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Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

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If anybody doesn't think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds "at risk employees" which they didn't define but said it included signals such as "they updated their linked in recently" as a signal that they may be on the job hunt.

You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment/job/interview behaviors.

We built this tool as part of HiringSolved. Other signals included time in current position relative to industry average and personal history.

I will never understand how people can willingly build tools like this that almost exclusively serve to make employment miserable.

The family needs to eat and as an American with no social or economic safety net, my morals play a very small role.

the industry in Silicon Valley and elsewhere is filled, packed with people who have no children

Let me give you a hint how: it involves a money transaction.

There's a strong component of "If I don't someone else will", but also, usually this is the kind of thing that sucks at getting general open/free solutions, because no one does it willingly, yet it's easy for an employer to justify paying for (And economically incentivize it's development)

"If I don't then someone else will" is only an excuse for the already morally dubious. So what if someone else does it? Sure the bad thing still exists, but at least you didn't personally make the world a worse place explicitly for your own personal gain.

The unspoken part of that phrase is the second half of "so since it will happen anyway, it's not wrong for me to reap the rewards of doing the bad thing"

I hope you understand how inherently wrong that is.

I think there's an explanation that is both more charitable and more pragmatic.

Companies try to keep employees happy and committed, and part of that is making sure they see a potential future / growth for themselves. As a manager I try to both make sure this is based in reality and that employees are picking up the message.

I like to think I am good at this but it's a difficult skill, and external signal to "hey, you might want to check in with Bob a bit more carefully next time to make sure he's feeling as good as we think he is" could always be valuable.

So even from Bob's perspective it's positive - he may get the extra conversation that increases his options where he stays. On the flip side, what's the malicious use case? "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you" doesn't sound like company policy that's going to be implemented anywhere because it makes no sense.

> "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you"

You might be close to quitting (via perceived signal) so I’m going to give the high visibility project to someone “loyal”.

You may be perceived as a quitter so I’m going to give discretionary budget for the next raise to the employee who is more loyal.

You might be perceived as quitting, and my company requires me to stack rank employees. The lowest gets fired. I put you there to keep the rest of my team. You become a “sacrifice” since you were going to quit anyways.

And these are just the examples my friends at Amazon talk about. I’m sure there’s more.

Now consider all of the above, but now you’re on a visa. Losing your job means you have a few weeks to replace it or get deported.

Typically these tools are bought and used by HR or Talent Acq departments, not managers so the type of detailed decision-making you’re describing wasn’t a use-case in my experience.

It’s more like a roll-up metric that can be looked at globally, by role, department, location, etc. yes, it can also be used at the individual level but again, HR is the buyer and they are the most fearfully bureaucratic department in most companies .

From a data and capability perspective, I agree it’s a little scary. But in practice I doubt it’s used this way and if so, there’s your retention problem.

Murphy's law disagrees.

IMO a company that would rely on this kind of invasive surveillance is not really interested in the well being of their employees. There are far better and less invasive ways to evaluate employee satisfaction and fulfillment than hiring an outside organization to "dig up dirt", for the lack of a better term.

To me it's no different than a company hiring a PI to follow me around so they can report back how many drinks I have on the weekend at a barbecue. Or following me around to find out if I bought a new suit and tie (oh no, might indicate I'm going for an interview!). Just because it's being done digitally doesn't make it any less invasive.

What's next? Grocery stores start selling my buying habits to my employer? That would definitely give them more insight into whether I'm happy and committed. Banks/Credit card companies selling my purchase history?

> Banks/Credit card companies selling my purchase history?

As far as I am aware, almost every credit card company already does this. They tell you they are doing it too.

Yep.. and grocery stores

Stop giving them ideas! The last thing I need is for someone to figure out and monetize the correlation between my Oreo / Johnny Walker consumption rate (not together, obviously) and my job satisfaction.

Lololol

> my Oreo / Johnny Walker consumption rate (not together, obviously)

Hmmm, why not together? You might be on to something there...

Originally it was built as the inverse. A signal that recruiters could use to tell them which “passive candidates” could be more willing to change jobs.

A customer asked if it could be used internally (we already had their ATS/HRIS data) so a new feature was born.

Yes money was a motive but this particular feature didn’t seem like an evil idea to be used to increase employee misery.

That said, We did build some things that I do regret now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

Late stage capitalism makes us do it.

Amazing what people are willing to trade in exchange for a fat salary with decent benefits. Even if it means trading their moral code.

Really? You think this is that bad?

I always said “at least we’re not building weapons we are trying to get people jobs (or keep them in jobs)”

But aside from weapons, if you think building a retention tool for HR is bad, you certainly should not ever look at AdTech or the types of things insurance companies are doing from a data perspective.

Or ah hem… Palatir for example.

so your argument is that you don't need to be ethical because there exist people that do worse things than you?

No, my argument is that building an employee retention tool is not the same from an ethical perspective as building a weapon system.

One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon.

The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon.

And then there’s AdTech.. lol

I'm sure zuckerberg says the same thing to his kids

lol.. probably

> I always said “at least we’re not building weapons"

If everyone in my country decided to stop working in or sponsoring the arms industry, we'd be invaded by an authoritarian dictatorship tomorrow.

If in contrast we all summarily banned these aspiring social credit tools, the negative side effects would be negligible to nonexistent.

Why you think they traded their moral code?

People are working for evil companies like Facebook or Purdue Pharma without moral issues.

Job is just a job, people needs money...

Paycheck go brrrr I assume

Can you tell us more? What signals should I be worried about employers looking at?

It’s worse and deeper than you’d want to know. That said most HR Tech companies and large corporate HR departments are incompetent so it’s not really as scary in practice as it sounds.

Also GDPR/CCPA has hamstrung a lot of this and HR depts are fairly petrified about it. Talent Acquisition, not so much…

Wait, how much worse, and how much deeper? Unless that kind of stuff is a trade secret.

Sorry, I’m being a little dramatic.

I mean the data part is a little scary. Look up People Data Labs. There are lots of these data aggregators and that data can be used for a lot of scary things. HR in practice is probably the least scary.

I know many people who have been fired for _liking_ a post on Facebook.

So there's that.

Your website returns: Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.allegisgroup.com, allegisgroup.com

hiring solved

Sold the company to Allegis.

Do you sleep well at night?

Yes, actually. Hiring sucks. We wanted to make it better.

I believe we did do that by showing the HR world that data driven insights could be a better indicator than what school someone went to or whether they played Ultimate Frisbee (a real hiring signal used by a Fortune 500 tech co).

We didn’t solve hiring. It’s a tough problem with many strange human biases and rituals. But I do think we made it better even if only a little.

It can be useful to know who's near the door so that you may rectify the situation, it doesn't necessarily have to be slimy. Benefit of the doubt I guess. DX (getdx.com) has it and it's very pro-worker.

This can be a positive too, proactive dive & save to retain an employee who's manager feel they're about to leave isn't unheard of in my company.

If you're good at your job and highly rated there should be obvious signs when they're trying to preemptively backfill you and at that point you can just communicate about how excited you are about your growth at the company or something to make them take a step back.

Let them squirm. Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives. Take it even to starting a union if needed.

You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.

> Let them squirm.

The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable.

The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.

> success could get you promoted

"Could" is such a big word. It means nothing, but it is intended to be very valuable. Get that promotion in writing. Otherwise it's a carrot to dangle upon you.

> they'd better not send you on that expensive training course

You know what's worse than training people and then these people leaving? Not training them and then these people staying.

You insist on giving me reasons to stay away from that company.

You don't necessarily realize that you work for this company.

Some people will talk about ideals all day without even realizing that they too live in the real world. So many things could be great, it’s just not the reality that we are in.

Those are naive arguments. Most people need employment, and most people want to get better wages by climbing the ladder.

Get it in writting? When in the history of the mankind it ever happened? Not to anyone I know, and I would never make such promises as well. Promotion depends on a lot of things, and promising something like that in writing is stupid.

And once you're tagged as someone who might be leaving, some employers really may prefer no to invest in you. Why should they? You might leave.

The whole argument of "the risk of training and they staying" depends entirely on how you gauge risk. In this case, if you have positive evidence that they are unhappy, then you know that the risk of leaving higher than staying.

Or it guarantees you’re in the next round of layoffs. You’re now a liability and they’ll be looking for a replacement with better loyalty signals.

You will be on the next round of layoffs regardless of your loyalty. "You were updating linkedin" is the excuse. It could be anything else. But the reality is that they found someone cheaper.

I heard non-squeaky wheel look more loyal and are kept around.

"Loyalty" has been dead for decades, just look at that many accounts of successful teams and people that have been laid off in the last year alone. The same exact stories of hard working and dedicated people being laid off on a whim can be found going back decades.

There's a reason that so many people now get prompted by moving "horizontally" between companies, very few companies today properly reward loyalty, if anything most actively incentivize individualism and disloyalty.

Staying with one company made sense when pensions were prevalent and unions were strong. Tech actively disincentives people from staying in one place too long, and instead of changing that they seek to limit mobility via NDA's, collusion, etc. It is a grossly atavistic world they've built, and the whole idea is to keep wages as low as they can.

Definitely. But also expensive non-squeaky wheels get replaced with cheaper wheels if upper management is in the mood of cost cutting.

Is there always a cheaper wheel to replace cheap non-squeaky wheels ? Asking for a (n-already-too-)cheap(-to-their-liking) non-squeaky wheel friend of mine.

There is always perceived cost cutting of outsourcing.

There is always "we fired 20% of the people, now their workload is on your shoulders or you will also be fired".

There is always "here is a book titled 'use agile to deliver twice as fast' now the deadline is in 3 months instead of 6 or else".

The only defense against that is having more options.

Yeah, in the end it's about always having a plan B at any time.

Wheels gotta move I guess, it's in their nature after all.

Avoidant attachment at its best.

Or they spare you, betting you'll leave on your own terms and they won't need to pay you a severance.

You can wait for others to promote you as a carrot or you can promote yourself. With more power on the labor side, you can more easily promote yourself.

Big Tech started with a lot of power in labor due to the knowledge economy, and is losing a lot of their core power. Thus wages will start slipping more and more and converge to general market rate for talent. Reclaim that power!

> The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.

What a great reason to encourage employees at the margin to job hop! Better pay, negotiation of those expensive training courses and/or big important projects.

What's the downside here, exactly, to a more fluid labor supply/supplier's market?

Managers want prisoners. Tradespeople don't fall for this shjt, white collar employees shouldn't.

I think a better mental model is that managers want _control_. If you are known for keeping your word and being frank in your goals, you are forecastable in how you will act and management steps back from trying to control and maybe even trusts you. If you aren't this way (and most folks aren't), then you become a pawn in a lot of manager headgames.

Some managers are just a--holes, granted.

All of that is reasonable, but none of it works unless you can get ~everyone in your org to do it.

Conservatively, only takes about 15%.

Some findings show as low as 3.5%

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...

> Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives.

If you're working for a company that actively monitors this sort of thing, I don't think that management's response will be "let's make our employees; lives better."

It reminds of a concept, which barring a better name, is "action through inaction" — if you know an employee is unhappy through external signals like these, you could make the active effort to not engage with them knowing that it may lead them to quit; instead of a lengthy severance/redundancy discussion.

I've seen similar insights, derived from a person's social-graph through email exchanges, and it was decided to not be used by managers as it could be a liability.

Employers and recruiters are always bewildered when I say I don't have a LinkedIn account, or a public Github profile (I have a few tiny open source projects I maintain, but they are all pseudonymous) - and this is exactly why.

I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.

I have such public accounts but they are specifically for said creeping.

Linkedin is required to market yourself though or else you can't bullshit your way through the HR hoops.

No. I have plenty of clients over the years and not a single on ever asked my LinkedIn and / or any other social. And if they ever will the answer will be NO. Well other than HN I am not really on social media anyways. Just have couple of accounts to talk to a couple of people.

I deleted my LinkedIn account fifteen years ago, and it's been fine. I don't have random recruiters beating down my door trying to interest me in jobs I don't want, but is that such a loss? I've had no trouble getting the jobs I do want.

Maybe you have a better history than I, but I've only ever had 2 or 3 very interested recruiters that got a hold of me but they were the real deal and weren't looking to fill entry level crap or stupid temp work.

All the other recruiters just make chat and email spam easily ignored and they never bother me.

And yet I am gainfully employed and haven't had problems switching when I want to..

Is what they waht you to think. Fear of missing out is powerful marketing.

It's by no means a limiting factor if they don't have one, but when I'm interviewing for mid - staff+ level engineers in my specific field I absolutely love when they have some sort of project portfolio I can look at. Github, Gitlab, medium, whatever.

I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this persons interests and skills over and over again.

When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice.

But I also couldn't care less about being "creeped" on. Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.

You're using a completely random throwaway nick to stay anonymous on here, while I've literally gotten jobs from hn and grown my career from it. Just like I did on IRC when I was 13. It's an interesting difference of use.

I don't mean one is better or worse at all and I totally get wanting to be anonymous.

People often have reasons outside of their control for being anonymous. Others have employment contracts that limit what outside business interests they can be involved in, including open source. That being said, I've been on HN for 2 years longer than you, 2/3rds the karma, and zero job offers so what do I know.

I wasn't aware of any of this! Outrageous!

All kidding aside I totally get it. I was lucky and taken under under the wing of a very generous group of people who have pretty much followed one another around to various jobs/projects over the last decade and our skills have just grown non-stop. I WISH I'd gotten into FOSS projects way sooner, like when I was a kid instead of just learning linux and crawling up the sysadmin route.

Like, junior help desk tech support to principal architects nowadays, etc. I try to get my friends who want to level up or change careers to hop into foss projects, #goodfirstissue sort of things. A lot of people just have no idea where to start, and they don't think they're skilled enough to join a project like kubernetes or what not, but those projects actually have Contributor Experience people/teams to help bring new people in comfortably and they need all sorts of help, not just go developers, etc.

Hell, those contributor experience people are absolute diamonds and really make certain communities so inclusive and great to be in. There is a lot of cool ancillary work to be done and everyone has something in their wheelhouse they can contribute.

https://goodfirstissue.dev/

> Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.

I think this is a really important point. Most companies aren't going to hire some anonymous person on the internet with no track record or verifiable background. Most companies can't even legally put someone on their payroll without knowing a lot more about a person.

People without a real-name presence on the internet are only going to get a pretty limited amount of unsolicited job-opening contact. And that might be what people like that prefer, which is fine. The minimal cold emails that come in may even be of much much higher quality and relevance. But ultimately they're still leaving a lot on the table, even if much of what's on the table is probably poorly-targeted crap. (Again, that's fine if that's what they want.)

My take is exactly the opposite: the more people who know that I exist, the more likely I am to hear of jobs that might interest me.

Let them creep all over my profile: so far the only downside is that I have a pile of messages to sort through and say "no, thanks" to.

I have a very old linkedin account that has 10 years-outdated info. The company I'm supposedly working for does not exist anymore.

As soon as I would even touch one word in my profile, a pile of recruiters would be triggered instantly. From experience I know that these recruiters have zero added value for me and often even their customer. On the contrary even, they have a tendency to try to fill any job with any qualification, because when they succeed, they hit a jackpot.

Job vacancies are present on job sites like 'Indeed'. It is very easy to set an appropriate filter and just start sending out your CV to companies.

It's even easier to do nothing and have people contact you.

I got my current job because a recruiter cold-called me about my Linked-In profile. It was a perfect match for a position she was trying to fill.

I wasn't looking, but it wasn't hard to persuade me to switch either.

I clearly need to do a better job with my profile, because recruiters never bother me.

I had two pretty good jobs come to me from LinkedIn.

The majority of job leads I got from maybe the start of LinkedIn to about 8 years ago were crap.

These days, most job leads are not crap, they just are not competitive with my current job. Much improved! Granted, I just updated a couple months ago my profile to say, "Not open to opportunities" and because my profile is recently updated, I get people contacting me daily - even on the weekend.

I'm torn on this. Exactly once have I gotten a recruiting email from someone that turned out to be a good match for me. That job literally changed my life.

But... every other recruiting email I've gotten has been at best something I just wasn't interested in, while the vast majority of them are so poorly targeted, I'm embarrassed for the recruiter for clearly not having a clue how to evaluate if a candidate is a good fit in even the most basic ways. All promising job prospects I've had (whether they worked out or not) came through connections, or active work on my part to seek out positions that interested me.

(Obviously everyone's experience differs; I see you mention downthread that you once found a great match from a cold recruiter call.)

So... did that one life-changing job come to me because of a privacy-minefield site like LinkedIn? I'm not sure how that in-house recruiter found me: it was a cold email to an address that I hadn't used in years, and it was just dumb luck that I signed into it a week after it was sent, which seems at odds with the usual way to get in touch with someone you've found through a job-network site.

I'm at a point where I don't think I really need to maintain a LinkedIn profile in order to achieve my employment goals... but a part of me is too afraid it'll be useful (or even critical) to something in the future, so I haven't deleted it. Meh.

This is a big thing, too. The spam of those messages definitely makes it a needle in a haystack, even for a "loose potential match". 99%+ of the messages in my inbox are for short to mid term onsite contracts on the east coast as an engineer when I am a Product Manager in the PNW.

Just yesterday I got a phone call from a recruiter asking about my LinkedIn account. I said that I don't have one.

About an hour later she called me again with an invitation for a job interview.

I don't really know what LinkedIn would change here...

For the vast majority of developers, this is the smarter choice. If you contribute to a very popular project, it might be different. But otherwise keep a bit of privacy.

Companies already tried to get rights to software created in your free time. Why even allow any attack surface here?

If you can help it, it’s best to leave (or not start at) a company with such practices anyway.

That's difficult to identify.

What I mean is, you shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of losing your job or not getting hired due to those practices.

I already have concerns over my retention and marketability. I would definitely be concerned about this as I would like to have some sort of decent job.

I think a lot of people necessarily need to be afraid of losing their jobs, depending on their skill set, local job market (less important with remote work, but still), and financial situation.

The trouble is, often it can't be helped, management, and sometimes whole companies often change hands. In the firm I work at, so far I've survived 4 rounds of massive retrenchments over 3 years due to restructure and more recently a complete takeover. The only thing in my control is to leave, yes.

Perfect, I can update my LinkedIn profile when the project is in a critical phase and I know managers are making increment decisions

I think this was done to me. I didn't even signin or anything, just looked around at what options are out there and started getting questions about my plans to leave.

What I've learned is if you plan to change jobs assume everyone at your current job will find out the minute you have an interview booked. Only applies to big companies that pay 3rd parties to monitor their employees like that though.

Sometimes I wish we had germany's privacy laws for employees in the US.

Even some rudimentary effort on a given manager's part could find LinkedIn updates.

I'm not convinced this is always an ultimately bad outcome if someone finds that.

I feel like if managers are using third party tools to try and find employees changing their linkedin,, they have waaay too little to do

Very few managers would do this themselves. It is far more likely to be done by HR or an HR-adjacent group and a report sent to a manager.

I've never really seen retention risk tooling used for evil in the way that most HN readers seem to think it is; it's kind of interesting and eye-opening to me to see the strong negative sentiment towards it.

I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be greatly in an employee's best interest, as it would be another justification to the higher-ups for a raise or better job assignment.

To be clear, I'm personally generally against these kind of panopticon data-slurp initiatives overall, I'm just surprised that the initial reaction is so strongly "my manager will use this to fire me" when I've only ever seen the opposite.

I've never even heard of these tools before now, but my impression is the same as yours: the people they flag are more likely to be the kind of people that you want to keep.

The basic assumption at play here is that data about you that you don't control is likely going to end up being used against you, which I think isn't unreasonable. Flawed risk metrics, even if they are only used to benefit those who are flagged, may still turn out to be unfavorable for some employees (eg for the false negatives).

Well the article is about glassdoor, which is where you write reviews.

You better believe that if databrokers will buy information on whether you updated linked in that they'd also buy information on whether you gave the company a 1 star review.

Heck, you can even post your salary to glassdoor, so maybe your next employer would buy that information so they know the least they could offer you.

>"my manager will use this to fire me"

For me it is more like: "my manager sees that I'm looking for a job", and I really rather tell him that I will be leaving, as soon as I'm certain of a new job. It's none of his business before that point.

> I've never really seen

I remember reading a blog post by an employee that had gotten on the wrong side of google. When he came in their crosshairs, he said all his google machines forcibly updated themselves, and it became clear he was closely monitored.

I think the idea is that decent relationships have good boundaries, and proactively maintaining them is a worthwhile endeavor. This is especially important when there is a power relationship.

I hope my boss sees my LinkedIn activity. Every other company does and if they want to retain me they better be willing to offer a fair wage.

I think we should modify the laws covering credit reporting agencies to cover these knuckleheads and add criminal penalties for non compliance.

I once got a call from HR because I had updated my LinkedIn profile and they wanted to know if I was considering leaving.

I keep thinking about this response from a glassdoor employee, and what it implies about their decision making processes:

  I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted or nullified/anonymized from the platform. I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. [...] This is my final determination. I, as well as multiple members of my team, have reviewed your request several times, and I am considering this matter closed.

this is why the GDPR right of erasure exists

fuck these companies

Also California’s CCPA/CPRA.

Also Virginia’s VCDPA.

There is no recourse except not to play. The end user has no choice. Sounds like a dictatorship.

Sounds like a platform that will wither away and die. Glassdoor users are emboldened by anonymity and know exactly what happens to people who put that kind of information on Facebook or LinkedIn next to their real name.

The recourse is taking down the business with a bot hive?

I can't help but think, how does glassdoor make money?

investigating htis, it is clear - from employers.

They help companies keep a clean image, and also sell them job listings and advertising.

Scrubbing a company's image seems like it would be really lucrative.

It doesn't seem like reflecting reality makes money. I actually don't know if there are any review sites where having accurate reviews makes it profitable.

And it doesn't seem like employees are really a revenue stream, since they are not looking for a job.

I think Glassdoor has the issue in that its not a growth business, but needs to be. You can't have a website like Glassdoor that is VC funded, owned by PE or publicly traded and not have it go to shit. The organic usage is people looking for new jobs, or posting about jobs they hate, or companies responding. A website that has <20 employees and is fine with being a $10M a year business living off of ad revenue could absolutely do this and be successful. A business seeking to double revenue can't.

This is the essential problem with any platform whose value consists of user-generated content. For example, Reddit doesn't have to hold an IPO to continue being Reddit, they don't have to paywall their API, and they don't have to make their website a global dark pattern to force engagement; they chose to sell stakes and play the growth game. Medium is another example, as is Quora, LinkedIn, and a hundred other tech companies that are essentially specialized takes on PhpBB forums.

Yep, it's so disappointing how many web projects provide solid value for many people, have a reasonable business model, but go to absolute shit and eventually fade to nothing chasing unsustainable returns. It's staggering how much better the web could be if the demand for exponential returns hadn't become so dominant on the business side.

It does sometimes feel like we're missing out on these "reasonable company with reasonable expectations" type businesses and funding and crashing a ton of companies that would otherwise maybe live on reasonably?

What is the line from The Social Network? "Its not cool to be a millionaire, its cool to be a billionaire" or something along those lines. I think a lot of people aren't happy with being just very wealthy I suppose.

There's even a stigma to being a "single digit millionaire"

    Greg: I'm good, anyway, cuz, uh, my, so, I was just talkin' to my mom, and she said, apparently, he'll leave me five million anyway, so I'm golden, baby.

    Connor: You can't do anything with five, Greg. Five's a nightmare.

    Greg: Is it?

    Connor: Oh, yeah. Can't retire. Not worth it to work. Oh, yes, five will drive you un poco loco, my fine feathered friend.

    Tom: The poorest rich person in America. The world's tallest dwarf.


    Connor: The weakest strong man at the circus.

-- Succession

Can't retire on $5M?

At a 5%/year withdrawal rate, that's $250K/year. That's absolutely livable. You won't live like a king, but that's a solid middle-class living in most suburbs outside the Bay area.

I dunno, I think it's pretty cool to be either a millionaire or a billionaire. That's probably why I'm not either.

> What is the line from The Social Network? "Its not cool to be a millionaire, its cool to be a billionaire" or something along those lines. I think a lot of people aren't happy with being just very wealthy I suppose.

I think the founders of those companies would be fine with the millionaire outcome, as it beats crashing and burning in pursuit of billions.

The problem is the VC mindset.

It’s not good enough to run a business that supports you, your family, and your employees families anymore. Everything has to be the next billion-dollar big idea that’ll make the books. Even small businesses have the feel of soul-less big business because of this. It’s disheartening that this is what the tech industry has become.

Yeah, and the problem is that if you try to start a bootstrapped company to compete with Glassdoor without ever taking funding, you’ll be outspent on marketing by the companies that did take funding and you’ll go under. There’s a reason so many of these sites are VC funded even when it feels like they shouldn’t be. And VCs are often willing to fund things with a 1% chance of success, so even if multiple VC-backed companies in a market have failed, it won’t dissuade them from investing.

Why is it impossible for communities to emerge organically in 2024? Why must you raise and spend $20m on marketing alone?

I found Reddit literally through organic word-of-mouth when Digg went under. Never saw an ad for it in my life.

Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?

The thing is you did find reddit via marketing, its just the marketing hit the people before it hit you, that guy that told you about it or the one that told him was the one that marketing got into reddit, which got them to a critical mass that word of mouth can take over.

Reddit's early employees were very busy with sock accounts reposting things from other sites, commenting on them, then messaging the creators on the original sites "hey your thing was posted on reddit!".

Marketing comes in lots of forms.

Reddit didn't start to attract the critical mass until they became the top result in Google though nor it was able to keep its servers with its own profit. Until they squash all possible opponents, such social networks has never been profitable.

Reddit isn't profitable, never has been, and likely never will

>Why is it impossible for communities to emerge organically in 2024?

levels and blind sort of feels that way, but that's part of the issue:

1. these kinds of sites are a paradox in that you want employees to be anonymous but also verified. So you can't just spin up a site in a week and have valuable data

2. despite the comparisons, I'm sure both levels and blind were in fact vc funded. The models feels indie but it probably isn't. But they did their part for SEO and marketing and yadda yadda. So it got the eyeballs it needed before word of mouth set in

>Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?

to be frank, because most people don't try very hard to find the grassroots. They are lazy and will take the first thing that looks good on Google.

Fully agree with that. But you've just stated one of the major problems the software industry has in general. There's almost an inevitable flow that leads businesses that feed on VC funding to develop like this. They will turn shitty because they are as big as they should get, but not as big as they must get.

Like a web mittelstand [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand

Decided to visit the website to delete my account. Lo and behold, the "Deactivate Account" button kicks off a perpetual loop that asks you to "Sign In Again To Delete Account" then dumps you on the same profile setting page, which prompts you again to log in... so you can't really delete your account, at least on web, without the help of support.

Edit: figured it out, is confusing

1. Remove social connection if this is how you logged in 2. Log Out 3. Upon login, request a password reset 4. Reset and login 5. Request Deletion 6. Enter newly created password

Strange, do you have any browser security extensions, aggressive cookie-blocking, or something similar? I was able to complete the process (see my comment below). I'm using Brave with ad blockers. The "deactivate" language is pretty misleading, but after entering account credentials, it did seem to delete the account completely.

It worked for me normally just now

I have the same experience right now.

Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway? Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.

Remember when Yelp did that? And yet, somehow not dead.

Yelp isn't dead but no one I know uses it anymore, specifically due to all the issues with reviews.

Yelp rating, photos and reviews come before the street address when you click on a place in Apple Maps. I have to scroll down to get the street address, somebody decided that is less important.

Bing gives Yelp similar priority for queries like "tacos near me", so all the Bing-serving alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo do the same thing.

Yelp has no real alternative for vetting unfamiliar restaurants, at least not one which doesn’t have similar conflicts.

If you're in UK look at Harden's http://www.hardens.com/

TripAdvisor? They charge for advertising/sponsored positioning, but it's free to claim your business and it allows you to respond to people but pretty sure not do 'moderation' like that.

TripAdvisor is good for everything outside of the US but I pretty much just use Google Maps now for restaurants in the US. I'll keep an eye out for who gets awards in my city as well.

The reviews might be real, but the order you see anything, say Top 10 hotels in Indianapolis, is the result of an auction

Google Maps?

I find this is generally region-specific, as what review sites are most commonly used will differ somewhat from region to region.

I have found it preferable to visit the restaurant in question, look around, read the menu, and decide based on those cues around me whether it's worth risking a meal there.

Yelp has become useless, and TripAdvisor is as bad if not worse. The reviews on Google Maps are wholly unreliable as well.

> And yet, somehow not dead.

I can't remember the last time I looked at yelp, pre-covid maybe?

I think Yelp only survives through its integration with Apple Maps. If Apple ever decides to build its own review feature I can’t imagine Yelp surviving.

Given the integration, I'd expect that Apple's decision to build their own would start with buying Yelp if for nothing more than the data Yelp already has.

Apple seems to be working on it. A lot of times when I press that POI icon, I get Trip Advisor reviews and not Yelp. Additionally, there is thumbs up/down UI in the Apple Maps app to rate a POI. An example would be Fairhaven Village Inn, Bellingham, WA: no Yelp droppings anywhere to be found.

I basically stopped reading Amazon and Yelp reviews. They do more harm then good. Now it's all about human-curated information. Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.

Should I eat here? Should I buy this product? Etc.

With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.

>Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.

OMG please don't do this - it's more gamed/scammy than online reviews: people will routinely post sponsored content disguised as personal recommendations. The FTC occasionally cracks down on it (or sends warning labels) but it's still so ubiquitous.

If you are following an "influencer" peddling products, yes, but there are plenty of good resources available.

The choice is between "scam" and "bias".

If you think this is only a problem with "influencers peddling products" then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

> I basically stopped reading Amazon and Yelp reviews

I've done that too and am sure many people here on HN realized how gameable and gamed they are but sadly it still works for the masses who fall into these traps like flies to a candle. When these this kind of deception will stop working we will have reached a total trust of 0.

> With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.

Absolutely agree, and I try to do this more often now. A visit somewhere new and untested for lunch or dinner isn't like a product purchase, where I might regret a bad purchase for months or years. If a restaurant doesn't work out, I've only lost an hour or two of my time, and a bit of cash that likely still went to providing me sustenance, even if the experience and taste was poor.

And if it turns out to be great -- well... great!

it wasn’t always the case (or at least most people believed it wasn’t) and they exist for a long time – the suggestion I think is for the people like me, who wrote something there over 10 years ago and now their posts would possibly stop being anonymous.

How is this not fraud?

https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-ca...

> You can't pay us to take down reviews and we apply the same content moderation rules to our clients that we use for everyone else.

https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/

I wonder if it could be considered securities fraud, in the Matt Levine sense of "Everything is Securities Fraud."

I certainly would take CEO approval rating and employee's reviews of overall job satisfaction into account when investing in a company. If you see very low reviews, you know the company is under-investing in employees and will likely need to increase spend on employee retention in the coming years, which is not reported in their current financial reports. Likewise, if you want to be cynical, a consistent 5 star company has some fat it could trim, which would increase it's investment value.

Perhaps we'll see a shareholder lawsuit following a mass employee resignation event which was arguably concealed by manipulating employee reviews.

oh but they're not paying to take down reviews

you're paying to "flag and report reviews for additional scrutiny"

their process then co-incidentally always seems to agree that those reported by paying customers are bogus

(same as paying for trustpilot)

I’m still filing the regulator complaint.

hopefully the sarcasm in my post was obvious

maybe not :)

It was! :)

A few of the tricks I've noticed they use:

* Review not tagged as English, or neither Full-Time or Part-Time, and those are the default filters

* Default sort is "Most Recent" and the Featured Review at the top of reviews is always a positive hand chosen review

* "Found 515 out of over 530 reviews" - I suspect they maybe take those 15 other reviews into account for the rating average, but you just can't read them right now so technically not taken down

* Negative review stays in Pending state while being screened by Glassdoor for over a month, but the time it's approved, it's buried by newer reviews

> https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-ca...

Interesting that of the 4 options to address bad employee reviews, none of those options is:

* Address the review by improving your company culture or policies

Many companies pay agencies to post fake positive reviews about them. This is especially common among companies who publish fake job vacancies.

I feel like this is technically some kind of FTC violation, even if it’s not broadly enforced.

Many companies just post fake positive reviews about themselves directly. Glassdoor reviews come from two places: aggrieved former employees and HR departments. The whole thing is garbage.

i wish everyone would adopt a mutation to the 5 star review, so that at a single glance a 3 star review would have coded with it whether it's a bathtub curve, or equal, distribution. like, if it's bathtub curve, change the middle star to a skull. but if it's even, leave it a star. how great would that be

All reviews are scammed. Phone a friend.

Join the trust graph...

I have an idea. We could build a new, better review site. Sprinkle in some blockchain and AI...

I find it hilarious that all the money pumped into Glassdoor has created less useful information about companies than the Better Business Bureau.

I know of two multinational conglomerates (one Indian, the other Argentinian) that requires all newcomers to post a GlassDoor review and a LinkedIn post praising the company, the onboarding gifts, and such things. Both are absolute hell to work for unless you're upper management, according to acquaintances that have been there and climbed outside the bog of low-level positions.

It's not a lot, but it's weird it happened twice.

Globant?

Their interview raised a lot of red flags for me. I see they were raised for a reason.

That's one, the other starts with a 'T' and ends with 'CS'.

Who needs glassdoor when you get red flags like that on your first day.

I’ve never flexed my new positions or anything like that, which seems to be widespread nowadays to seek validation on social media.

I’ll never make a post about a company even if I end up loving my time there, it’s just not going to happen. It looks fake and everyone knows that.

> It looks fake and everyone knows that.

Sometimes I wonder if being fake is seen as pejorative as it used to be. I mean the whole "social media influencer" thing is super fake, but people seem to eat that shit up and a depressing number of kids aspire to be one.

You're missing that plenty of people lack the intelligence, education, media literacy etc to actually recognize that "fake"ness. You can still pull in a hundred grand scamming people on instagram by posting a selfie with a rented or parked Lambo and a caption reading "Send me <shitty cryptotoken of the day> and I'll double it and show you how to be rich just like me!!!"

There are people on this very forum who are 100% subscribed to the "if you work hard you will make it" propaganda and also the often unspoken corollary of "if you didn't make it, it's your own fault". Arguably that's the entire ethos of this VC/startup focused community.

We are extremely irrational creatures, who have pretty much only advanced by being able to write down information and curate that body of work over the centuries, enough to tease out a couple semi-working systems that produce better than a coin flip results enough of the time to manage to advance. Even the best educated, smartest, or most successful of us are absolutely chock full of irrationality and bias opposed to direct evidence. Even Einstein abandoned the data when it disagreed with his beliefs.

There's also some preliminary data that younger people consider the awkward, scammy, low production value feel of things like tiktoks to be "more authentic" and therefore more trustworthy to them. All you have to do is say ten words very confidently and some insular community will adopt it as part of their belief system. Look at all the absolute dreck, nonsense pseudoscience that makes up the incel community.

Media literacy is completely irrelevant to all the people who lack it. When you haven't learned HOW to pick apart and interrogate a source of information, you have no option but to fall back to shittier, brand or ideology based source analysis.

This is the most insightful comment I’ve ever read on HN.

>There are people on this very forum who are 100% subscribed to the "if you work hard you will make it"

It doesn't guarantee that you will make it, but certainly increases your chances.

> Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.

I very briefly worked at a toxic company that was aggressive about Glassdoor reviews. From what I heard, they couldn’t get them removed just by asking. They had to carefully examine the Glassdoor rules and find a reason that a review violated the rules.

They used the argument that reviews revealed confidential company information most of the time. It didn’t always work.

When I left, I used a throwaway email and coffee shop WiFi to leave a completely accurate, honest review. I carefully made sure to comply with every letter of Glassdoor’s rules.

My review is still up.

> Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway?

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but all online aggregate reviews are a scam. There are countless ways to game them and with AI it's only going to get worse. At best, they're a weak signal of whether something is bad or good. And the bigger and more popular a review site, the worse the quality/reliability since the impact of manipulating reviews on a site with a huge audience is that much higher.

My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.

Still somewhat shady.

There’s something odd in the lifecycle of these sorts of sites. I wonder if it goes like this:

Review site starts out as community driven, connected people tend to get involved. This provides a filter for competent users.

Companies become aware of the site, start looking for ways to manipulate their score. Companies gain access to competent employee. It is bearable for a while.

The scores are manipulated to the point where the site no longer provides a good signal. Only out of the loop dummies still use it, and it becomes a negative filter.

From this point of view, community sites are more like a crop that gets harvested. It would be better for people if it didn’t happen, but the incentive for the company seems to be: be the first one to start consuming the site.

Oh, a mini-cycle could be: at first, the companies that start manipulating the reviews tend to be the more connected and on-the-ball ones, so users don’t mind as much, since the companies that are trying to exploit the rankings them are also filtered for competence.

> Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.

I can verify this was true at least a few years ago. My friend's company had some bad (but totally honest) reviews. They requested them to be removed. Denied. A few days later they received an email from Glassdoor, talking about some sort of premium plan. They signed up. The bad reviews disappeared a few days later.

I know for sure that Glassdoor has no problem with companies flooding their page with fake positive reviews. I worked for a shady company that did exactly that in the most blatant way possible. They consistenly posted short vapid 5 star reviews on a regular weekly schedule from the same IP. I tried reporting it to Glassdoor two different times and they could not have cared less.

Glassdoor seems very has-been at this point. They’re trying to move beyond the mix of folks trashing their employers and then charging employers to make the profile look better to now trying to be more of a serious career site. The ship has sailed on that front and they just seem on a slow march to irrelevance as has happened to lots of other similar career and employer review sites.

Took some digging but here’s the data delete request form that should cover all the HR Tech sites including Indeed: https://requests.hrtechprivacy.com/create

Be sure to select “show more sites” in the sites selection.

And for Glassdoor, bottom of this page:

https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US

I just logged in for the first time in years to delete my account, and before letting me do anything they required me to add my full name and other employment info.

i did the same and was so, so infuriated by that.

My name is Joe Blow and my job is a Glassdoor Bankruptcy Advocate located in Antarctica.

Nice to meet you Joe Blow. My name is John Jacobs, Vandelay Industries.

This is very very illegal, depending on jurisdiction.

Same. Thought I must not have been signed in and was getting pushed into a signup flow or something, so I cleared cookies and got the same behavior once I logged in.

Forcing you to give them your real name before allowing you to use the site when logged in is incredibly scummy behavior I hope they are punished richly for.

Was it possible to use a fake name?

It is

Always use a fake name, like we taught kids to do on the internet in the 1990s!

I used the name “Nah Thanks” and selected that I was unemployed to pass on giving any legitimate information.

I got the same modal, but I opened up DevTools, deleted the modal and was able to then click into my account settings and delete my account.

Same, but instead of devtools I just found a longer URL in my history to get past it.

Careful now, some particularly dimwitted prosecutor might charge you with unlawful access to a computer system.

We need to throw away current cybercrime laws and start over with people who actually know what access means.

I'm now known as John Smith, student at Brookdale Community College with an associates degree, aspiring to be an "Assistant Dog Catcher" (yes, that was one of the options in their auto-complete field) in Lodi, CA.

There was no option to delete the account, but after clicking "Deactivate", it still said that my account was now deleted, so who knows.

Edit: And now I received 2 emails from them that my recent submissions (filling in that form?) violated community rules.

Oh dear, I hope they don’t delete your account for violating their community guidelines!

I haven't logged in in years and I don't think I did much back then. Given everything I've read here, I think it might be safer just to let my account lie.

I reloaded until I was able to tap twice fast enough to reach the profile page, then "delete"/"deactivate" the account.

This is pretty shocking. I never use Glassdoor anyway, so deleted my account after reading. Worth noting that going to Settings only shows a button that says "Deactivate account", which seems misleading. Following this process does show a modal at the end that says "Account Deleted Confirmation. You have successfully deleted your account.", so seems like this is actually deletion vs. deactivation. (Your data stays in an archive DB for some period of time for legal reasons.)

also worth noting that if you attempt to go in via the mobile page, specifically to delete an account that predates "fish bowl" and mandatory names, you'll be bombarded with cascading popups that require your compliance (no x to exit, just "next" and filling in the relevant forms).

Based on this story, I already knew to expect resistance, but jesus fuck that was far worse than I imagined.

Careful: Those are just words, written by someone who thought that the difference between them is insignificant. (Maybe it was insignificant when it was actually written.) Without having concrete confirmation, all you have is just some optimistic assumption.

At the bottom there's a Data Request Form.

You have the option "Delete my personal data"

https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US

Wow, big dark UX pattern when trying to sign in now. I'm quite positive that I never linked my glassdoor account to google. Yet, Glassdoor was ambiguously saying on login "use your google account to login for your @gmail address!". To which google asked "are you sure you want to share info with glassdoor."

There was no way to enter my old password, I was forced to now link my account with google which force shared my email & name. I was really nervous about even enabling this linking... I bit the bullet, happily it looks like it is somewhat easy to delete reviews and finally the account. Getting there though, was forced to divulge new information.

I don't think I could have a lower opinion of glassdoor now..

I was able to login just now using an email address.

Was it an @gmail? I wonder if glass door forced the account linking because of that, or if the option to enter my password and not link accounts was just buried.

If this is how they're going to play it, RIP Glassdoor. Seems like a MAJOR breach of trust to allow users to submit content and participate anonymously THEN start revealing their names!

"If you are not willing to allow your name on your profile, you will again need to complete Data erasure once you are able to. However, we cannot remove this for you or make the changes you wish to see for your name."

I guess we know the appropriate action to take here. This is an absolutely BONE HEADED decision with regards to the operation of Glassdoor but I wonder what was the impetus for this? It looks like they're trying to convert their anonymous, Reddit-like, users to First Class Named Users for the purpose trying to compete with Linkedin to me.

I find the rationale here questionable and the execution plain nutty personally.

They're not revealing anyone's names. Names are anonymous by default until you elect to share yours.

It will be pretty hilarious if we see 500 positive reviews exposed as being from Terry from HR on Glassdoor. Maybe it will help legitimize it a little.

I have not logged into Glassdoor in a long time, I tried to log in after seeing this.

I get a prompt that I cannot dismiss about "Communities at Glassdoor" that I can't get past without putting in my employment information and name...

I can't even get too my account to delete it or emails support.

Love dark patterns...

I just lied about both things it wanted and it was fine with that, so it seems a little silly to make it a requirement

As a senior manager I worked closely with a VP of engineering on the engineering culture - one of the expected outcome was the improvement of our Glassdoor company rating. But my VP (and probably the leadership) wanted to go fast. So my VP was in touch with someone at Glassdoor and had a way to 'tweak' or remove unpleasant reviews. I don't know the details but if there is definitely a way for companies to do that despite Glassdoor claiming that reviews can't be removed.

They can definitely manipulate the default (“recommended”) sort to bury bad reviews. Companies do that all the time. They can also reply to reviews. I’m not sure about control over visibility if a user chooses to sort chronologically, though.

I can confirm that at least 2 of the offending reviews simply disappeared after my VP talked to them.

You should request your data from a company like axciom. You can ask them to delete it while you’re at it.

They already know more about you than you’d ever want them to know. The fact that they hadn’t automatically matched your name before was either incompetence or simply being blocked by some frayed little law somewhere.

A little off topic, but his is a classic example of the problem where the laws just haven’t kept up with the technology.

Data collection and public government databases weren’t a problem when you had to go into some big office building somewhere to make a request, or maybe wait a couple weeks to sort it out through the mail.

Today, however, it’s easier than ever to gather this data at scales people can’t even imagine and this level of aggregation has eroded privacy to a degree that I don’t think is reversible anymore.

Anyway, here is a link to axcioms portal, although the cynic in me thinks that by requesting your data be deleted, all you’re doing is confirming your identity.

https://privacyportal.onetrust.com/webform/342ca6ac-4177-482...

Love the change. Now I can signup with employee name I dislike like a powerful manager and get them out.

Well, I've understood Glassdoor to be useless for years due to supposedly allowing companies to control the existence of negative reviews, and I've never had an account. However, this is pretty disturbing and deserves to be more widely known if Glassdoor is actually now hostile to employees who might review former employers.

Wow, in the EU one email to the local data protection office would set them on fire for this.

I was thinking this too. I’m very thankful to live in the EU and have the right to have my PII data deleted.

Wow, Glassdoor operates in the EU and somehow they're not on fire yet. Why do you believe this is?

Done, account deleted, and thank you for the heads up. Genuinely, thankful for that post and maybe the most important social network I’m a part of: Hacker News.

Surely this would discourage anyone posting legitimate reviews of their workplace but quite honestly, Glassdoor seems to only be for companies themselves to have a "badge" and not the potential employees.

I don't think it would be missed if it were to disappear tomorrow.

I had an employee on my team at a company I worked for once who used the CFO's real name to post a review trashing the company.

The real name policy had the opposite of the intended effect.

All this "my final determination" and "your other surprise account" nonsense could be rectified pretty quickly with a GDPR banhammer. I am increasingly of the opinion that personal info of any kind should be legally radioactive, and very high-risk for companies to hold onto or collect.

I agree. I am the author of a [very mild] social media app, that Serves an extremely tinfoil demographic.

The #1 posture is that if we don't actually need the information for the application to run, we don't take it.

I won't go into detail about how we do what we do, but we don't keep any data, other than the email the user chooses to send us (which can be a DEA or proxied one). We also never export that email outside the server. No marketing aggregations, no trend analysis, etc. The email stays inside the deployed server.

This stance has not made me popular with my coworkers, but it has made our app quite popular with end-users.

stances and postures sound like policies that are not written

Nah, it’s written. It’s an iOS app, and Apple requires a well-written policy.

Also, I have gotten used to doing things this way. I’ve been writing software for this particular demographic, for over 20 years.

I'm incredibly curious about what this demographic is.

Won’t mention it in public, but it’s not a deep secret, or anything.

Feel free to drop me a line.

German site kununu may also be forced to disclose clear names of previously anonymous reviews [0]

So, what's left besides word of mouth?

[0] https://www.golem.de/news/urteil-kununu-muss-im-streitfall-k... (sorry, article in german)

Thank you, I deleted my account.

This is precisely why I never created a glassdoor account. It's exactly the kind of thing I feared would happen.

> Glassdoor now requires your real name and will add it to older accounts without your consent if they learn it, and your only option is to delete your account.

weird. I just logged in, and I can't confirm that this is happening. all of my reviews are still properly anonymous. my account knows my name and my email address, of course, but it does not appear anywhere on the site where I don't expect it to.

> So all users will now receive a Fishbowl account once they login to Glassdoor

I'm not real sure what this means - as far as I can tell, 'bowls' are just the equivalent of fb groups, and while there are a few automatically added to your account initially, you can just leave them, and proceed with an empty list of 'bowls' you follow (or whatever the terminology is)

what am I missing here?

> my account knows my name and my email address

you just said it yourself -- consider that the data that is collected and sold is not necessarily on the pages you see

I definitely want to hear this from Glassdoor. I just can't imagine why Glassdoor would put a user's name alongside a review against the wish of the user in question. So I'll give Glassdoor a chance to clarify what's happening before getting my pitchfork.

It sounds like they aren't doing that, from what the glassdoor rep wrote. It sounds like the author is concerned that, in the event of a data leak, that their name can now be associated with their reviews, instead of just their email address.

Also more importantly, in a future product update:

If you pay for the Extra Premium Data Insights Package (TM), Glassdoor will happily give your real name to your employer so they can either see the reviews you've written about past employers or the review you wrote about your current employer.

While this isn't a real product (yet), you can't tell me there is a non zero risk on this one.

Yep, although if we're worried about an adversarial Glassdoor, then the OP screwed up their opsec by sending their real name in the first place. Even for regular Glassdoor, it's in their email logs which might get leaked alongside anything else, anyway. Still should have the right to easily delete info, though, I'm not trying to blame the OP for being angry about that.

Danish payment app MobilePay also just revealed the full name of all its users, linked to the government database.

You can enter any phone number and the full name of the user will be shown. Previously a user-selectable name, now it's coming from the government database of citizens.

It's very possible that the full name from the email to the person's Glassdoor account was not manually performed by a human.

More than likely, their CRM software automatically tied their user-facing account with their support ticket email. Especially if the only unique identifier is based on email address. It's not hard to remove the name and location from the CRM, but because it would become a manual process they just don't want to have to deal with it.

FWIW, this theory could be put to test by signing up an account with username.extrachars@gmail.com and then sending a support email from username.extrachars+1@gmail.com, not sure if they would reject the support ticket as "emails not matched".

I haven’t used Glassdoor for years. I just checked and my account didn’t have any personal information listed. My name and other fields in my profile were “*”

I didn’t see a way to delete my data but I don’t think they had much in the first place.

I did use the “deactivate account” option.

Site is close to unusable anyway. I have gotten emails from them about potentially interesting jobs, and then could never figure out how to actually view the job postings. Instead I’m sent through their review workflow to get access.

All of these shenanigans occur because the laws favor employers over employees; there’s no protection, or at least, proper freedom of speech. But what can you expect when employees can be fired on the spot for asking to unionize?

It’s always so easy to start relationship when two people are in love, so I met my partner and we were both In love with each other or so I thought until I realized something wasn’t right, he was just so good to be true, so I searched online on how to spy on my husband’s phone without touching it then I saw Spyrecovery36 I contacted him via spyrecovery36 at gm ail c om and he did a very good job, I was able to find out my partner was two timing, I felt so betrayed by him

we need strong laws on data brokers. to protect our privacy from foreign and domestic actors.

All US tech companies ever, they are out there to doing the right thing until money rolls in then profits take the priority over quality and they go down the shitter.

1) Evernote

2) Triplebyte

3) Glassdoor

4) Let's not forget Quora

Are you sure it’s just profits? People need money to support themselves. Companies hire people and have to pay them because they can’t work for free. This means companies need revenue.

Now, with traditional companies, customers paid for products and services. This revenue allowed companies to pay employees. With the companies you listened, they gave away their product “for free”. That meant they had to get revenue some other way. Usually, this either involved ads, spying (so ads could be better targeted), pay for advanced features (Evernote), or sell services to some third party (Yelp and Glassdoor are two examples of this).

The problem with all of these new business models is companies often struggle to get enough revenue to survive. What is no called ‘enshitification” is basically companies searchimng for a way to survive when their users will not directly pay for the service they are offering. Is this good for users? No, but then again the users refuse to pay for the service.

My main point here is greed is not the only thing driving this process. In many cases, it is incentives and organizations trying to survive. If we want products which delight us, we are probably going to have to pay for them. If we want the cheapest thing possible, we are going to have to accept that it will get progressively worse as companies try to survive or keep their earning growing.

Note that the above earnings growth is probably a short term phenomenon. My guess is that companies who push earnings over quality eventually destroy their product and get a bad product and lower earnings. This process can take years or decades.

This is just absurd, how much revenue does Facebook need to "survive"?

I'd expect from society in 2024, platforms like Facebook, Quora, GlassDoor to not only exist but to work well in an established way. It's just greed, pure and simple.

Nothing works, and everything is "shittified".

For example, I was really excited about Triplebyte. I thought finally we may have a tool to separate the wheat from the chaff and hoped it would make it's way even to Europe but then it got shittified with dark patterns.

The moment something becomes cool for a few months, it's already a cow to be milked endlessly and sold off to the highest bidder who will do the same and once it's gone they'll find someone to throw under the bus and move on to the next thing.

And that's not even counting personal information which they consistently misuse or sell. I am terrified to use majority of services online with personal name/surname and recently my very unique(identifies just me) name:surname combo got hijacked and was used in a fake review site. I just don't trust any company when they say "your private notes" are private. Yes, they are, if they earn trillions and become like apple. But the moment money is tighter they change the tune.

For example take a site like bumble. The frontend is junior level programming even HS. The backend is a simple DB. It can't cost billions of euros to run that.

Recently, Evernote limited the free tier and increased pricing. This means that now the users pay for the product and this is very good. In fact, they added a lot of new features and improved performance.

I guess all I can do is upvote this, and hope the sunshine helps lead to the demise of those who turn the public goodwill they've solicited -- here, transparency into employment practices -- against the very folks they've gotten to exercise it.

I guess we all know now not to work for Glassdoor...

(Including the unpaid work that built their product in the first place.)

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>they had updated my profile to add my real name and location, the name pulled from the email From line I didn't think to cloak because who does that?

How did they get that if you never sent them an email? And if you sent them an email, you gave them your name (whatever name is in the from line)

> Recently I contacted Glassdoor for an account-related issue. This led to them sending me email that I had to respond to. Big mistake.

So he put in a support request, likely via his account; they sent him an e-mail about it, likely to his Glassdoor account's e-mail. He replied from that e-mail address with his full name in the From: field, as most people do, and now they could link his full name with his e-mail address, and update his profile.

That’s super slimy of them — a while back I had spent some time investigating fake reviews on their platform [1] and also found that their moderation team has no strict processes in place to deal with bad actors.

[1]: https://www.careerfair.io/company-reviews

You might be confused: to them, people like you and the OP are bad actors. What you mean by “bad actors” are their paying customers.

I'm not wildly surprised, and am kinda getting the impression, that companies can fuck individuals any way they want, but… this couldn't be legal, right? I mean, especially the "that would be forthcoming" part.

Thanks! You're right.

Just deleted all my glassdoor contributions, then deactivated my glassdoor account.

> your Glassdoor account

null pointer exception

Seriously, I’ve browsed some of those sites in the past and the info is always bad info. Or at the very least, it’s not possible to discern the good info from the bad info on those sites.

I’ve never understood what compels people to go to those sites, I suspect it’s because people feel that it at least gives them a voice.

The only site with a modicum of value is LinkedIn, and even then you can probably come up with a million reasons to not use it.

This got a lol from me, well done

While you're at it, don't forget to freeze your Work Number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number

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When I signed up for Blind, I remember being a concerned that I had to use my work email to sign up. At the very least the employer can see that you signed up via the verification email.

I've heard of people randomly signing up their coworkers to create plausible deniability.

I mean, I guess that could work at a company with horrible security practices that you could verify through their email.

Tend to use blind for the inside scoop these days anyway

Blind is 10% inside scoop, 90% shitposting.

Weird. I only see the option to deactivate an account, not delete or even close.

Damn this terribly company and their terrible, terrible dark patterns.

See my top-level comment. I went through this process and the confirmation message seems to indicate it does perform a deletion vs. a deactivation.

Maybe. I don't trust Glassdoor to be honest though.

Out of curiosity, I had a look at my account on glassdoor and my name is "Rollo Tomasi". Seems about right :)

What the actual fuck, glasdoor just died for me. Tinker around with data to that degree is a nogo by all means.

Shit, and I hate how all of these 'auto-login' prompts appear in Chrome, and if you accidentally click it, then boom, now your name is all over the place. Think this is how I ended up in GlassDoor to begin with.

UBlock Origin -> My Filters, add this:

accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe

the google popups go away, but if you click on a "login with google" button it will still work.

(I use that filter with Firefox. It wouldn't surprise me if Chrome's bundled spyware somehow breaks this.)

Good luck 'deactivating' your account. Somehow I was registered via Facebook. I was able to sign in via Facebook. Then they force you to give your company, title, location, and name before they allow you access to anything, including settings (scum). Then when you click deactivate you have to sign in again, and the Facebook login just redirects to a blank page and deactivation doesn't occur.

My God what a sleazy company this is. I just logged in for the first time in ages to delete my account and it immediately gave me an inescapable modal requiring personal information, including my name!

I stopped using the site years ago once it became clear how corrupt they were about handling blatantly fake reviews, but this new name policy is a new low. Glassdoor can't be run out of business fast enough.

Wow, never using that service again, thanks for the heads up.

Tell me you don't understand what makes your own website mildly attractive to employees without telling Mr.

Glassdoor has been mostly useless for quite some time now anyway. HR departments offer little trinkets to employees who leave a good review to boost their score, negative reviews can be taken down. Minimal value all around basically.

It's both funny and sad when people find out how the real world works and get all indignant. "How dare they do a thing they're legally allowed to do! Rabble rabble rabble!!!" Glassdoor is trying to make money off you, like every other free site on the internet, and they will do whatever the law allows them to. Welcome to planet Earth.

Meanwhile, all the commenters in here are overreacting as usual, clearly not having read any of the terms of the website, like the part where it says your name is not disclosed until you explicitly elect to share it. But hey let's not let facts stop us from freaking out.

Glassdoor is one of the worst and first examples of "annoying paywalls" that I remember. (they don't require payment, but your login and personal info)

Done. Thank you for the headsup

The enshittification of the world continues apace.

I think you are fundamentally wrong. The world is getting better all of the time. Look at life 10 years ago, 30 years ago, 100 years ago, 200, years ago, etc.

Life expectancy is up, people are richer, people are healthier, we have an amazing number of choices, we have amazing devices, etc.

I think your view is very distorted and you really should check your facts. Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

1) What do you mean when you say “enshitification”? How is the world getting worse? By what measure?

2) Are there any counter examples which could disprove your thesis?

3) How does the world today compare to the world at other times? Why is the world better today? What was better before?

Finally, you should consider individual things instead of the world. For example, you can look at your town, housing, food, culture, etc. Try going beyond good and bad and look at the benefits and drawbacks of various things. Consider whether you need a more nuanced view of the world.

ok, I'll bite:

1) What do you mean when you say “enshitification”? How is the world getting worse? By what measure?

More violence, more bigotry, paying more and getting less not because things cost more but because stock price, minimum wage not tracking inflation while political donations do, Donald-Fucking-Trump as POTUS, cyber attacks at a truly breathtaking pace, healthcare and the entire fucking tragedy that is in the US, women's rights, body autonomy, a stock market where market makers can legally and literally steal money from everyone else, CU literally legalizing outright bribes to congress, the rise of US Nazis, the entire fucking state of Texas, judges who ignore any and all legal standing and common sense that enact the stupidest most regressive horse shit, corporations dumping chemicals into the environment by the metric ton and "suffering" profits for it, and much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more.

How about you step outside sometime and look at the world you're in?

2) Are there any counter examples which could disprove your thesis?

There are counters, but they are generally outliers in practically every instance. The simple fact they are outliers is the entire point I'm making.

3) How does the world today compare to the world at other times?

Tech could have been a great thing, but it's being used to abuse people at a greater scale, now, so win?

3a) Why is the world better today?

I would say something like better medical care and that care does exist, but only for the rich since most people cannot afford it. Why? Human greed.

3b) What was better before? Very little.

At no point did I say I pined for the 1860s. You're confusing me with Republicans.

I'm just tired of the human model of "shit on everyone I can, because fuck you, I'm getting mine". I'm fucking tired of people committing crimes for decades, and when caught saying, "I'm sorry". I'm tired of watching a country kill another countries CIVILIANS because they can.

Look at the world's choices.

A 15th carrier group or feeding kids in school?

Tax breaks for those that need them the least, while those with less money pay more or the reverse?

Food Stamps and the ever forward marching of less and less being spent on this very real need.

Social Security. A system you're forced to pay into, while congress plays fucking Lucy from the Peanuts with the benefits. Even going so far as to label them as "entitlements" in the shittiest possible definition of the word instead of entitlements, because its fucking owed.

How about the constant lies and horse shit propagated by media? Not truth, not facts, just bias with the sole goal of selling ad space and consequences be damned.

Maybe I just wanted more of humans than the current "fuck those in need" or "shit on minorities to make ourselves feel better", etc.

I'm truly glad you find the world a better place than I do.

YMMV and I sincerely hope it does, but let's put down the PollyAnna-tinted glasses. That's not the world humans built and pretending it is, is simply disingenuous or wholly ignorant.

Glassdoor is so gross sometimes with its requirements.

Levels.fyi has been really nice.

The problem Ive always had with levels, is that it seems much more focused on the "sales" groups - the non tech, but vital to business everything.

I've always disliked sales. especially when working on projects where a sales is so smarmy, because they get a huge pay - and I, implementing it all - get nothing.

This happened all over. but here is a story of why I cant stand sales:

I was tech designer for LDAC (lucas presidio campus)

So I built out the RFP for network and we were doing selections up at Big Rock Ranch (the only reason this is important is just how beautiful the space is, so it feels really open nice energy, relaxing)

We are doing vendor selection presentations (the vendors come show us why their solution is best match to RFP reqs)

The vendors were Cisco, Foundry, Force-10 (extreme backed out)

Cisco comes in and they're going through their presentation and we are getting through it - I am reviewing and seeing that it was rather weak, more "marketing"-ish reply to the RFP instead of a detailed response on the specs...

I am sitting across from the main cisco sales guy. (this is at the time the largest 10G network in the world as this is just as the 10G switches were made) - so at the time, its a big deal - like ~$80 million in core gear)

The sales guy is leaning back as if... don't worry Toots. Jimmy's got this sniffs coke" https://i.imgur.com/gPdQiW5.jpg

So I am going over the RFP with his team, and he interjects:

"I just want to assure you that Cisco has a world class media team - and I will personally be sure they go through this in depth and really create the right solution"

PIN DROPs

(I am the youngest in the room - but its my RFP/design)

"Excuse me. This is the RFP review. Youre presenting your solution here today. So are you to tell me, that you have a "world class media team" and they have not informed your response to this RFP? That the entire point of this meeting" i said a few more things that made this guy die inside.

This guys balls shot into his throat.

Those are the types of people I think of when I think of levels.

(this was also the meeting where the CIO of Lucas Arts demanding a date for "when can you provide me power over fiber" ((his logic was the design was for both power and fiber to desktop - and he was trying to flex on showing 'how can we reduce infra wiring costs' -- it was a truly different world back then, mostly))

I used to think similar to you, as an engineer I didn't see value in sales. Then I tried to sell something myself and I realized it is not easy. You hear no all day long it starts to get to you.

The best sales people I've seen are relationship builders. They understand their clients needs (Even if outside the core market) and try to find a solution for their needs. This looks like wining/dining on the outside but it's important.

I would suggestion anyone that wants to build something to try and sell first. Then you'll realize why they get paid and can be very valuable.

(sorry that was from an old lens... I was pointing out my perception of LEVELS not sales. (thus I said "vital to all business")

Sue the fuck out of them. Hope this company crashes and burns.

That's absolutely batshit insane if true. How do they not understand that no one will use their site if they can't do it anonymously?!

First, you get to the point that management thinks enough people won't leave no matter what they do.

Second, you find some sketchy thing to do that will boost revenue and burn people's desire to use your product willingly into the ground.

Third, you leave on your golden parachute and the company acts surprised that this proved toxic and changes nothing.

Sadly this is becoming more common everywhere. Companies (and individual people) just don’t care about long term prospects. This includes SWE industry: if people switch companies every two years on average, why care about things like tech debt?

Disgusting. Thought about creating an account several times to see more salary information, but now I guess I never will.

I did that and they said I have to post information to see information, or something like that.

Account is untouched since then.

I made it a step further and shared some info and they were like "fuck you, we don't believe you".

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