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Comment by dawhizkid | Hacker News Reader

Glassdoor is really useful for researching companies. Usually I go straight to the reviews and sort in descending order by date. I look for: -Distribution between good and bad reviews -common themes among bad reviews -lots of good reviews on same day or around same time (usually means HR planted reviews)

I’m still trying to figure out what it means when a company has very few total reviews given the size and history of the company from a “is this a good or bad or neutral sign.” For example, I’m really surprised Stripe only has 59 reviews since I thought they had over 1000 employees at this point and has been around for 8 years or so. (Airbnb has 700+ and Pinterest has 200+ for comparison)

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I would consider this a bad sign. My wife recently left a company that had few reviews. The management would actively try to remove bad reviews on any basis possible, and have been successful enough at it. If you look at her (small company's) page, the reviews tend to be very polarized- "Great Place to Work!" "Keeping it 100!" to "Miserably failed at just about everything" and the reviews tend to be 5 stars or 1 star. There is not a single 3 star, and only 2 4-star reviews for a company rated overall at 3.4 stars. HR is almost certainly seeding it with good reviews, and several employees have had their reviews pulled, resulting in their reviews not in any way resembling a normal distribution.

Anecdotes aside, I think there are real tells: -Review numbers being "hollow" in the middle. -Data not quite adding up- for this particular company, No one has hit the "approves of the CEO" button, but I once looked at a startup that was quite the opposite- 85% approved despite a middling overall rating. Was the founder just beloved? Its hard to say, but I found the lack of matchup concerning. -Are a significant number of complaints consistently in certain areas? Work life balance bad, bad leadership, etc... if so... these are probably true, and people not mentioning that may need closer examination.

Some companies actively encourage people to review them on glassdoor. While I have not seen example of the opposite, I suspect that there may be companies that warn otherwise <s> due to fear of leaking their proprietary hiring process </s>.

Our company encouraged us to leave reviews... What a bad idea. Every new review was absolutely terrible, as expected.

also a rush of reviews could mean that there was a downsizing

perhaps such companies make people sign strict NDAs

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