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Since you opted to reveal the company's name (Snowbound software), I went ahead and read the reviews on GlassDoor.

Your review is very emotionally charged and with very few facts or examples, which makes it difficult to take seriously.

Since you were fired I can understand why you would write like this, but it is a bit ironic considering the article is about manipulating reviews.

Yours is scathing indeed, but not in an insightful way and just seems like an attempt to bash the company (1 star, all reds, only pros are low pressure environment and parking?). I can understand why the company would want to defend itself against this with actual facts (they state increased revenue, staff seniority, customer names).

Anyways take whatever you want from this comment, I'm just a neutral observer with limited information, but I don't think Snowbound's positive reviews show manipulation

The negative review was informative enough. Political, negative work environment and old, dead tech. Blah blah.

It's the context that is particularly damning. Whenever you see a heartfelt negative review surrounded by obviously fake or reactionary (do you really not see that?) positive reviews, that is a red flag. It is not uncommon.

I totally disagree. When I read reviews (on Glassdoor or anywhere, really) I try to discount any emotionally charged content and focus on the factual elements of the reviews.

I mean, "Political, negative work environment"? Every single group of humans since the beginning of time has a level of political interaction, so when I see comments about things being political I pretty much discount them unless there are some level of specifics. I've also seen folks make the "political" charge when what was really at issue is the person didn't communicate or work well with others, and it takes a level of emotional maturity to realize why this is important.

People are naturally political, that's precisely why professionalism was invented, and a key function of a manager is to shield their people from the politics higher up.

> factual elements of the reviews

What facts can you really share though? This isn't a court situation, where evidence is scrutinized and held up to rigorous standards. So what are you really expecting? Transcripts of conversations? Financial documents? I don't really understand what kind of "facts" you would be looking for.

Reviews are all about "how was your subjective experience there." If the answer is "awful, the company treated me poorly," then that's a legitimate review. Why would you discount it?

Because there is a big difference between "awful, the company treated me poorly" and something like "I got 4 consecutive quarters of positive reviews, including a bonus and a raise, but then when there was a change in management I was let go with the reason being 'poor performance'." Something like that would let me know the company is immature with respect to how it managed employee growth.

Just because there's some numbers doesn't mean it's factual.

Annecdotal, not factual. And both should be treated with same level of scrutiny.

> Annecdotal, not factual.

Anecdotes are not the opposite to facts. They are only opposites to whole facts.

oh shit that actually happened to me! man thanks for validating my terrible experience with my last company :P

That's a great example of a specific factual incident!

But, A.) you don't know if these "facts" are true, so they shouldn't really add much weight, and B.) not all situations come down to something so specific and citable. Sometimes, people are just really obnoxious to be around, and they're rude and impatient and temperamental and it's a daily thing and that's all there is to it, and you can't really boil that down to such a nice clean sentence as in your example.

> Every single group of humans since the beginning of time has a level of political interaction

You don't say.

"Political" was my word to sum up part of a lengthy Glassdoor post made by someone else which does not use the word at all. Feel free to substitute whatever word is least prone to cause you a mental hemorrhoid flare-up.

Would you say it's fair to oppose "political work environment" with "meritocracy?"

So you support politics and lots of people don't. And that may make them politically immature but politics is a very common skill compared to technical and raw work skills.

Individual reviews are ultimately worthless on a site like Glassdoor. You'll never hear both sides.

I've found that it's relatively accurate for bigger companies, though, give the larger number of reviews. Individual reviews are simply 1 data point and worthless on their own. Good employers are often typically awarded in other ways, like local best places to work lists.

Much like on Amazon - more people look at the star rating vs the reviews as the indicator. Sadly these can be gamed, but for the most part I've found major companies to be represented correctly, in my experience.

It really depends. I try to view Glassdoor like the way I read amazon reviews.

I'll see a bunch of "good" reviews. They do me nothing.

Yet those bad reviews have a trend that the battery hatch clip keeps breaking off and they had to do hacks to make it work. ... Or the multiple Samsung refrigerator water filter were fakes and leaked all across the floor (0).

In a office setting, it's the similar thing. There will be a lot of good, but the details and consistency of the bad ones are the thing to watch.

(0) https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Da29-00020b-1P-DA29-00020b-Re...

Yeah, an employee fired from my previous employer basically wrote the same negative review on any site that he could. Including the goddamn Yellow Pages. In that review, he alleged several things that were just simply lies.

Yes, I eventually left as well, but I left because there was a better offer from another company that my previous employer couldn't match. They were sad to see me go and it was hard to leave because they were a good group.

While his isn't great, the other reviews absolutely look planted or suspiciously good.

I did not mean to reveal that, it was an oversight by me.

> Your review is very emotionally charged and with very few facts or examples, which makes it difficult to take seriously.

I wrote the review more than a year after leaving the company. I wasn't feeling very emotional, I was just trying to be descriptively honest. I'm not sure what you're looking for. Transcripts of specific dialogues between employees? I explained the way things are there pretty truthfully, and five years later I still feel it's objectively accurate. The problem is the personalities and there isn't much more to it than that.

> just seems like an attempt to bash the company (1 star, all reds, only pros are low pressure environment and parking?)

If you had worked there this might stop seeming like an exaggeration.

> I don't think Snowbound's positive reviews show manipulation

If you can't see the manipulation going on there, it's hard for me to imagine a set of reviews that you would consider manipulation.

All the bad reviews are from former employees and all the good ones are from current employees, yeah I'm gonna call bullshit plus even doubt a bit your neutrality about the matter.

Run from any prospective employer who tells you, "we're like a family." They mean it an all the worst ways. Feuding, dysfunction, racist uncles, getting kicked out of the house.

I just sat through a company wide "Sensitivity Training" at my company (which I'm very much looking forward to leaving, and leaving a review for,) where "We're a family" was repeated ad nausium. I was a little shocked that this was coming from HR and Staff. It was almost a cultish call and response of bullshit.

The reality is, we're not family. I don't have to be sensitive to my family. If I don't like them, I can say and do as I please. If they don't like me, the same. I don't have to care about their feelings, I don't have to accept their life choices. I don't have to see them every day. I don't have to accomplish tasks with them. I can quarrel with them, and eventually they may choose to forgive me because of kinship, or not. Point being, there are precisely zero commonalities between family and work peers. And there shouldn't be.

The contrarian jerk in me really wanted to yell an epithet during training and say something along the lines of "What, if we're a family, I'm the racist uncle that your dad keeps inviting to dinner despite his offensive tirades and uncomfortable leering at your sister. Deal with it."

> The contrarian jerk in me really wanted to yell an epithet during training and say something along the lines of "What, if we're a family, I'm the racist uncle that your dad keeps inviting to dinner despite his offensive tirades and uncomfortable leering at your sister.

LOL. But in general I very much agree. Equating a workplace with a family is gross, and a bit cult-ish. I do think the workplace (and the world) would be a better place if we all tried to love each other like we do our own family, but there's a whole lot of other things family brings that would make the workplace a nightmare, the least of which is widespread manipulation, power struggles, mooching, and non-stop drama.

That's assuming that loving each other like our own family would be loving in a loving way, and not in an absolute deep down rage love-to-hate way. But yes, I agree with your sentiment. We're all just people trying to make it and a little love goes a long way.

Family as a reference is horrible. Everyone has a different family dynamic and experience. Some families have unconditional loyalty, others have abusive controlling members, the list of dysfunctions is endless. The cult should be formed around "a team" that has shared values and operates upon agreed acceptable behaviors.

> Some families have unconditional loyalty, others have abusive controlling members

Don't those two usually come in pairs?

But people from bad families join less bad families like gangs because people need a family. Nothing wrong with having a family feeling at work but more along the lines of "superstore" or star trek vs full house

Never had that though I would be tempted to mention my great great Uncle who was a off course bookie in Birmingham UK between the wars - yes that era Peaky Blinders is set in.

In the US this is like having relatives that worked with Al Capone

You'd probably have more effect mentioning that the sensitivity training is insensitive to people whose families are abusive, especially given significant groups of minorities are disproportionately affected.

(Personally as an adult who continues to deal with difficulties regarding abusive family, I would feel highly uncomfortable with "we're a family" rhetoric- this is the exact rhetoric abusers use when abusing their family!)

You're absolutely right (and also on point for why I prefaced with 'the contrarian jerk in me.') I think I'll email exactly this to HR now.

If HR ever asks specific groups(as a way to dismiss you), feel free to bring up LGBTQIA+ and CSA (child sexual abuse). That tends to really light a fire under some asses.

> I would feel highly uncomfortable with "we're a family" rhetoric- this is the exact rhetoric abusers use when abusing their family!

You're right to feel uncomfortable; this is not coincidental.

Remember that HR exists to keep the company out of trouble. If everybody has gone through sensitivity training and later someone gets in trouble for doing something insensitive, they can blame the person instead of being accused of having a toxic environment.

> where "We're a family" was repeated ad nauseum.

You should view such comments with the same eye that you would view a someone that is always saying 'I love my wife/husband'. Companies either walk the walk or they talk and won't shut up.

I can’t believe it took me to read this comment to realize this has been exactly my experience in those environments. Thank you for putting it that way, it clicked in me and now I’ll make a mental bookmark of it for future reference

I also am strongly allergic to the "family" analogy with the workplace. It should not be analogized to that - even though management sometimes likes to do it.

You can leave a company, or the company can lay you off, or re-org and divest your department. After a year, you will not go to the company picnic. Just won't happen. Not a family.

> You can leave a company, or the company can lay you off, or re-org and divest your department. After a year, you will not go to the company picnic. Just won't happen. Not a family.

Just as a small anecdote: this can happen. I do go to occasional picnics and parties my previous company chooses to make open to former employees. I'm already looking forward to an upcoming office-warming party, as I expect to see a bunch of old colleagues I really enjoyed working with.

There was not a single asshole during my time there. I resigned (over a year ago) to get some fresh challenges, so no bad blood either.

Same. I worked at a small (at the time) consultancy and I will stop by just to visit on occasion. And I'll be invited to several events. It might be a little different because as someone who worked for them, I am inclined to recommend them to where I work. And to recommend other people who used to work for them who have also gone on to other things.

Indeed. Run twice as fast from companies that lament not being able to pay you as much as competitors, but claim to compensate with a "family" atmosphere.

This can also often mean that they intend to try to replace your actual family in terms of how your hours each day are spent, which for many is unacceptable, no matter how shiny-happy-euphemistic "like a family" may sound.

Former employees that sit in dark rooms and write negative reviews in between shifts at the local convenience store.

Wow - that sounds amazingly petty and vindictive. These people must have been a pure mindfuck to work for.

Thank you for posting that, so that people looking for information about this company (Snowbound Software) can be adequately informed about what to expect in engaging in dealings of any kind with this shop.

Right? They proved my point far more effectively than I could ever have done.

This is nothing more than my own opinion, formed over 25 years in software: look forward, not back. If you find yourself venting on a site like glassdoor stop and think it through. Yes ostensibly the point is to help others avoid a similar experience, but the reality is that relationships between employer and employee are so fraught with subjective qualities that it's very hard to say how generally applicable your personal experience is. If you can confine yourself to statements of fact - they have this policy or don't have that one - then that may be actually helpful. Having a bad experience with an employer, especially one that results in involuntary separation, can leave a lot of emotional baggage for you to deal with it. I'd say the last place you should deal with it is in public on a review site.

How could someone write these words you quoted and not see the irony? I could understand wanting to respond to a scathing review you felt was unfair but it's one of those things as a normal person I would probably stop half way through and move on. Did this guy really keep going and post under different accounts? You're lucky you got out of there when you did.

That "Cons" is possibly the worst thing someone could post.

That they hold a grudge when someone left is a _huge_ red flag.

Like everyone, I know lots of divorced couples. If you listen to the man, his ex is 100% to blame. If you listen to the woman, her ex is 100% to blame.

So when I hear a rant from someone about their ex, their boss, etc., I nod sympathetically and think to myself "I wonder what that person would say about you."

Agreed, I do the same.

That said, for what it's worth, I've worked at five companies now and 3 out of 5 were great. The fourth is the one discussed in this thread, and the fifth had 3 hours of meetings per day for every engineer.

A previous employer would do the same thing. They would astroturf reviews whenever they received a bad one.

Yeah, I left a negative review for a startup where I worked, and it was the first review (I actually had to create an entry for the startup in order to leave the review). I tried to be balanced about the things that attracted me there in the first place, and the kind of person who might be able to last a while there, but noted the downsides that drove me out.

Within a month, four more reviews, all 5-star reviews with "cons" sections like "none" or "I don't like this particular office snack" popped up for this company that had existed without reviews for years, all of which were very obviously in the unusual and quite-recognizable writing style of the head sales guy (who was constantly recruiting because of his habit of scapegoating his 3-or-4-person sales team when the company did poorly, and thus firing and replacing all of them), down to his particular mannerisms that I hadn't heard from anyone else (with the same wording appearing in multiple reviews).

I flagged these reviews as obviously by the same author, one who was an "executive" employee of the company, and that I was willing to provide samples to prove it. I've since re-flagged those reviews a few times before realizing that Glassdoor has no interest in responding.

Since then, it appears that the same guy has taken to requiring his new hires (of which he has many, due to his high churn rate from firing and replacing every single BDR/SDR regularly) to write at least one glowing review on Glassdoor, which has grossly inflated the company's score.

The lesson I learned from this experience was to skim positive reviews looking for dangerous euphemisms ("more than just a job" means "no work-life balance", "like a family" means "unprofessional (and often backstabbing) working relationships", "fast-paced" / "driven" / "high-performer" means again that no work-life balance exists) count the number of negative reviews as a health indicator, and read negative reviews looking for repeated themes to identify real problems.

For example, a smallish (50 or so people) company I considered in my last job hunt had several negative reviews that contained phrases like "CEO conducts a whisper campaign against employees he doesn't like", and "getting on the CEO's bad side is easy and damning", while positive reviews said things like "not everyone can adapt to our flat structure" or "it's not for everyone", or "if you can learn to fit in, it's great". That sent the clear signal: there is no real reporting chain, just the CEO's capriciousness, and the CEO plays favorites (or "unfavorites") arbitrarily and heavy-handedly. The verdict: avoid this company.

As with any source of user-submitted reviews online, you have to learn a certain degree of cynicism in order to arrive at an informed decision.