Ask HN: How much to believe Glassdoor and Blind reviews of a company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much to believe Glassdoor and Blind reviews of a company?

4 pointsalfnki9 comments

I am interviewing with a small company and am growing concerned based on reviews of the company I have been reading.

The reviews of said company on Glassdoor and Blind all have a common theme that the company hires great people, but the executives and leadership in general are just not good at all. The reviews range from "all in all its pretty good, management could use some work though" to "the company and product are going to implode this is so bad" so I'm not sure how bad it is there.

I think it's impossible to know how true this until you work there, but I'm wondering how much stock I should put in these reviews and if I should just disengage from the interview process because of it or not.

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I think it's useless for big companies, but for smaller ones you might be able to get something from them.

Look for a bunch of positive reviews that sound straight from corporate. This means the company paid for those (red flag).

Look for a trend in negative reviews that goes beyond the 'I hate my boss' reviews.

My personal experience with smaller companies I worked for is that they are accurate.

It's complicated. Startups are always dysfunctional, and it gets magnified by people who aren't used to it. What they say on these sites it almost certainly true, but it's relative, not absolute, so it's hard to get a sense of how outside of norms it is.

Like if someone says none of the execs know what they're doing, it's going to fall apart any day, are they a new grad, someone who's only worked at big companies with everything formalized and an established business, or are they startup veterans. You don't really get that context.

So the best you can do is try to judge it based on your experience. If you find those comments concerning, maybe it's not a good place for you. If you think "yeah everyone says that" then maybe it's ok.

Maybe it depends on industry, but I looked on Glassdoor for a company I applied for a job with. They had mostly ok reviews that were lacking details and quite vague and then they also had a few reviews that were very detailed outlining how terrible the company was. I should have taken note of those negative reviews. My experience was also awful and the company was super dodgy. I never bothered to write a review about it though. How good or bad does an experience need to be to motivate someone to write a review.

Look for trends, take with a grain of salt. In my experience if you see a clear trend of similar red flags in negative reviews then it's probably at least somewhat accurate.

They're quite accurate from what I've seen. Ask about stuff that concerns you during the interview. If a manager says they don't know, that's a yellow flag. Some of the ratings are from sore losers though, so do ask for the story.

Generally 3.5-4 is workable. 4-4.5 is dream job. 4.5 and higher is very rare, probably has unlimited paid time off, dental, servant leadership, team vacations on work days.

3 and below tends to be at the brink of imploding.. senior leadership is probably job hunting, illegal stuff is going on, etc.

Blind is pretty good. It's not really anonymous if someone messed up but it gives the sense of anonymity.

i tried it. can't have a sense of anonymity when I have to link it with my work email.

Yeah, it's good to get some insider information though.

I use grapevine. Get got convos of indian startup tech.

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