Hacker News Reader

Comment by holydude | Hacker News Reader

I found glassdoor insanely accurate. It just really reflects the reality most of the time. I observed at least 3 workplaces and it was exactly like the reviews mentioned. Obviously it is harder to know if it applies to the whole company or just your team but if you can do your research it is fairly accurate

View on HN

I've always found the reviews much more grim than the reality of places where I've worked. No surprise since it's a venue for departing and departed employees to vent (and then for HR teams to try to counteract by encouraging embarrassing good reviews from current employees), but in either case I've always found myself laughing at reviews of my workplaces, it's like "what company are these people actually working for? Because I'm pretty sure I don't go into a toxic hellscape of an office every day."

This overall problem might be solved by offering periodic reporting where each subsequent report by a user is a bit more credible.

Individual Glassdoor reviews aren't worth much because you never know the context or background of the author. Sure, it's possible that there is no mentorship and the place is cutthroat -- but it's also possible that reviewer was dead weight, actively rejected offered mentorship, and finally got let go after months of trying to work it out. Impossible to know in any specific instance, unless you already know the author.

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.

I like to look at what I think are more authentic, indirect indicators, even though very imperfect, too.

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

Reminds me of ex-[fill in religion] online forums. It basically filters on people that hate [fill in religion] and so it portrays only an extremely negatively-biased ("toxic hellscape") view of [fill in religion].

I think the main problem with Glassdoor's rating system is, it can attract high number of negative reviews when a company is going through rough patches, such as mergers and acquisitions, lay offs and integrations. Then it's going to be a steep uphill battle to climb out of that hole and improve the average scores. If I were job hunting, I'd only look at reviews written in the past 18 months because things can and do improve quickly.

That doesn't seem that unreasonable though. If a company is going through a rough merger I'd like to know that.

Yes, I was thinking about that earlier. I would suggest lowering the strength of ratings the older they get when calculating the average, so:

  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

Instead of years, it could be a rolling year, so average of last 52 weeks would be 50%, prior week 53-104 would be 30%, etc.

> If I were job hunting, I'd only look at reviews written in the past 18 months because things can and do improve quickly.

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.

Yes, I've witnessed that myself. On the flip side, those fake reviews:

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.

Is it bad to get those negative reviews? If the situation is legitimately bad why should prospective employees care? It's not like the companies are going to take an employees personal life into consideration when they fire them

But they can also not improve quickly. I used to work for a company in a declining industry which was in a precarious position, and there were layoffs and profit warnings and such. (Glassdoor rating: 2.5.) the company continues to exist, but there have been more layoffs etc.

So at the very least, a wave of negative reviews is an indication to check the fundamentals, has this pivot worked, etc... Useful information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com