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This is hilarious

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Theranos-R...

  Advice to Management
 You are doing a good job. Stay in better touch with the 
 employees. I think most people do feel appreciated but 
 there are also some that are disgruntled and unhappy for
 other reasons. I see these people spreading negative energy.
 You should seek them and try and fix the problem.

Is it common practice among upstart companies to pad their reviews on glassdoor. I've been using those as references for my job search, I know better now.

They are absolutely padded and padding is even encouraged at some places. Even companies like FB do it.

What do you mean by pad the reviews? Coerce employees into giving mostly favorable ones?

I won't name names, but one thing I've personally seen is HR initiatives encouraging employees to write reviews, not necessarily coercively.

If well-known companies are doing that, it's not unlikely that some companies are directly instructing HR personnel to write favorable reviews.

What's wrong with encouraging employees to post reviews? When you sign up as an employer, glasdoor gives you a sample email to send that asks for honest reviews.

Because it creates an implicit expectation that your review should be positive.

Yeah, I'm kind of torn on this. I was asked at a previous company to write a review on GlassDoor (I never did).

Let me rephrase that last sentence: GlassDoor was brought up literally at every monthly update meeting.

But back on target, I'm torn: On the one hand I understand the need to actively recruit and attract talent to join your workforce and I definitely understand GlassDoor is something used by many people to benchmark their expectations on working environment, management and peers. I get that completely.

Where I break off though is when you have to ask your employees to write a review (even if you're adding the qualifier "Be honest, we wont penalize you") instead of creating an internal feedback environment that can go into recruitment, retention and employee/manager review platforms.

I would say there's already a power imbalance inherent to the workplace, especially if you're in one of those "at-will" states. So putting in front of your employees "Hey, can you go write a review of working here on this site?" understandably makes some people shift in their seats.

Go with your gut on this one. Obviously being part of a tribe means trying to attract the best talent to ensure it's success, but it sounds like you don't necessarily want to join a tribe that's "encouraging" signals to a market when there wouldn't normally be any.

I don't really see how. If I'm unhappy, I'm not going to lie just because I want to anonymously live up to an unspoken expectation.

Unless you think people fear being ID'd... but that's a problem with the whole model.

Anyway, I'd imagine many glassdoor reviews were generated this way. If employers didn't ask, it would be mostly bad reviews from ex employees. Few others would bother.

The same would apply to App Store reviews also then. Essentially the review system is broken.

They wil sometimes remove reviews that are too negative. They removed mine of my previous employer.

Post fake reviews.

My old job made us write positive reviews on company time. Basically anywhere that says, "keep doing what you are doing" as the advice to management and/or the reviews are ALL either 1 star or 5 star reviews, you know they are fake.

When they make you write reviews, the trick is to write a very glowing one, including several perks that you wish you had but don't. e.g. "Great company, love the 20% own-projects time and work-from-home Fridays." This has all kinds of good effects:

1) It subtly anchors execs and HR to accept your perk as reasonable, especially because the people paying attention to Glassdoor are far removed from your manager and don't actually know if you have those perks or not. "Since our company already does it, it must be a good idea," thinks the exec.

2) Your coworkers see the reviews and assume the perks are true but unevenly distributed, thereby further ingraining the perks in the company zeitgeist.

3) If you are eventually found out, nobody will ask you to write reviews any more.

and 4) Candidates, including good candidates, will come to interviews and say things like "I've heard you have 20% time, that's a great idea, tell me more about it." This fans the flames in favor of your perks.

I used this technique as part of a wildly successful give-us-more-perks agitation campaign in my previous job.

You sir or madam are and evil genius! My hat off to you!

> I've been using those as references for my job search, I know better now.

Eh, that just means you can't take the reviews at face value. Ignore the obviously disgruntled employees, treat fluff reviews as a small yellow flag, and look for the real dirt not so much in the angry reviews but in the disappointed ones.

It's like dealing with Amazon reviews, which are also gamed.

You look at the low ratings, and if they're coherent and make sense to you then take them seriously. If more then one make the same claims, then it's probably true.

Glassdoor reviews are still helpful - you just have to take the averages with a grain of salt, and filter any that seem to have been written by a PR flack.

That filter should consider every review that looks like it was written by PR as a 1 star. Adjust accordingly. Theranos appears to have about a 1.1 star average with that adjustment.

Yes indeed!

I note on the reviews the "Helpful" click count gives some indication as to how relevant they are. I see

> Everyday brings new challenges, and you are able to approach these challenges with autonomy and creativity.

gets Helpful (1) and

>"House of Cards comes crashing down"

...A front row seat and education how to adulterate documents and strategy!

gets Helpful (76)

Well that plus I've had two separate situations where I left a negative review and was threatened until I took it down. Not sure you're going to see many unbiased views there...

How were you threatened?

One threatened to tell my current boss that I had been a bad, disruptive employee, even though he admitted that he knew that this was untrue. So he basically threatened to try and get me fired from my job because I reviewed my experience working at his company.

Other one threatened to sue me because I had signed a non-disparagement agreement after a layoff.

Wow, that is incredible shittyness.

They were able to identify you?

Yep. Small team one time and a coworker of mine who knew I wrote it told the company on the other one.

It'd be great if someone collated the data for the reviews and pointed out which companies tend to have the most "fake" reviews. It'd be a bit difficult to do so, but I can think of at least a few ways to try (date and frequency of reviews, "corporate speak," median length of reviews, distribution of "stars", distribution "helpfulness", writing style analysis, etc.)

All those Glassdoors reviews talking about long hours of work, working late, and for what? What did all those people work those long hours for? For complete failure. Theranos is in shambles, and these people signed up to work and work late at a company that was a fraud. Requiring employees to work late, or to strongly encourage that kind of behavior is a huge red flag for me when looking for work. People wasted hours of their life at this place, away from family and friends and personal time, all for Theranos, a name that's a joke now.

Easy to say with hindsight. What if it would have worked out and their tech had revolutionised medical testing?

Failures are as important as successes, and nothing to be ashamed about from the employee perspective, just the covering up by management that's the problem.

When I've seen things like this on Glassdoor, it's almost always a company that's closing in on a spectacular failure. It's like almost some kind of evidence of a specific kind of leadership driven failure mode. Theranos didn't fail because of lack of market demand, or even the failure of their tech, they failed because of how they were run and these kinds of reviews seem to be specific pointers to this kind of management style.

Anecdotally, I once worked for a company that did this same thing and the feeling in the company much more closely matched the longer-form negative reviews than did the astroturfed reviews...all of which were written by one H.R. exec shortly before they were let go from the company.

This is anecdotal, but in my experience, the complaints about "everyone working long hours" is usually a sign of either:

a) Poor planning on the part of management, resulting from not enough resources or hires

b) Poor market performance, leading to having to squeeze more out of the existing resources to get the results originally projected to the investors

Certainly there are people who like to work long hours and there are jobs that will give them all the work they can want, but those typically aren't the people complaining about it.

Astroturfing Glassfoor should be considered fraud. It's giving information to potential employees while omitting material information (that the company is the oposter) for purposes which financially benefit the company and its backers.

Just like institutionalized discrimination, prohibiting this has no teeth when nobody can prove it's happening.

> prohibiting this has no teeth when nobody can prove it's happening

If you take a job, find the experience to diametrically-opposed to how it was represented on GlassDoor and suspect your hirer of astro-turfing, a lawsuit with discovery would quickly uncover the action.

Oh god how I wish people would start thinking just a single cycle ahead in terms of unintended consequences before knee-jerking into outlawing things.

Seriously, what could possibly go wrong when companies can get sued over the inaccuracies of anonymous third-party review websites?

Reminder: you don't need to lose a lawsuit for one to be enormously costly.

I dunno, it seems pretty transparent it's bullshit. If I read stuff like this it's obviously signaling a toxic work culture full of company koolaid. I never drink the koolaid. I try to do a good job and work hard, but I never get into company culture stupidity. It's not in my nature.

True - it's deceitful and spreading misinformation.

This is tangental, but I also think that posting open job positions online when there isn't one should be considered fraud as well. Same with recruiters who do the bait and switch. People invest time from their lives into those, only to result as a record in a database somewhere when there was never any intention to hire.

I agree. Proving it would be difficult though.

Yep. It would have to require a regulating body like the IRS to be involved, since new hires are reported against EIN.

Who would have regulatory oversight on this one? Fake Yelp and Amazon reviews go to the FTC and State Attorney Generals (Who could do a far better job.)

Another startling Glassdoor review that seems planted by the company:

'Cons Not a con, more of a note -

It is a start up environment, which means that it is very fast and dynamic. It calls for a lot of hard work and creativity. Theranos is not for someone who is set in his or her ways, or for someone who is simply looking for a 9-5.'

Agreed. For a second I thought it was an ad for a job.

"Pros A pay check that clears the bank. A front row seat and education how to adulterate documents and strategy! Working on my CV on company tine..."[1]

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Theranos-R...

It's been my experience that those who talk about transparency and openness are usually the ones most trying to lie, cheat and steal the most.

My buddy also had a theory that those dating profiles that say they don't want drama are the ones that are the drama.

Theranos' relationship with GlassDoor is rich. You should have seen the posts up there before Theranos went after them with lawyers.

Pretty typical. A lot of startups that are going down the tube (or were always awful) end up with horrible reviews on glassdoor. That makes it harder for their recruiters to do their job, so they pad it with extremely obvious fake reviews to compensate.

> I wonder who inside the company is responsible for writing all of these? Holmes herself?

Hey - someone can do some NLP work to estimate number of authors, right?

"Knowing that we have top talent in every vertical reinforces my pride and confidence in Theranos"

Facepalm.