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Comment by hsnewman | Hacker News Reader

I got burned once when my company did a annual employee survey. My boss determined who gave the anonymous answer and fired me eventually.

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Sorry to hear that. This is a good reminder to everyone else of why you should try to avoid identifying yourself on anonymous surveys, even if you aren't saying anything risky. Everyone who gives their name, or makes it easy to figure it out, makes it that much easier to identify those who really want the anonymity. (Same principle as using encryption and Tor even when you don't really need it.)

People who provide negative feedback on these surveys do become targets, and not always for retaliation, but because companies (or the subgroups inside them) don't want discontent to spread, or would rather have an unquestioning happy employee they can manipulate.

same here. the companies that give those surveys play games with categories to ensure managers can always narrow it down. If I were a manager, I could never trust employees' survey answers. Since I got laid-off, my answer to every question has always been perfect 5 out of 5, unless I genuinely thought it needed improvement, it which case it gets a 4 out of 5. And even then I will answer no more than 5% of questions with 4s.

My sister’s team did something truly great with the satisfaction surveys. They all gave the same marks along the months: 6, 7, 10, 8, 8, 10, 7, 6.

It made a very nice Batman shadow on the manager’s dashboard. That’s about all they can be used for.

…which is a pretty good proof of team cohesion.

Must’ve been one doozy of an answer :)

I gave one doozy of an answer once in an anonymous feedback survey. I then started to feel quite bad about it and realized probably it's not so hard to figure out who that feedback possibly came from. I went to my skip level boss and leveled with him about the feedback I had given. He was remarkably cool about it and told me they didn't get enough responses to that particular question to pass some threshold and hence he hadn't even seen that response. Luckily he wasn't a psychopath type manager and was generally just a wise old guy who was a great politician and I didn't wind up burning a bridge. But I definitely learned never to give honest feedback under the guise of anonymity.

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