Apple is no longer part of Glassdoor’s 100 Best Places to Work ranking | Hacker News Reader

Apple is no longer part of Glassdoor’s 100 Best Places to Work ranking

9to5mac.com

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Glassdoor's entire system is compromised. My company used to have a rich, detailed set of diverse reviews. Some time last year it was all scrubbed. There are still some negative reviews, but the net result is definitely putting the company in a better light. I think roughly two thirds of reviews are now hidden.

I suspect if companies pay Glassdoor to post jobs, there is some sort of quid pro quo system. But that's just a hypothesis.

Companies game this metric. SpaceX has all of their interns fill out Glassdoor reviews every cycle in exchange for swag. That's ~500 new reviews, presumably from extremely excited and doe-eyed college students, every 3-6 months.

Bain, McKinsey, and BCG are all in the top 7.

Maybe one way to the top of the rankings is to pay very well, while cultivating people who'll understand how to answer the questionnaires in alignment?

https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,...

Well, forcing out numerous engineers who consistently worked the soul-sucking Apple daily grind because they weren't allowed to go remote after being remote for more than two years has some consequences?

(Hint, Apple doesn't care about Glassdoor or their employees. They have hordes knocking down the walls trying to get jobs there. Even the Apple Store employees grind for years and years to get a shot at their CE program to try to go corporate so they can slave away even more. Apple is fine.)

My organization at Apple regularly has people leaving for Amazon for a better work life balance.

This doesn't even get into the Machiavellian politics you have to wade through at Apple.

And then there are other orgs at Apple where you can easily put in your 20-30 hours and no one will ever bug you while you make as much as (or more than) your try-hard peers.

As much as management (and some staff) might believe otherwise, time spent at desks or in meetings is not directly proportional to work output or quality, and it's easy to go beyond the point of negative returns.

> My organization at Apple regularly has people leaving for Amazon for a better work life balance.

That's a scary statement! Thanks for sharing it

Pretty shocked to see notoriously cutthroat companies like McKinsey and Bain at the top. Makes me seriously question this list.

Self selection. From my experience, people already know the work culture is cutthroat and love the idea of it.

I was also confused by the collection. I suspect there are different ways companies end up on this list. e.g. pays very well, is doing very well (times are good when times are good), better than other much worse companies in the sector, etc.

Neither is Meta, after 12 years of consistently being near the top.

Looking at many companies in that list, especially beware the top, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

Besides, “best place to work” says nothing how it would be for “you”.

Is this ranking solely based on reviews from disgruntled employees? In that case I would take it no more seriously than Yelp.

My experience with Glassdoor is that there is a significant amount of non-disgruntled employees reporting. I think this is because if you want to look at their data, you have to put in some details about your own employer. Certainly most people are writing either milquetoast feedback that gets them through the door or moaning about their employer so the information is biased, but it's not quite Yelp. Either way, Apple has 154k employees, it's such a large company that it'd be surprising if in aggregate it was the best place to work.

> if you want to look at their data, you have to put in some details about your own employer

You can bypass this by selecting a random company, Glassdoor even ;), typing in a random sequence with some spaces sprinkled in as your "review", and that's it. They will dismiss your review but that won't matter anyway; you got in, you can see all data, and you gave them nothing back (or did not dox yourself).

Exactly, it's not like the culture/pay/environment really changed. Apple's really quite an old school place to work (like you pay for lunch?!?). Also, it's so huge that there are radically different parts of it (even just retail vs hardware vs software vs ID).

More an indictment of Glassdoor's methodology.

Actually yelp is great?

An obvious difference is you can see photos of food and decide for yourself how it looks -- so I'm not so much defending Glassdoor (which I don't use) as I am defending yelp. As far as yelp reviews, you can generally tell when the reviewer is unreasonable.

Yelp reviews are pedestrian non-opinions that are basically reducible to either "zomg!" or "Food poisoning!!! Cannot recommend!! (because I mixed sushi with diet coke)". A million of those reviews isn't even worth two words from an actual expert on the topic.

In my particular neighborhood in DC, I’m not even sure ANY restaurants have been reviewed. And when I travel, your approach is certainly not a reliable way to get a sense of what’s near me.

Good way to get a sense of how used Yelp is anywhere: look up the local McDonald's.

If it has 4+ and/or detailed reviews... probably don't trust Yelp there.

In an incognito window, I googled: mcdonalds yelp dc

1.5 stars, 2.5 stars, 1 star, 1.5 stars, 2 stars, 2 stars, 2 stars, etc...

And this is maybe the most popular and beloved fast food restaurant in the world!

It surely isn't.

My company forced us to write reviews there and you can be sure they expected good ones. Worked out pretty well as far as I could see.

Isn't the first time I've heard about companies doing that.

Even if they'd rely solely on reviews from disgruntled employees, the amount of those would also say something meaningful.

So it is like Yelp: only capturing the extremes on either end, with the "middle meh" not represented proportionally.

Does that separate retail from corporate?

While I don't know about the "Best Places to work" report... You can apply a filter of "Job Function" and get retail reviews from the same company page as engineering reviews. Thus, I would suspect it is "no, there is no separation of different job functions in the report".

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Apple-Retail-and-Food-Serv...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Apple-Engineering-Reviews-...

You'll also find that FedEx Services (Best places to work #31) is different company than FedEx Ground (note the different revenue and number of reviews for the company).

https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-FedEx-Services...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-FedEx-Ground-E...

Never was

In other news, the sky is blue! Maybe that's a bit too harsh, it is surprising that they've dropped off the list altogether however...

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