Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service.

You don't even need to pay Glassdoor. At $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER I managed to get a negative review by an employee who we'd let go removed just by asking them.

Don't be too horrified yet because it gets worse: I stand by asking them to remove it. The review was extremely negative and posted by somebody who, in the less than 3 months they worked for us, had been nothing but trouble: lazy, arrogant, obnoxious, demanding, complaining, entitled. Nothing was ever good enough for this person, and they absolutely slagged us off in the review as a result.

No company is perfect but the criticism was entirely unfair, so I asked Glassdoor to remove it, explaining why in reasonable detail. They could have refused and there would have been nothing I could do, but within a few days it was gone. Funny thing was that I wasn't even in love with $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER myself at the time[1], but the review was so out of order that it simply pissed me off.

Your situation sounds quite different, with objective grounds for grievance, so I can certainly understand the frustration.

[1] This is something of an understatement: I was by this point hugely disillusioned, but the review still offended my sense of fair play.

The problem is, "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management. If you were already disillusioned, it's possible that it really was a bad atmosphere, and they were just less shy about calling a spade a spade.

I've also noticed that people tend to measure whether someone looks busy, not whether they're producing results. Some people will just start writing code, and they get called "productive". Others nip off for 2 hours to think it over and sketch out architectural diagrams, and then finish the whole task in half the time - but they're the ones that get called lazy because they weren't at their desk.

> "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management.

For sure, but that's not what I'm talking about here: every now and again one makes a bad hire. It happened very rarely, particularly in product development where this individual was, but that's what this individual was - just a bad hire.

Now there were reasons why they were a bad hire that I think were perhaps not their "fault" (although fault/blame isn't a helpful concept here), which I'm not going into the specifics of due to #reasons, but the fact remains they chose to deal with that by acting out and introducing toxicity into their team.

What changes did you make to the hiring process to better filter such people out?

Every now and again you make a bad hire: even companies with the best hiring processes do. Hence the probation period, and letting this person go during that period.

Not to say we didn't do a retro to see if there were improvements that could be made, but you're never going to be perfect at hiring.

What you do need is robust processes, and the appropriate culture to support them, to deal with the situation quickly on the rare occasions when you do hire someone you shouldn't have.

(Btw, bad hires are extremely costly, even at entry level, not just in terms of hiring costs or productivity, but in terms of the effect they have on people around them: they can be a serious morale drain and, whilst their departure often leads to a bump in morale, the effects can be quite long-lasting. A bad hire in a leadership role is positively dangerous, because you multiply all of the above - and actually it becomes likely you'll lose people who work for them - and on top of this you risk serious erosion of trust in those more senior leaders who hired the person in the first place, which leads to further problems with retention.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com