Glassdoor added real names to supposedly anonymous profiles | Hacker News Reader

Glassdoor added real names to supposedly anonymous profiles

techradar.com

79 pointsmikece23 comments

It's a shame to see Glassdoor implode, because it actually serves an important social function as a public repository of mismanagement stories, as told by employees.

In a previous company, we outsourced some work to a content marketing firm, and what we got back was so abysmal that I felt compelled to investigate (as Pam Poovey says on Archer, "it's like sour milk. You just gotta take a whiff"). On Glassdoor we found answers:

> As many other reviews have pointed out, [agency] is currently in a death spiral. Morale is extremely low. Burnout is the norm. Employees have been leaving in droves. And customer churn is at an all-time high. The root cause for all of the above? An incompetent and inexperienced leadership team

> The only way to save this sinking ship is to fire the entire leadership team and start over

> an absolute textbook of mismanagement – in my time the company went from being in a position of imperious advantage through the COVID period to being in an absolute death spiral now. The company is awash in cynicism at every level. Shocking rates of pay compared to market averages. No-clue leadership team rinsing the company for massive salaries and reciting Monty Python bits during All-Hands despite catastrophic staff churn and client churn

RIP for a piece of the old internet where people spilled the beans like we used to on Xanga

> actually serves an important social function as a public repository of mismanagement stories, as told by employees

That's what made it great, and also painted a colossal target on it. There was no way something like that could survive being mainstream for long.

How so?

I think I know which company, because I read the Glass Door reviews after they imploded. We're in the same space.

What I've learned is that every word of content is a liability to mess something up. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation are table stakes. I'm talking about voice / messaging / positioning / product knowledge / industry knowledge / etc. Not only do you need to attract talented creatives, you need to enable them to care as much as they cared on day 1, in year 2.

Creating this kind of culture is really, really hard. Especially for business people managing creatives. We've managed to avoid the problems this company had, but it wasn't intuitive, and it required doing things most companies in this space don't see, can't do, or won't do.

Interesting to see the same trends happen with multiple companies recently. e.g. Mint, Twitter, Glassdoor, etc.

It must be that once a company gets beyond a certain size, management turnover reaches a critical point, board / share-holder pressure becomes too influential, or some other X factor, companies become unable to make sensible decisions and destroy themselves.

Reminds me of the famous quote from Anna Karenina.

    Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The Microsofts are the exception, not the rule.

Let me guess, you typed this on an OS that required your Microsoft login to access?

People bought plenty of gas from Enron. I'm not sure this is a relevant signal for company mismanagement.

What is your point, exactly?

Microsoft has been through its own deeply dysfunctional periods, it's somehow managed to survive on the Windows monopoly. They're the company that popularized stack ranking.

Sometimes their OS responsibilities could be a lead albatross, too. I would, very mildly, suggest that the cash money that kept MS afloat as a player all these years was always coming from enterprise, specifically their lock on office formats. Shows you that sometimes it really does help when you pay off the ISO TWG/TAG to make your format the ISO format. That scheme would shake out different today[1], because man, respect for ISO is not what it was in the 1990s. For goddamn good reason.

To quote a colleague in my industry, who's far more eloquent than I: "ISO can die of dicks"

[1] Which doesn't prevent a whole cottage industry that will promise to make Your Special Sauce an ISO-Approved Special Sauce. Selling shovels to miners, I guess, except replace "miners" with "greed-eyed motherfuckers trying to make imagemaps a data exchange format".

We are at a point where i share nothing personal online anymore. Not too old to be out of risk of it being used against me one day. Not that I do anything non-ordinary, but times and morals change fast.

Once 'ai' in say palantir style were / are let lose on the internet, it should be rather trivial to piece all those datappints to single indivudual, no need to monitor backbone traffic.

Ie this is not my first account here. Stopped using other forums, they keep slowly dying over time. FB feed has like 1 travel pic per year, not participating in the rest. Those few relevant in our lives get all the info via other ways, rest... who actually cares?

Participating in online envy/ego games is anyway sign of unhappy life, no way around this simple fact.

I remember when glassdoor first arrived on the scene. It was such a democratizing* experience. Salaries, reviews of management and the company, and good old fashioned venting.

The web was such a different experience that we never thought about how dangerous it could be to give out so much information. I would never trust anybody with this kind of information anymore, and I would especially not hand out my opinion of a company I still work for.

*back when this term was (naively) a good thing

It was drilled into me from a young age how dangerous the web was, then Facebook MySpace and Friendster happened and everyone kind of just put their entire life on the internet with no regard for their future selves.

My parents were more tech savvy than the majority so maybe that played into it.

I don’t think they did this intentionally, or at least explicitly, but because of corporate ineptitude. Someone’s job was to merge data sources, and the boneheaded implications of this got through all layers of management and design review without any grownups stopping them.

If that seems implausible, I invite you to work at a bank for a few months. It’s… informative.

Ok so now that this has been widely reported, we know that glassdoor are rolling it back promptly and publishing an apology and confirmation of this on their website, right? Right?

No, they have responded to the press and on the record that this is all wonderful, nothing to see here, they love their users' privacy and are kicking corpo ass in court to avoid disclosing names behind anonymous user feedback:

To a user:

"I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted back to just your initials or nullified/anonymized from the platform," Glassdoor's manager wrote, confirming that Monica's case was now considered closed. "I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. We treat all users equally when it comes to what is eligible to be placed on the profile and what is not, but we know that there are times our users, such as yourself, may not always agree with us."

To the press:

"When a user provides information, either during the sign-up process or by uploading a resume, that information will automatically cross-populate between all Glassdoor services, including our community app Fishbowl," Glassdoor's spokesperson said. "When using Glassdoor and Fishbowl, there is always the option to remain anonymous. Users can choose to be fully anonymous or reveal elements of their identity, like company name or job title, while using our community service."

And:

Glassdoor's spokesperson told Ars that "Glassdoor is committed to providing a platform for people to share their opinions and experiences about their jobs and companies, anonymously—without fear of intimidation or retaliation."

"We vigorously defend our users’ right to anonymous free speech and will appear in court to oppose and defeat requests for user information," Glassdoor's spokesperson said. "In fact, courts have almost always ruled in favor of Glassdoor and its users when we’ve fought to protect their anonymity. With the addition of Fishbowl’s community features to Glassdoor, our commitment to user privacy remains ironclad, and we will continue to defend our users from employers who seek to unmask their identity."

Quotes here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/glassdoor-adding...

As someone with a Gmail address that is my last name, I was signed up for Ashley Madison by a bot, and when I started getting the emails they wanted extortion money to delete it.

The leak of that information had impact on my life. As Glassdoor forced you to submit reviews or salary information to view reviews, a breach is a professional risk.

This type of claim simply doesn't matter with data breaches.

Hopefully people realize this.

Nearly every large company is completely dysfunctional due to being captured by the professional managerial class, a group of people who's only skill is to resist all change that brings value to shareholders, customers or employees while allocating resources to things that are harmful to shareholders, customers and employees.

Yeah, even at companies with a lot of red tape and procedure, in the end it's just a group of people and people make stupid oversights.

Doesn't mean there shouldn't be public shaming, but usually stuff like this isn't some nefarious plot.

Source: have worked at large institutions and seen stupid mistakes almost go through except for sheer blind luck

Seems like an opportunity to create a privacy-focused alternative.

You'd need a way to anonymously confirm that the reviewer worked at the company they're posting about. That seems like a good fit for a government service: "did the individual presenting this non-traceable ID work for company foo?"

Glassdoor have a GDPR Data Deletion Request Form here: https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest

Logged in yesterday to delete my account and they locked it to “read only mode” so I couldn’t. I had to contact support and prove my identity to unlock it which I’m obviously not gonna do

Duplicate:

Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39705788 - Mar 2024 (316 comments)

Glassdoor is now adding real names to user profiles without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39769166 - Mar 2024 (41 comments)

Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39761176 - Mar 2024 (24 comments)

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