[HN Gopher] The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews
___________________________________________________________________
The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews
Author : shsachdev
Score : 165 points
Date : 2023-07-07 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.careerfair.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.careerfair.io)
| collaborative wrote:
| 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
| jdwithit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They could already do that with pockets deep enough, what
| openai allows is for the common people to fight back
| JohnFen wrote:
| > what openai allows is for the common people to fight back
|
| How so?
| mhzsh wrote:
| 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.
| paddw wrote:
| 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.
| nerdjon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| newah1 wrote:
| 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fairly solvable with an actual identity/employment
| verification system, and that's not exactly an exotic idea.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| whatwhatnewacct wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| guiriduro wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _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?
| shippintoboston wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I've experienced this almost verbatim - put up a factual (at
| least from my view) account of working with a previous
| employer, a "warts and all" review. Next week I see about ten
| 5-star reviews each with a single sentence something like "This
| is a great place to work!".
|
| However, when searching out the low-down on a potential new
| employer, I only read the one and two star reviews - if they're
| pretty spurious then I feel more comfortable taking a role
| there. If however the poor reviews contain lots of pretty
| specific complaints, I find them more believable that the
| single sentence "everything is awesome here" style reviews.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've considered making a browser extension where you can
| click a review to ignore it and have the average ratings
| recalculate automatically.
| Solvency wrote:
| I know a non-engineer who left DesktopMetal with a similar
| sentiment.
| xnx wrote:
| Another case where web annotations would be useful.
|
| Recently: iAnnotate - Whatever happened to the web as an
| annotation system? (2013)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559758
| druvisc wrote:
| Same is happening to Google Maps.
|
| I and other reviewers had left negative reviews for Cosuno
| Ventures GmbH as it's an incredibly toxic and horrible place to
| work in. I received a take-down notice from a German Google
| Maps review employee saying that Cosuno is claiming it's a
| false review and they don't know how who am I. Even though I
| worked at the company for 4 months with the CTO and had
| responded to the e-mail with documents signed by the CEO and
| CTO.
|
| They're rocking a 5 star review now. I didn't receive a
| response from Google and my appeal has been ignored. I still
| have the company's t-shirt in the countryside.
| Kretinsky wrote:
| I went to a pediatrician near where I lived. Long story
| short, she was very toxic, making ultimatums and giving what
| was revealed as dubious practice. I consulted other similar
| pediatricians, who all gave me radically different answers
| than hers.
|
| As a result, I chose to write a detailed review explaining
| why I thought she was unprofessional, citing examples. Of
| course, my review got nuked.
|
| Same happened with a photo shop that screw up a photo
| development for some films. I left a factual review, with a
| sample in pictures. I can see my review with my account, but
| no one else can.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Heh, one of my friends wrote a negative review about his
| landlord's Immobilien company. Got sued and had to pay him
| the amount of his deposit.
|
| I bet I'd be at risk of getting sued in Germany even if I
| wrote a positive review about a company. The moment you post
| an opinion online you are opening yourself as a target.
| jchw wrote:
| Yep, I noticed the exact same thing. Glassdoor is a complete
| scam, and it has been for as long as I've had a career. I do
| not even check anymore.
| nottorp wrote:
| Only way to get something useful is to read between the
| lines. If there are full text reviews. But that takes time.
| Glassdoor, tripadvisor, anything.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before generative AI makes even
| that type of analysis impossible
| AlanSE wrote:
| So is it basically true that there is no objective
| information out there anymore, because anyone running a
| successful site gets corrupted with money?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Blind seems somewhat OK?
| iambateman wrote:
| I'd say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty
| objective...
|
| Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn't change
| much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019
| are probably still good now, which is boring.
| outworlder wrote:
| Wirecutter is not objective.
|
| https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-
| pay-to...
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Wire cutter is hardly objective - check out their bike
| lock reviews. Every single recommended product is from
| Kryptonite.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| To be fair, most of the alternatives are garbage, but
| also most of Kryptonite's own products are garbage. There
| are ~3 worthwhile bike locks on the market. 2 of them are
| made by Kryptonite. The rest provide the same value as
| the TSA. Mostly theatrical.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It depends on where they get their money, and how devoted
| to being ethical the place is. Consumer Reports is a good
| example of how to do this right.
|
| I think it has to be a nonprofit or individual who isn't
| doing it to make any money, though. If it's a money-maker,
| you can't trust it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's a big broad brush you just swiped with, but yeah, I
| kind of agree with it.
| smcleod wrote:
| Yep. I've experience almost exactly the same in the past.
|
| I've always just assumed glassdoor was a fake / scam site
| since.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply
| exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove
| negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive
| reviews.
|
| Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Clearly the solution is a review company for review
| companies.
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| Ah yes, the Coast Guard will police the police!
| camhart wrote:
| > No one trusts these review companies actually.
|
| Most people do trust them, but shouldn't.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Actually you are right, sorry. I was exaggerating but it is
| true that it is mostly the naive/average users of internet
| that do place any significant credibility in online reviews
| Mtinie wrote:
| Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could
| legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark
| UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Only if it was driven by a non-profit org I guess
| Libcat99 wrote:
| Perhaps a site that included both reviews of companies
| and (paid) job postings from reviewed companies could
| survive.
|
| Of course misbehaving companies would probably stop
| spending there, but that might not be a bad thing.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| At the same time, unfortunately we will have a hard time
| finding companies that will actually thrive on that
| website, since a staggering majority of them are just
| ridden with crooks in the management layer and above.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Wouldn't that set up a conflict of interest for the
| review site? I'd trust such a site even less than normal
| (and normal is pretty close to not at all).
| kfarr wrote:
| Consumer Reports has entered the chat
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I'm designing a worker cooperative owned and self hosted
| distributed solution
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| Not a review site, but networks of people I trust directly
| is about the only thing that works. As soon as this grows
| beyond the trust I have in the network, the proxy trust
| tapers off quickly. That's the problem with something like
| glassdoor.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| That's why the most lucrative thing is to get people to
| 'connect' their networks digitally on social media and
| manipulate them. I hope we see a return to irl networks
| alecthomas wrote:
| https://www.productreview.com.au/ is the only site I've
| ever seen that does a good job at user reviews. Each review
| has to be accompanied by a verifiable receipt.
|
| Here's their operating model, which sounds like a mix of
| paid brand manager subscriptions and advertising:
| https://support.productreview.com.au/hc/en-
| us/articles/36000...
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > verifiable receipt
|
| lol. the current amazon scam is to purchase the product
| (ship to a random address to defeat "common address"
| detection) then leave the fake review
| m463 wrote:
| Talking to some friends who are job-seeking, I do know they
| check them.
|
| Not so much positive reviews, but negative reviews are
| believed.
| pyeri wrote:
| A blockchain based solution can be developed for customer
| reviews. If your cryptographically signed and verifiable review
| went and sat on the disk of every computer on the planet, there
| will be no options to manipulate it.
| JALTU wrote:
| But those "seven positive" reviews will still show up! When I
| was calculating the NPS scores at a former job, IIRC you need
| seven or eight 100% scores to offset one low score.
| Interesting that's what happened to the Desktop Metal poster.
| pyeri wrote:
| But (presumably) those seven posters would be motivated by
| big tech money and thus be identified by some algorithm or
| the other in that blockchain? And/or you being a genuine
| reviewer would have a more organic activity across the
| blockchain with other products too compared to theirs and
| that will add to the weight?
| sverhagen wrote:
| There's just very little organic activity on a site like
| Glassdoor. You changing jobs, and thus naturally having
| any kind of inclination to post something may be few and
| far between, and you might not even think of uploading a
| review unless you're disgruntled (read: motivated).
| JohnFen wrote:
| > (presumably) those seven posters would be motivated by
| big tech money
|
| Probably not, I think. They're more likely to be
| employees or friends/family of the company doing it
| because they were required or asked to.
| starttoaster wrote:
| Yeah except there would still be a mechanism for revoking or
| moderating bad reviews because people would use the platform
| to review bomb any company they took issue with. The review
| might still be on the chain's history, but the moderation
| tool would still be created with good intentions, with a new
| transaction on a later block that basically revokes the
| "validity" of the bad review. Similar mechanisms can be seen
| in NFTs, where you can update the NFTs metadata.
| randycupertino wrote:
| At a healthcare tech startup I worked at for every negative
| review we got management made us write three positive reviews.
| The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college
| to write more and more positive reviews.
|
| It was so obvious, any fake review written by HR will always
| have "keep doing what you're doing!" in the "advice to
| management" section. Like, even a moderately happy employee
| will actually have something to say in the "advice to
| management" section. Only a shill will say, "Keep doing what
| you're doing!"
| incone123 wrote:
| " The owners daughter would get all of her friends from
| college to write more and more positive reviews."
|
| A cottage industry of liars. I was pretty naive in college
| and I still would have been skeptical about that.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| 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.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Same here. It does sound like Amazon reviews tbh.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| 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.
| pushswap wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| 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.
| triyambakam wrote:
| > One of the companies that he's offering his services to
| includes a Y-Combinator backed startup.
|
| I'd love to know
| michaelteter wrote:
| 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.
| willis936 wrote:
| I saw a glassdoor salary range for a job at my company. I know
| that the internal range is 50-100% higher than what glassdoor
| suggests. And then I wonder why no one's applying. Companies
| should just publicly advertise compensation.
| milkytron wrote:
| Some states are requiring salary ranges for job postings,
| hopefully this becomes more prevalent.
| sahila wrote:
| 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.
| willis936 wrote:
| This seems like a very nice tool if you are a capital case
| SWE. There is no similar analog for more general engineering
| positions.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Why are people downvoting this? Glassdoor numbers are BS and
| levels.fyi is extremely accurate.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| That's a reasonable distinction but just look at the data
| itself.
|
| There are tons of low level employees posting their
| salaries. If you work in those roles, that data could be
| more valuable to a candidate than Glassdoor's amorphous
| projections.
|
| I think the user behavior that facilitates this is the
| same behavior you see represented on Blind.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I have found that the United States Bureau of Labor
| Statistics is a comprehensive and unparalleled treasure trove
| of current, accurate salary information, and much much more.
| (US jobs only, natch.)
|
| https://www.bls.gov/
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary
| information is not public.
|
| It's possible, but I know that salary information isn't at all
| what I'm interested in learning from such sites.
| paradox460 wrote:
| 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.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| > So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking
| people to leave positive reviews.
|
| I don't think this is necessarily wrong, provided there was
| nothing forcing them to be positive or repercussions for not
| doing it (or for leaving a negative review).
|
| Most people review things only at the extremes (usually
| negative) unless they are prompted. That's why Amazon sends
| people emails with questions or asking for a review. If a
| company asks their employees to leave positive reviews, and the
| employees generally like the place and are willing, that seems
| OK to me. I've lived in apartments that have done this and
| noticed when looking at reviews for others that they must have
| done the same.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > If a company asks their employees to leave positive
| reviews, and the employees generally like the place and are
| willing, that seems OK to me.
|
| Yeah, it doesn't seem OK to me. The power differential is
| such that there's no way for a company to ask that of
| employees without the employees feeling like they have to
| make the review positive, or less negative than they
| otherwise might have. So I consider such reviews highly
| unreliable. That companies do this sort of thing is one of
| the reasons why I think reviews are pretty close to
| worthless.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| My last company sent out multiple "Please leave a positive
| review on Glassdoor" emails as we were trying to hire more.
| I never felt actually pressured to leave a review, positive
| or not, from those requests. I didn't (and it would not
| have been a positive one, if I did at that particular point
| in my tenure) and there were no repercussions. There were a
| few negative reviews added at the time, but there's no way
| of knowing if those were a response to the email or not.
| This was a large company, so maybe that matters to how
| people feel about it.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You know, the account you wrote the positive review with was
| the shill account.
| aorloff wrote:
| The grift is real
| nine_k wrote:
| I think we need something like a canary signal to mark reviews,
| posts, etc that you are forced to make, not expressing your
| opinion.
|
| Something innocent-looking, like a double question mark, or a
| double exclamation.
| paradox460 wrote:
| One of my coworkers left a nasty review, and signed off with
| "They asked us to write reviews about the company, so here's
| mine"
| 23B1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Blind company reviews are way more trustworthy because they
| have a way to verify that you're a current employee with your
| email.
| nottorp wrote:
| 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.
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