading. Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site). I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits. If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
When I search a job, I'd like to know both work environment and the salary, in the end both are really important
sahila 3y ago
https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ is a grest site for actual salary information on tech related jobs. The data reported very much matched my last round of interviews and the data granularity is good, being able to see levels, location, pay breakdowns, and even dates when the salary was posted.
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  Why are people downvoting this? Glassdoor numbers are BS and levels.fyi is extremely accurate.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Aren't all these sites limited by (and biased by) the selection of offer data they collect? Unless they are working directly with payroll companies to obtain a uniformly random sampling of offers, they're not going to be accurate. What incentivizes employees who get below-average offers and companies who give below-average offers to share that data with these salary sites? Example: Everyone who even knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook seems to love posting about it here, but nobody who makes $100K there seems to feel the need to boast about it.

newah1 3y ago

Despite high turnover, and lots of complaints, my last company had one of the highest Glassdoor ratings I'd ever seen> How? Simple, they'd pay their employees to do so.

nottorp 3y ago

Hmm that ChatGPT review doesn't sound like it was written by a real human either. Because it's in corporatese not English. And back to Glassdoor, they seem to be desperate for reviews? Maybe non fake? I wanted to check a company last month so I went to them and found out you now have to register. Alright, I made the effort. Then they didn't let me see anything before I uploaded a review of my current job. I don't know if this is to prevent fakes but they lost me, at least for now.

whatwhatnewacct 3y ago

Glassdoor is a hellscape for employees and employers. Current and former employees can write literally anything they want, true or false, and it gets published. Employers have no cause for recourse except apparently paying people to write fake reviews. So a brand can be damaged by fake reviews or lies in reviews, and have to go through backchannels to fix it. It's basically a place for legal libel and puts everyone in a worse spot. I never trust Glassdoor.

idiotsecant 3y ago
This is surprisingly pro-corporate take. This same argument could be made for literally anywhere that people provide feedback on anything. In such cases I tend to favor the interests of the least powerful rather than the interests of the most powerful.
- bruce511 3y ago
  That certainly is one way to try and pick a side, but in practice it's no better than flipping a coin. Anytime you hear one side of the story, we'll you're hearing one side of the story. Most situations are not black and white, most have context and nuance. I've seen employees leave because the company behaved badly. I've seen employess leave when they behaved badly. I've seen situations where both sides had legitimate complaints. Obviously no person posts something like "they fired me cause I'm a dick". But plenty of people do get fired for perfectly valid reasons. Companies will very seldom talk about firings publically, it's too dangerous to do so. So basically just be aware that people who have been fired are, well, unreliable witnesses to how that came about. Of course there are plenty of bad companies. It eould be good yo know who they are. Im not sure employee reviews from ex-workers is meaningful. I -know- reviews from current employees is not meaningful. Which makes the value of review sites questionable.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

About the IP addresses: If the users are behind CGNAT you cannot rely on the IP address. I don't know what Glassdoor does in that case though.

paddw 3y ago

Glassdoor's model suffers from intrinsic problems such that... it's hard to imagine a site as it could ever work well for a sustained period of time before becoming a target for abuse. It also seems inevitable that such sites, will exist. Can you really blame Glassdoor here? Are they supposed to do a thorough investigation for every review? At least it gives some sort of weak signal about the place.

pushswap 3y ago

I left a review on the BBB, when I was a student, after being promised a gift card for a video interview of a product for one of the large tech companie's PMs. I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process. Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue. Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.

IronWolve 3y ago
The BBB is geared for companies, if you have an open issue, it becomes a back and forth ping pong match to see who can outlast each other. Companies HR will respond to the BBB update, they wear you out, and it gets closed as resolved. Its not. Its utterly useless. Same goes for some state agencies, file a complaint, but turns into a response back and forth, until someone finally gives up responding, and default closed. Systems are designed to make you give up and go away.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Once I requested an insurance reimbursement for a transportation expense of about $20.00, on the basis that their chosen service failed me that night. The reimbursement was denied, so I appealed. COVID lockdowns were active, and the petty bureaucrat on charge of my appeal barely knew how to use her phone. She said the request was denied due to illegible documentation, which was bullshit. They announced that the appeal was still undecided, but they wanted to grant themselves an extension of several weeks to study it more closely. I appealed the extension, and presently I was mailed a check for the full amount. How much is your time worth? Is $20 worth an hour of wrangling bureaucracy?
  - IronWolve 3y ago
    I would log into the BBB couple times a week and respond, "Still not resolved, did not receive refund", and click the "not resolved". The business would reply "We sent the check", after 90 days, I didnt log in for a week, auto closed as resolved.

praptak 3y ago

The society as a whole would benefit from more information transparency (in the job market and several other areas) but the economic incentives just don't align to make this happen. Which is kinda funny because the free market itself is advertised based on how great it is - when there's information transparency.