Glassdoor and its effect on workplace culture
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I took a closer look at the review, and found out that the reviewer had mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did some digging and found another company with the same name in Singapore. I reached out to Glassdoor again with all this info, screenshots, website links, etc and there response was basically the same.
Yes, but surely Glassdoor should agree to take down reviews that can easily be verified to be factually untrue?
I'm sorry for what happened to your startup here, and the doubtless frustration.
But I'm deeply happy owners can't find out who the reviewers are! Can you imagine the fallout? It'd have such a chilling effect to render the site completely useless.
Regardless of the negativity, I find tremendous value in reading reviews and looking for themes. Most don't care about outliers.
So then, the reviewer that had bad experience with "XXX, Singapore", would not post it against "XXX, Austin, Texas".
Even if the original reviewer didn't take it down, that's a valid response. People will see that and be like, "huh .. let me look that up .. yea that seems legit."
I mean for something as delicate as this, I feel like there is a limit to what Glassdoor can do and maintain integrity.
It's been my experience that few people will see that and even fewer will look it up.
The original poster can’t even take down a post if they make a mistake.
> "Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance/stupidity"
More ignorance in this case.
I bet if you talked to the reviewer from the beginning he would've taken down the review immediately.
Creating a Glassdoor profile for an early stage 3 persons startup doesn't look very useful.
I got shafted by my employer who promised to start the green card process immediately on joining, managed (knowingly or not) to delay the start, and by the time it started, they prepared the petition so weak, that it was too late to complete the process before my 6yrs of h1b expired(because they had to redo the petition a few times).
Now I explained this very clearly in my review and just mentioned that if you are an high skilled immigrant who has precarious requirements, then don’t join this company. In fact I added all the good things about the company, but always made a point to glorify the fact that they screwed me and left me jobless (because my authorization ended).
What happened to that review?
It never showed up in Glassdoor reviews for that company. And my account was suspended. I thought there was some “pay to remove negative review” option for employers.
Now, that employer has more than 4.5 stars average reviews, and its glowing overall. If this is how Glassdoor works, I don’t think it is meant to help the past, current, prospective employees.
As far as I'm concerned, Glassdoor makes their money by pandering to the companies who have a vested interest in hiding negative reviews and is an unreliable source of information.
Glassdoor claimed some of the reviews were removed because they violated this or that community standard. However, this wouldn't justify removing the numerical score, would it?
Sad part of such behavior from Glassdoor, is that I cannot tell anyone anonymously that this particular company is a bad place for high skilled immigrants on h1b.
I can only hope no one else makes the mistake I did in beleiving the hiring manager and recruiters without having anything in writing.
The biggest impact to my career has been the semi-anonymous mobile app Blind. I realized I was getting underpaid and I quickly fixed it. I thought I negotiated hard in previous jobs but maybr it was all a ruse to make me feel like I was getting the best salary. Glassdoor and Paysa had lower total compensation numbers for my position.
The _sample_ is flawed because H-1B visa holders are atypical. In some situations they are hired precisely because they have lower salary expectations than US residents (paying them less than the prevailing rate violates the terms of their Labor Condition Application, but it happens). In other situations the employer puts up the with expense and delay of the visa application because they have unique skills that also make them more valuable.
The _data_ itself is flawed because the salary information is only recorded at the time the offer was made, since which it has presumably increased, and it does not include bonuses or non-cash compensation.
They just have my base salary listed there, which is a super-inaccurate way to compare salaries, in my opinion. RSUs and bonus are almost 50% of my comp. They also have my starting salary there, no increases, etc since then.
There have been countless articles that talk about how there isn't a huge pay disparity between men and women in skilled jobs, and articles like The Confidence Gap (Salon) that show that when disparity does occur, it's simply of women not being confident enough to ask for what they deserve.
(On a side note, I hypothesize if you could objectively measure confidence and then compared incomes to confident vs non-confident people in their field, the pay distribution would be low to high among them, regardless of gender. That's difficult theory to prove though).
At larger companies, you have pay grades listed and everyone in Active Directory has a pay grad associated with them (BlueCross orgs are like this). So you can actually look up, within a $8k range, what everyone around you makes, and it pretty much stays accurate until you get up to the VP/board positions.
I wish more companies had transparency on this, but I feel like income transparency is going to stay limited to the public sector.
The people who are least likely to join in on that have been the older devs but I think the taboo was much more ingrained back when they first started their careers and younger folk are following more out of tradition than an actual strong belief
Additionally, people were pretty much free to set their own work hours (I worked with a great designer who typically left at 4pm, but was never an issue because he always did what was needed - and often went above).
The only possible downside I can think of is that we didn’t really hire a lot of young people (no graduates) so potential for stagnation of ideas (??) however I never saw that have a noticeable effect, and actually at the time the company was quite progressive in its approach to technology.
Our highest ‘executive’ was an interesting mix of someone who could understand and communicate to business, technology and design people.
I’ve often wondered what the secret sauce to this culture was, and how to replicate it...
As a former professor I have always found that site unbelievably odious. Did higher education improve when students (as paying "customers" of the university) got the upper hand in areas like grading practices and curriculum-setting? Does anyone think college education is in a better place today than 20 years ago, except the bizdev and admin staff? Surely Glassdoor could work the same wonders for workplaces...
For employees, it’s a bit better. It is reasonable to look for a good work environment, and employers won’t always be upfront in an interview setting. Having the inside scoop helps the potential employee.
She found that professor had no less than four profiles in RMP. Every time she accumulated sufficient negative reviews she changed her name slightly and created a new profile.
We did have a really bad professor in my department who got me fired for something stupid. (I was a lab admin). A bunch of students came to defend me. Her husband was the chairman so all of her evaluations went through a different department/chairman.
She got enough complains they didn't grant her tenure! Her and her husband left the university shortly after. I feel like the students achieved something really positive there.
Students getting some power over people they pay aren't what caused colleges to start hiring more adjunct professors for cheap rather than lifelong ones. It also didn't make colleges spend massive amounts of money on marketing or redoing all the landscaping every two months so that parents of prospective students would be more enticed to send their kids to that school
I think the admins like the data it gives them on professors, let’s them know who to promote / watch, etc
There are some really bad professor that don't care much about lecturing because they have tenure.
I had no choice with the courses of my major because they were required, but when it came to electives, it was amazing. It really made the difference.
There are plenty of bad professors out there.
The negative reviews for the engineering department at the company I work for are mostly accurate. The positive reviews are almost all too generic or over the top to be useful. Some of them are clearly written by HR in a PR campaign.
I'm actually surprised it has much of an impact, given how slow and horrible the UX is and how easily gamed the review system is.
Don't get me wrong. He's extremely capable and will probably continue to run ZG very well for years to come. But his Glassdoor rating should be lower and it irks me every time I hear it touted.
Fake reviews is also a problem—both positive and negotive reviews.
Glassdoor does little to help employers correct obviously bad information although they are happy to sell you “premium” services where you can bury things you don’t like further down the display of data. Their sales people call this “featuring” content. Sigh.
Officially they track an objective interpretation of the company. Only few companies would really get positive review though. So they also offer a way for the companies to improve their reviews for cash. And that is the main income probably.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-Reviews-E659519.htm
What should you think about a company that has no 2 or 3 or 4 star reviews? It only has the extremes, nothing in the middle.
Someone writes:
"Take a look at the distribution of reviews - either 5 star or 1 star. Seems a bit fishy to me. Nonetheless, I would still rate my experience a 1."
Perhaps there are many companies like this?
Take a company that is headquartered in bay area. If they have an office in location X where X != bay area, the est salary for that company in the context of location X is always going to be much higher due to the bay area HQ. I suspect they may not even filter out bay area salary estimates for location X estimates.
There is no way company will pay for bay area salaries for sat location in Omaha.
I see lot of people complaining about their reviews being removed from Glassdoor (GD) site and the occasional allegation that GD take money to remove negative reviews.
AFAIK glassdoor doesn't take money from any company to remove negative reviews. I left GD a year ago so things could've changed since then but I doubt it. People complain because their reviews were removed but have you read it objectively ? Do you single out a particular person because that's against GD rules.
I know a former coworker of mine (@GD) who left a 1 star review. His review was promptly removed from GD page because he was bashing his manager. For a small company like GD it's easy to figure out who that manager is based on the employer title. After removing his review, he was given an opportunity to edit it but he refused to edit it. I wrote an OK review for GD after I left and it's still up there on GD site.
As for fake reviews it's hard to remove them automatically. A good number of people uses those temporary email addresses to leave a review (10min emails) so you can't really compare the email addresses. I guess they could compare the IP addresses and remove duplicate submissions from the same IP ? But sometimes multiple users share same IP (correct me if I'm wrong) so that would result in more confusion and allegations.
When I joined GD any engineer could access the reviews table on production/admin page but they have tightened it up since then. only selected engineers have access to production table and they started implementing granular controls on the admin page. I remember seeing fake reviews on my previous employer's page but I chose not to flag them. My former employer's CEO himself left more than three 5 star reviews to bump up his ratings.
Nowadays I use GD for job search, reviews, interviews and benefits research. Salary data is very unreliable especially for engineers in the Bay Area. I know they keep talking about archiving old salary data or making adjustments but I don't know if they ever implemented it.
The thing about reviews is that you have to read it between the lines. If it's a 5 star review and the only con says something like the commute sucks there's a good chance that it's a fake review.
About Salary: they did release a Know Your Worth tool sometime in 2016 which is pretty accurate in my case (Bay Area + Sr. Software Engineer). Ironically I know a few people who left GD because of this tool :)
Salaries - www.Paysa.com
General Discussion - us.teamblind.com - Important because this is for current occupation rather than Glassdoor's focus on future occupation
Leveling / Titles - www.levels.fyi - Disclosure: I work on this
It's really about the aggregation of reviews. If everything is fine until 6 months ago, and then there is a steady periodic stream of negative reviews referencing a management change, then you can pretty well-assured there was a legitimate shift in the organization that made things worse. If it's just a trickle of some positive (HR lackeys posting fake reviews and/or current employees trying to reassure themselves about how they work at the coolest place in town) and some negative (often bitter people who've been laid off or dismissed trying to project blame onto the company), then you just have to look for the consistent elements and take what you can from them. No easy formula.
For startups specifically, I used to analyze the startups that VCs tweeted the most. Uber dominated for a long time. And Zenefits was tops too, until they dropped fast in mentions a few weeks before their turn of fortune. Yeah, some tea leaf reading and eye of newt stuff, but interesting nonetheless and some job seekers found it helpful.
Your point about departing/departed employees and hellscape made me think about how the recent negative news about Google contrasts with one indicator (again, imperfect) of how happy people are to be Nooglers and Googlers -- their public exultation in Instagram posts: https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/noogler-instagrams-by-googlers-...
Edit: Of course, neither of the above approaches are as broadly applicable as Glassdoor's approach
This year's average is 50% of total rating
Last year's average is 30% of total rating
Previous year's average is 10% of total rating
All prior years' average is remaining 10% of total rating
I can offer one counterexample. I worked at a fairly awful place two and a half years ago and the Glassdoor reviews reflected that awfulness. At some point in the last year, management got wise and started planting hilariously, obviously fake positive reviews to go alongside the negative reviews. HR also started leaving comments on every single review, which had a chilling effect.
The average rating would certainly be higher over the past 18 months, but it's not because anything has improved at the company. They're just better at exploiting Glassdoor.
1. Are usually hilariously easy to spot. 2. Beget more angry reviews with 1 star rating in attempt to neutralize their effect.
Hence, I'd read them pretty carefully to look for patterns.
So at the very least, a wave of negative reviews is an indication to check the fundamentals, has this pivot worked, etc... Useful information.
Just think about it: Any disgruntled employee or job applicant can trash a company publicly. An HR department can spam Glassdoor, singing its own praises. (It seems this happened with the company you quit.) Honest comments will get lost. Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by making participants accountable. (The argument for anonymity is that people wouldn’t post honest comments if employers knew who they were. Duh. That justifies graffiti?) They make money with every posting. That’s how Glassdoor is like the job boards.
In fact, Glassdoor is a job board. Like LinkedIn, the site uses the honeypot of “community” to lure you into an ulterior revenue model.
https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-...
Is this true? Do the users not value quality?
Surely they'd be more likely to use and continue to use the site (and by extension, increasing Glassdoor's revenue) if they perceive it to contain useful, objective reviews?
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the...
As other people have said, this particular fraud is meaningless because it doesn't fit the profile of the sort of thing that would cause problems for users. Misinformation about a real restaurant is an actual problem. Ratings of non-existent restaurants don't matter.
I think your assertion is obviously false. If the restaurant doesn't exist, nobody will provide real reviews. If it does, they may.
Once upon a time when Wikileaks/Arab Spring was unfolding everyone thought reducing information asymmetry would be net positive. But here we are with a 24*7 fake news culture in the "information age", and Snowden sitting in Russia of all places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
Reading the opening paragraph, to me it describes just about any news source today:
Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a US term for a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism.
The US cancelled his passport while he was in transit there. If they had any will to have him go somewhere else and not to the Russians with who-knows-what data they could simply have reversed that action and let Snowden go on to Ecuador or wherever.
That is a valid concern. Your comment is an ad hominem attack on the other hand.
I frankly don't think recruiters care about Glassdoor - there are plenty of people who'll take a job at a company with a 'negative' rating, and those are the exact people who the company is looking for in the first place. Let's not forget - companies who actually care about hiring, don't outsource it to companies that you imply profit from 'information asymmetry'.
When my former employer accumulated too many bad reviews, they eliminated their poor rating by folding their Glassdoor presence into their (much larger) parent company. That's an effective gaming of the system. It still doesn't make the whole exercise useless though.