Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

>In April 2014, she got a long email from another employee. The employee alleged that Theranos had cherry-picked data when comparing Edison machines to traditional lab machines to make the Edison look more accurate, according to a copy of the email.

>For one test, the device’s accuracy rate increased sharply after some information was deleted and manipulated, the employee wrote. Edison machines also allegedly failed daily quality-control checks often.

>Ms. Holmes forwarded the email to Mr. Balwani. He replied to the employee, who no longer works at Theranos, denied all the claims and questioned the employee’s understanding of statistics and lab science.

Oh man. If you read through Theranos' reviews on Glassdoor [1] this anecdote seems totally legitimate. Multiple reviews talk about the toxic culture and how management does anything to cover their behinds. Quite a few of these were written before the scandal broke so I think they're quite honest about what's going on.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Theranos-Reviews-E248889_P...

Here's some fascinating things I came across above and beyond lousy management kvetching and nepotism complaints:

- complaints about poor pay, minimal benefits, no options, no 401(k) matching, no wellness benefits, no gym

- not allowed to post Theranos on your linkedin profile...that's crazy goobers

- lots of acknowledgement by reviewers that many of the reviews of Theranos are fake, including a couple that say there's regular pressure to post fake positive reviews on the site. Reading the positive reviews that sound like press releases, I can believe Holmes probably wrote them herself.

- long work hours, minimal work from home, regular weekend work

- incredibly high turn-over rate (no surprise)

- complaints about lack of domain knowledge up through the management chain, from product development to medicine

- very heavy involvement by the COO in everyday employee's work, complaints about the COO's temper and lack of domain knowledge (he, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani appears to be Stanford CS dropout who went on to get an undergrad and MBA elsewhere)

- descriptions of the assay preparation not being particularly unique...which feeds my previous notion that they're main innovation is subsidizing blood tests with VC money to drive the price down

- employees with experience in the regulatory environment are ignored

- no protocol "if you stick yourself with a needle" (written by a current Phlebotomist)

Interesting thing about Balwani is he already had an IS/CS degree from UT Austin in '90 and a MBA from Haas in '03 - the CS degree from Stanford is from '04.

Glassdoor actually removed a few of the more scathing negative reviews about working there. I think Theranos advertised on Glassdoor so they removed some of the even worse reviews... there used to be some even more negative ones.

i wonder if we can find them? or an archive of them?

So I was on Glassdoor just yesterday and saw a little note "Your trust is our top concern, so companies can't alter or remove reviews."

Is that just a flat out lie?

It's not a lie but it's not necessarily the whole truth. Companies can't alter reviews, but Glassdoor definitely can and does. We just don't know what criteria they use.

Glassdoor seems like it has the same business model as yelp- "Buy our advertising and we will make your good rankings rank higher and your worse reviews be filtered or lower."

Maybe not outright extortion but certainly not what they claim of being a truly independent forum.

That allegation against yelp has never been proven. I'd be surprised if either yelp or glass door is outright deleting reviews for money.

What would you consider a proof? does a a sales rep asking her friends to post fake negative reviews count?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C67Lh4LE5LY

The fact that they need to have friends post fake reviews suggests to me that this is not sanctioned activity or a systematic fraud.

An environment where salespeople feel they can do stuff like that is a problem, but no, it is not proof that "yelp deleted bad reviews for money"

True not not, Yelp certainly wants you to believe it helps to buy from them. It's how they make money. It doesn't need to be written in the contract to work.

I was looking for chimney sweeps in the DC area and found one of the top-rated chimney sweeps on Yelp on about page 4 or 5 after the 2 and 1.5 star rated companies. The companies on the first page were all those that paid Yelp. I talked to the owner of the company that I hired and he said that Yelp wanted him to pay $300+ / mo to get his placement on the search pages higher and he said he didn't want to because he was so busy from so much work he didn't need any more visibility (he ran and operated it with maybe one or two other assistants). For a lot of companies, this could be viewed as extortion to hide well-rated companies so far down the list that most users wouldn't look to go there.

Yelp definitely hides a lot of reviews that are completely legitimate supposedly due to their review validity system filtering them, but in a lot of cases I've seen the only crime these disenfranchised reviewers had was that they didn't want to go make a full-blown Yelp profile with pictures and everything to make really serious, very well described complaints. This artificially inflates review relevancy ratings for companies that have Yelp reviewers that skew towards younger demographics. There's a ton of stores where I live that are frequented primarily by 50+ year olds but they have almost zero Yelp presence since nobody operating or visiting the store are much into technology / social media enough to care.

I know companies that have tried to get their reviews removed or edited, and offered considerable bribes for it. All have been turned down. My impression is that Glassdoor does uphold their stated policy. It's possible that their bribes were not high enough, or not presented to the right people, but at the least, it is not easy to get a review removed.

No- but glassdoor can remove reviews on companies' behalf :)

Can someone post those reviews? I'm curious to read them. Hopefully there is a daily cache of glassdoor that we can look at.

The couple I remember reading that have been deleted were about how the CEO and the COO park their Ferraris/crazy racecar sports car in 2 designated spaces directly in the front entryway (like literally exactly in front foyer the building) whereas the actual handicapped spots were about 150 yards away down the parking lot away from the entry of the building compared to the CEO/COO spaces.

There were also complaints about ridiculously high security to the point where people didn't even know their own exact job descriptions/workflows because of "competitive secrets" and that they couldn't talk to people working in other departments due to paranoia/culture of fear.

Finally there were a couple about how they interview and act like your job will be at the fancy building on Sand Hill near Stanford but really the bulk of the employees are relegated to annexed buildings far away in EPA or in Mountain View, yet they don't tell them this until their start date - during all their onsite interviews up through the offer letter it seems like they'd be working at the HQ on Sand Hill.

The kicker is right after your quote:

He added: “This is product development, this is how startups are built.” The reply ended with an edict that the “only email on this topic I want to see from you going forward is an apology that I’ll pass on to other people.”

Just FYI for anyone clicking this link, this is a link that sets it to show the worst reviews on Glassdoor, not a random sampling. I wasn't that familiar with GD beforehand it and confused me.

You kind of have to. The vast majority of them are obviously fake. If you look at the wording / grammar there is a lot of similarity (uses of the word "Great", etc)

Good shout on the glassdoor reviews, it's amazing how even the most rudimentary internet searching seems to elude journalists!

Also, can this be our last Theranos thread before the company officially implodes? I get no small amount of freude out of this schade, but it's becoming the new bitcoin in terms of endlessly rehashed HN topics.

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