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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

"In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable!"

Yes. In my experience: Only people extremely pissed off take the time to open their macbook and write a truthful rage at 2am. There are good reviews, but they just don't have the same soul crushing honest factor. Comically, people think they are being anonymous -- but you can't soul crush without knowing -- and people (engineers) quickly put things together.

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That doesn't make any sense. I've come across colleagues who wrote scathing reviews...typically consistent with their work ethic. Hard to work with, quick to blame others..then it's no surprise when they go to Glassdoor and say 'the people here are morons!' when they get let go for performance reasons.

I understand what you are saying: You hired psychopaths on accident -- but your office is still a great place to work!

Just a bad apple, you see.

The thing about those people (not sure psychopath is the exact term) is that they can pass for decent people for long enough to get hired and entrenched. Hiring a few of them is inevitable at scale. So as long as they actually do get fired (as in GP's case), yes, it can still be a good place to work.

Ah yes. The "we hire a few psychopaths now and then" excuse.

Ah, yes. The "throw out snarky comments and hope nobody notices I don't have a real argument" tactic.

Fun fact though: Actual legit psychopaths are very charming. The biggest symptom is that they have a history of failures and bad referrals. But they are good at convincing you that they were victimized, and that they trust you to bring them to the next level.

Usually at the end of an interview, the interviewer ends up feeling like this person is a great guy, just unlucky. They might have failed a lot, but failure is good in Silicon Valley.

You end up with a person who becomes a core team member because they care the most. But they end up being manipulative assholes who are well connected.

With NLP and ML any company can know who wrote what review if they wanted to. They have all your emails and thus writing style is easily ascertained.

> With NLP and ML any company can know who wrote what review if they wanted to

And the motivation to dedicate resources to this is...? You already fired the person, what does it matter if you find out who they are?

Current employess sometimes write scathing reviews as well, so there's clearly a potential for retaliation there.

If they signed a non-disparage clause, it could be worth quite a lot.

That this is even a thing is extremely concerning.

Streisand effect is a beautiful thing.

Wouldn't that be easy to foil? I can, and do, write with different styles that depend on the audience I'm trying to reach. I'm reasonably sure I could write entirely unlike my normal writing and appear to be a completely different person. I've done a lot of writing for very different audiences.

Am I, perhaps, over-estimating my ability? Are they really that good at determining origin?

Even if you're overestimating your ability, it does not really matter for the case at hand. You can have someone you trust write the review for you.

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