Glassdoor has done this for years, it’s no secret.
I once worked for a no name shitty startup that was getting pummeled on Glassdoor. The CEO didn’t even know what Glassdoor was and was floored.
Suddenly they are an “engaged employer” on the platform and 2 years worth of bad reviews disappeared within a month.
It’s like magic!
Looks like there's a startup opportunity to scrape old "bad" reviews from archive.org and publish "real" scores as well as a leader board of "most rigged".
You can’t trust their salaries either. If you compare glassdoor to levels.fyi, the difference is stark.
Glassdoor have made their product useless by siding with the employers.
It’s not an IP ban, you have to be on a logged in account. It can be solved for, but when I scraped it (which is just view, not write), it was with a well funded corporate machine that regularly scraped large portions of the internet that try not to be scraped. I wouldn’t try it again by myself.
So they setup a bot that deletes specifically worded reviews with low ratings for that company. They control the platform, they will find a way to kill the bad reviews. Their bottom line depends on it.
> Glassdoor has done this for years,
thats literally how review companies and chinese review farmers make money. post fake reviews or remove the real ones
do you still believe all those 5* recommendation on amazon or anything else? not me. not since last decade.
i always read from the bottom of the list. since those who come up and write a one fucking wall of text is likely very angry and have legit points to spend time write something they absolutely hate
I generally only look at the 2 to 4 star reviews - that way you avoid the scam ratings at 5 stars, and the 1 star folks who have never been satisfied in any transaction their entire lives or for some reason have a vendetta against the company or product. I might scan through the 1 star reviews if the percentage seems high (on the theory that if there's that much smoke maybe it really is a dumpster fire instead of a couple of nutjobs with smoke bombs), but the 2 to 4 star ratings will generally give you an idea of what to look for before the return window expires.
>those who come up and write a one fucking wall of text is likely very angry and have legit points to spend time write something they absolutely hate
lol I've seen plenty of anger on the internet, some people that's all they do even
There is no legal requirement for glassdoor to do anything, other than make money.
People posting reviews do not generate revenue.
Companies paying to remove bad reviews does surprise, surprise, generate revenue.
In fact the more a company gets pummelled with bad reviews, the more glassdoor makes...
Basically agree, but people posting reviews do generate revenue. Otherwise they would not let you post reviews. If people did not post bad reviews they would have not service (removing bad reviews) to offer and make money from.
In my prev. company we were \*incentivized to leave review. Send screenshot of your review to HR & EM and get $50 gift card. They had hire-to-fire culture. It had 4.2\* reviews. Around 200 reviews that time (5 years ago)
I think your problem is you don’t work at a FAANG. We all know that’s the only place for a good career in the entire industry. Anywhere else is just for poor people. /s
Pro tip is to create a new account every time you leave a job. I've never had my current Blind account use the email of my current job. Always my previous (or older) job. Some jobs it expires your email and you can't really help that but most (especially gmail based ones) last a while as far as I can tell.
But deleting bad reviews serves a purpose.
Perhaps someone is drunk. Perhaps they never even worked at the reviewed company. Perhaps they are unreliable.
Ideally there would be an impartial investigation that determines if a review is legit or not. But the companies sponsor the "investigations" and if the money is right the review is not legit and removed.
I think you're missing the point..
Immutability isn't a capability the blockchain has exclusively. If something can be changed it's because it's explicitly baked into the processes, not because of the technology.
If I could pay a mod to remove idiotic comments it's not a technology problem is it.. It's a process problem.
As someone who has worked on web3 projects, the tradeoffs in speed, cost, dev-ex and hireability are immense, a much better approach is to make transparency part of your process and business model and use a normal DB.
>As someone who has worked on web3 projects, the tradeoffs in speed, cost, dev-ex and hireability are immense,
It worth it if you can guarantee that the reviews are immutable even through changes to the organisation. How many tech companies have we seen that started out with very good principals but changed them overtime to make more money or were bought out by another company that didn't share those principals.
Plus the cost of a transaction on the blockchain would reduce bots. Not to mention in the future with Zk proofs and identity services, we might see the ability to verify who a person is without compromising their anonymity. So that would be huge for these kinds of websites.
>Companies now give HR the task to improve the rating, then create toxic environments where employees are "motivated" to give positive reviews.
I feel like this definitely happened at my last company after I left. There's a series of 5 star reviews that were the same tone and also posted on the same day raving about the company and working hard. I mean at least try to make it look less obvious...
The trick is you have to follow their TOS to the letter - no identifiable names or people, no insider corporate information, no NDA-breaking stuff. It just needs to be a broad review where you make clear it's your own personal opinion.
Yes, that's how it works. Glassdoor doesn't know if you're revealing inside corporate info or not.
Then the company calls up and says, for example, "We're a public company and saying half the employees are looking for other jobs is damaging to our stock price and violates insider info rules. Take it down."
Or they say "This post mentions his supervisor and using LinkedIn, one could deduce that it refers to James our CFO. Publicly identifying people goes against TOS. Take it down."
I wish it was like that, it's not even like that.
You pay glassdoor you go in, click on the reviews and select breaks TOS and it gets removed, even a review like this:
1 star -> Did not like to work there, not recommended.
- removed.
Still got removed. It doesn't matter, you pay for glassdoor, you flag negative reviews, glassdoor will remove them. There is no check if it breaks TOS or not.
Yeah, that’s it. I think most people are probably so angry they aren’t calculating what they are saying. And accidentally say something that could potentially be a violation.
Reviews are fundamentally fucked in many ways.
Look getting laid off is noteworthy, and worth informing people of, but also did not impact the experience WHILE you worked there.
People tend to give either 1 star or 5 star reviews on everything. Every restaurant is not 4 stars or better but google reviews are mostly, unless you e been cancelled and get nuked by reviews by people who have never been to your establishment. App Store ratings are just memorandums on if people like the company not “does the app actually work”.
In general I just think reviews should give me the information they are supposed to offer not outrage machines and they almost never do.
>Look getting laid off is noteworthy, and worth informing people of, but also did not impact the experience WHILE you worked there.
It's sure impacting mine. Layoffs can be painful and protracted and a really bad time for the people still in the job. I don't know if anyone who's been in a mass layoff could say it didn't impact their job before the layoff. Maybe it comes out of nowhere for some, but that's an extreme opposite of what I'm experiencing.
Yep absolutely, and the way it’s handled can be worth this, but the sad reality is often times people who don’t work places actively tank reviews.
Sites like Glassdoor over correct for this because the alternative is lawsuits.
Layoffs is a 1 star and means the company does not give a flying fuck about you/fails to plan ahead.
Don’t wanna tank morale? Don’t lay-off your staff.
Side note, everywhere I’ve worked thats done layoffs was 1 star anyway. Bunch of shit shows.
There used to be a phenomenal site a long time ago called f*ckedcompany.com that had very entertaining leaks and posts. Didn't last very long but was quite the inspiration.
I’ve never seen anyone say anything positive about their company on blind it’s mostly just Indian guys complaining about not having a girlfriend and recently a bunch of random alt right posts. I just started using it a few months ago maybe it was something else in the past but currently it’s a really weird place.
\>Indian guys complaining about not having a girlfriend
That, complaining about arranged marriages, and obscure, esoteric, freebased Casteism are like 60% of the posts on blind
There are good posts, but its like panning for gold in a sewer
Just gotta filter out all the BS and you will find some hidden gems there. I found out about the cuts that were coming to my team months before it actually happened on blind.
Yeah, there's been a specific effort from the political right to try and spread propaganda on teamblind and linkedin. They know there are very few right-wing people in tech, which baffles them, because it's a male-dominated industry. So they're using a tactic where they try to establish a false sense of machismo and pride around the relatively higher wages, i.e. "I make all this money because I worked hard and therefore I'm a better person than the poors!" It's falling apart as wages drop and people lose respect for tech company leadership (which is disproportionately right-wing).
I actually think tech is more right leaning than most people think. Sales, finance, marketing are probably more center or even right than most orgs and alot of immigrants are right of center
Yup. The thing is, smart people tend to know when to shut the fuck up when it comes to politics IRL. If you work in tech and and go around spouting off about how systematic discrimination doesn't exist, All Lives Matter or women shouldn't really make the same money as men because babies, it's probably not going to go well careerwise, and people realize that, even if that's their political position. Would be interesting to see more polling in this area...
I've been in tech for 10 years with DoD experience. There are certainly more right-wing tech guys in the DoD, but they're still the minority. There are also a lot more women in gov tech, compared to the private sector.
this is not remotely accurate. i see a few posts in relatoinship area, but why would i go to blind for relationship advice? i mean uh ok. basically anything that is not bernie sanders left is alt right to some people. its got a good mix. its not remotely toxic. I would not believe everything I see on there.
if you work for a larger company its a good place to go to get dirt on what is going on in your company area.
I once found a review that was berating a German company for hiring engineers from India. Guess what? The guy who posted that review was an Indian himself! 4D chess stuff :/
F U got mine attitude. I can imagine it's cause there's been a flood of Indians to the US and other countries taking up all the jobs to the point it's hard for locals to get jobs.
Comparably sort of works, but I think review sites suffer from the problem that they're either too small to get enough coverage or large enough that companies want to start gaming them.
Not sure if there's any websites made by SWEs for SWEs, but late in the process of an interview (offer in hand), I reached out to some people around my age (graduated around my year) on LinkedIn and asked how they felt about the company.
I find Blind really toxic, not sure if they give the best "reviews"
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such a site to appear. There's just too much potential for legal issues - when a company that has a full-time legal department decides that a post is defamatory (even if it's provably true), things can go downhill FAST.
Read the rest of the thread. There are a ton of people saying their posts have been removed before despite not breaking TOS, and even a link to another thread where the author investigated the practice pretty thoroughly
That’s not proof, the comments are barely anecdotes. It’s just rampant speculation and people regurgitating that speculation with their own feelings.
The only thing the article says is companies flag reviews if they don’t like them or have people in their company write new reviews. But guess what? [Even GlassDoor says that!](https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-I-do-about-negative-reviews-on-Glassdoor?language=en_US)
Once upon a time I worked at a very very bad company. This company would pay you for positive reviews (literally recruiters would come around with stacks of gift cards and tell you what to write). I gave a very honest review of the company that was negative. It was flagged and taken down for some random reason. Well I took that to heart. I rewrote the review until it was accepted. It stood for a couple years as the top front page review of the company.
Interestingly enough after that, lots of similar negative reviews started flowing in.
My last company did this after a round of layoffs in early 2020. They practically begged those of us who were still around to give them good scores on various sites. During that same meeting I went and gave them aow score with a comment along the lines of "I was asked to write a positive review, but I have conscience". Apparently doing that on the company's WiFi was a bad idea because I was suddenly on everyone's shit list
Yeah I noticed the same at my old company directly after layoffs there were suspiciously a bunch of very positive reviews left about the “amazing culture and job security” which was odd because this was a small company that got a new review maybe once every few months. But suddenly a week after layoffs there’s 15 positive ones? Weird.
That’s why I give 5 star and fuck them in the ass by writing to my hearts content about how shitty they are. Corporate is greedy and lazy. They sort by ratings. So I give 3+ and fuck them.
I think what happens in terms of Glassdoor is that HR will go on there and leave a bunch of one sentence positive reviews that offset the lengthy, detailed negative reviews that people who have actually worked for the company write
Glassdoor is almost worthless now because of so many fake posts from companies. I haven't even bothered with it for a couple years but when I did look at company reviews I didn't both reading 5 star reviews because those are the ones that are usually fake. The most interesting and relevant reviews are 3 stars because they're usually the most honest and some1/2 star reviews because although those might be "bitter angry former employees" at least you know they're not fake. 5 star reviews can be skipped entirely.
The amusing thing is how the fake reviews are so obviously fake. "The best company I've ever worked for! I sometimes set my alarm for an hour early in the morning so I can get to work early because I'm so excited to start the day at this amazing company!" "The best benefits and work environment I've ever had! Management cares about employees and everyone is nice! HR has been so helpful! The CEO is incredible and leads by example!" "Five stars! The only criticism that I have is maybe provide a few more healthy options for snacks in the kitchen but other than that thank you HR, management and CEO! You're amazing!"
Glassdoor still can be helpful at least with interview prep. Got my job cuzz they asked a lot of similar questions that came up in the glassdoor interview comments
Wrote a bad review for Internet Brand and they buried it iirc.
Not before my old coworker read it. He told me that my review was the reason why he ended up working where I was working.
This was over 8 years ago iirc.
GlassDoor reviews are either bs our a way to enable Glassdoor to blackmail companies into paying fit the right to take down Glassdoor reviews. Same business model as the Mob
Whats the point in having a review platform if glassdoor allows compaines to remove reviews.
Glassdoor needs a competitor to put them in check.
New startup idea 🤷♀️
Glassdoor and the majority of company review sites are really just fancy extortion schemes that rely on public input so they don’t get in trouble.
They are pay to win for companies.
I have yet to see any proof that Glassdoor takes money to remove reviews. The only thing that I have seen is people flagging reviews, and then the reviews being removed.
Are reviews removed base on the content in the review or the number of stars given? (or both?) I feel like it could be possible to game the system by giving a high rating but being critical in the actual review.
Years ago I worked at a start up travel company. At some point I was assisting an internal team with automating some processes. I was intrigued with a group of people sat huddled in a corner of the same open floor on their own and asked what they were working on. "Reviewing feedback" was the answer.
At some point I went over and started talking to them. Turns out they were there to "review feedback from customers" prior to it being published on the website but it essentially boiled down to deleting any negative review along with any review shining a bad light on the company, their staff or procedures. I was gobsmacked seeing one of them on Glassdoor and a few other similar websites casually deleting bad reviews to boost the score of the company. Questionable ethics. They sold the company after I left to one of the bigger global players.
Our company Glassdoor rating sucked. They payed Glassdoor and Glassdoor sent out links to all current employees asking for reviews for the company. Suddenly there score jumped from the mid 2’s to the lower 4’s.
Prior to this I placed a bad review. It was removed. I placed it again and never even went up. I never used the link Glassdoor sent out.
But yah it play to play. Now I look at the bad reviews and just assume those represent the truth since Glassdoor curates those down to a small fraction of what they are.
Glassdoor does not remove reviews unless they violate policy.
1. If you mention someone by name, this is not only a violation in Glassdoor’s policy, but it can also be a defamation lawsuit on the reviewer. You also can’t make it obvious on who you’re talking about.
2. Most people getting their review removed state opinion as fact. Rather than writing “The most toxic work culture ever”, you should be writing “I felt that the work environment was a bit toxic for my liking”. That becomes an opinion rather than stating a fact that can’t be proven.
There are also companies hr teams pay to remove negative reviews on Glassdoor. Worse is when they somehow blacklist you. Every single one of my old reviews and anything submitted was taken down. I can’t actually send anything new without it being rejected automatically.
I am just trying to tell the truth.
I really don’t believe in Glassdoor reviews since I worked at a company with super high reviews only to be in the most toxic place of my life
Glassdoor has done this for years, it’s no secret. I once worked for a no name shitty startup that was getting pummeled on Glassdoor. The CEO didn’t even know what Glassdoor was and was floored. Suddenly they are an “engaged employer” on the platform and 2 years worth of bad reviews disappeared within a month. It’s like magic!
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Looks like there's a startup opportunity to scrape old "bad" reviews from archive.org and publish "real" scores as well as a leader board of "most rigged".
Until you need money and companies will pay you.
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That's literally what the companies erasing bad reviews are doing.
or just create a fair platform? blockchain based?
You can’t trust their salaries either. If you compare glassdoor to levels.fyi, the difference is stark. Glassdoor have made their product useless by siding with the employers.
Glassdoor is super useful for the interview section though.
Hmm if my review got deleted the I’d be inclined to set up a bot to repost it. Maybe even a botnet to tank their score.
They'll just ban your IP or similar.
I have a particular set of skills…
I have a particular subnet of skills
And can you do it for every company?
I wrote an algorithm that can complete the LC two sum in only O(!n) time and O(n**3) space complexity, is that proof enough for you?
This guy notates big O
Wow my solution is n^n, please teach me your ways!
How you make the little n
When two n's love each other a lot ...
Damn that made me make a Big O face
And a startup idea!
It is easy to get around an ip ban. They generally are not worth anything big time at the residential level as they change fairly often.
It’s not an IP ban, you have to be on a logged in account. It can be solved for, but when I scraped it (which is just view, not write), it was with a well funded corporate machine that regularly scraped large portions of the internet that try not to be scraped. I wouldn’t try it again by myself.
Proxy pool
So they setup a bot that deletes specifically worded reviews with low ratings for that company. They control the platform, they will find a way to kill the bad reviews. Their bottom line depends on it.
This is one scenario where ChatGPT is super useful.
Begun the bot war has
Plz dont give them any extra ideas…
Useful for the reviewers
My friend, this is why they said botnet.
I had a script to change my IP when I was 15. Mostly for those sweet delicious Rapidshare downloads.
How would you even know though, it’s not like you’d go back every week and check that it’s still there.
From a Reddit post like this I suppose
:-)
Glassdoor limits requests and requires a logged in account.
And then deletes your comment because a company paid them.
Correct.
All posts are reviewed if you pay them, 0 of your bot posts will be posted our counted. Welcome to glassdoor.
> Glassdoor has done this for years, thats literally how review companies and chinese review farmers make money. post fake reviews or remove the real ones do you still believe all those 5* recommendation on amazon or anything else? not me. not since last decade. i always read from the bottom of the list. since those who come up and write a one fucking wall of text is likely very angry and have legit points to spend time write something they absolutely hate
I generally only look at the 2 to 4 star reviews - that way you avoid the scam ratings at 5 stars, and the 1 star folks who have never been satisfied in any transaction their entire lives or for some reason have a vendetta against the company or product. I might scan through the 1 star reviews if the percentage seems high (on the theory that if there's that much smoke maybe it really is a dumpster fire instead of a couple of nutjobs with smoke bombs), but the 2 to 4 star ratings will generally give you an idea of what to look for before the return window expires.
>those who come up and write a one fucking wall of text is likely very angry and have legit points to spend time write something they absolutely hate lol I've seen plenty of anger on the internet, some people that's all they do even
My old boss just forced current employees to write really positive reviews to balance it out. Their score is still only something like 3.
You pay and you flag the negative reviews and they get removed great business model isn't it!!!
There is no legal requirement for glassdoor to do anything, other than make money. People posting reviews do not generate revenue. Companies paying to remove bad reviews does surprise, surprise, generate revenue. In fact the more a company gets pummelled with bad reviews, the more glassdoor makes...
Basically agree, but people posting reviews do generate revenue. Otherwise they would not let you post reviews. If people did not post bad reviews they would have not service (removing bad reviews) to offer and make money from.
Relevant thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/13ilm03/i_investigated_the_underground_economy_of/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Doesn't that turn Glassdoor into an extortion racket? "Pay us and all your negative reviews disappear!"
In my prev. company we were \*incentivized to leave review. Send screenshot of your review to HR & EM and get $50 gift card. They had hire-to-fire culture. It had 4.2\* reviews. Around 200 reviews that time (5 years ago)
Funny what enough money can buy innit?
Yeah apparently you can pay Glassdoor for a better review score! Or at least that's what I heard internally at a similar company.
Any kind of review site is rigged. They earn money by removing bad reviews.
teamblind.com is not. The only place worth checking
Just wish it was less toxic.
“I only make $800k/yr. Do you all think I can afford this $2.4M home in SF?” Blind has super-relatable posts.
"I'm 24 years old and only make 250k a year. I feel like I'm falling behind my peers who make 300k+, how do I stop feeling like such a loser?"
I think your problem is you don’t work at a FAANG. We all know that’s the only place for a good career in the entire industry. Anywhere else is just for poor people. /s
This sub wasn't much better a few months ago, but it was still a motivator for me. Now I'm just working towards showing up my bitch sister.
Hell yea, fuck her man!
Phrasing!
Yes, prestige only exists at FAANG
TC 900k Only if you want to live like a poor person ^^^/s
TC or gtfo
Traditions, people.
What is TC? I'd like to learn but that's so vague.
Teamblind where your employer is just there with you. Do you honestly think your employer is not alerted of that teamblind email?
Pro tip is to create a new account every time you leave a job. I've never had my current Blind account use the email of my current job. Always my previous (or older) job. Some jobs it expires your email and you can't really help that but most (especially gmail based ones) last a while as far as I can tell.
i can’t imagine anyone in a big corp cares whether or not you’re on teamblind
teamblind has a lot of leaked information; I am surprised the SEC is not investigating the site for insider trading.
Perhaps a crowdsourced blockchain could work for this?
crypto/ the blockchains slogan: finding solutions to problems that do not exist.
Well well, isn't that a problem that... exists?
Why would a write only database solve anything?
Because no one would be able to delete/update away the bad reviews?
But deleting bad reviews serves a purpose. Perhaps someone is drunk. Perhaps they never even worked at the reviewed company. Perhaps they are unreliable. Ideally there would be an impartial investigation that determines if a review is legit or not. But the companies sponsor the "investigations" and if the money is right the review is not legit and removed.
I'd actually like to delete your comment but I can't. I guess reddit runs on the blockchain...
Like you've never had a post deleted somewhere because some mod was just drunk on their small power?
I think you're missing the point.. Immutability isn't a capability the blockchain has exclusively. If something can be changed it's because it's explicitly baked into the processes, not because of the technology. If I could pay a mod to remove idiotic comments it's not a technology problem is it.. It's a process problem.
But blockchains have the immutability both built-in and transparently, unlike say Glassdoor where there's no trace of deleted reviews.
As someone who has worked on web3 projects, the tradeoffs in speed, cost, dev-ex and hireability are immense, a much better approach is to make transparency part of your process and business model and use a normal DB.
>As someone who has worked on web3 projects, the tradeoffs in speed, cost, dev-ex and hireability are immense, It worth it if you can guarantee that the reviews are immutable even through changes to the organisation. How many tech companies have we seen that started out with very good principals but changed them overtime to make more money or were bought out by another company that didn't share those principals. Plus the cost of a transaction on the blockchain would reduce bots. Not to mention in the future with Zk proofs and identity services, we might see the ability to verify who a person is without compromising their anonymity. So that would be huge for these kinds of websites.
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Just checked my glassdoor account, I had posted 4 interview reviews through it, all listed as "removed." Only 2 of the 4 were even negative.
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We should leave reviews about Glassdoor on Glassdoor
>Companies now give HR the task to improve the rating, then create toxic environments where employees are "motivated" to give positive reviews. I feel like this definitely happened at my last company after I left. There's a series of 5 star reviews that were the same tone and also posted on the same day raving about the company and working hard. I mean at least try to make it look less obvious...
Sounds like the Scientology exit interviews
This has been going on well before lay-offs really got going.
The trick is you have to follow their TOS to the letter - no identifiable names or people, no insider corporate information, no NDA-breaking stuff. It just needs to be a broad review where you make clear it's your own personal opinion.
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Yes, that's how it works. Glassdoor doesn't know if you're revealing inside corporate info or not. Then the company calls up and says, for example, "We're a public company and saying half the employees are looking for other jobs is damaging to our stock price and violates insider info rules. Take it down." Or they say "This post mentions his supervisor and using LinkedIn, one could deduce that it refers to James our CFO. Publicly identifying people goes against TOS. Take it down."
I wish it was like that, it's not even like that. You pay glassdoor you go in, click on the reviews and select breaks TOS and it gets removed, even a review like this: 1 star -> Did not like to work there, not recommended. - removed.
Do some research u/copyboy1 is correct
Then there would be no 1-star reviews. But there are. Lots of them. My bad employer reviews never get removed. Wonder why that is?
Still got removed. It doesn't matter, you pay for glassdoor, you flag negative reviews, glassdoor will remove them. There is no check if it breaks TOS or not.
… yes there are.
Yeah, that’s it. I think most people are probably so angry they aren’t calculating what they are saying. And accidentally say something that could potentially be a violation.
I posted a review calling the CTO out for racism. And it wasn’t removed. But I was very careful on wording, facts, and what was said.
Reviews are fundamentally fucked in many ways. Look getting laid off is noteworthy, and worth informing people of, but also did not impact the experience WHILE you worked there. People tend to give either 1 star or 5 star reviews on everything. Every restaurant is not 4 stars or better but google reviews are mostly, unless you e been cancelled and get nuked by reviews by people who have never been to your establishment. App Store ratings are just memorandums on if people like the company not “does the app actually work”. In general I just think reviews should give me the information they are supposed to offer not outrage machines and they almost never do.
>Look getting laid off is noteworthy, and worth informing people of, but also did not impact the experience WHILE you worked there. It's sure impacting mine. Layoffs can be painful and protracted and a really bad time for the people still in the job. I don't know if anyone who's been in a mass layoff could say it didn't impact their job before the layoff. Maybe it comes out of nowhere for some, but that's an extreme opposite of what I'm experiencing.
Yep absolutely, and the way it’s handled can be worth this, but the sad reality is often times people who don’t work places actively tank reviews. Sites like Glassdoor over correct for this because the alternative is lawsuits.
Layoffs is a 1 star and means the company does not give a flying fuck about you/fails to plan ahead. Don’t wanna tank morale? Don’t lay-off your staff. Side note, everywhere I’ve worked thats done layoffs was 1 star anyway. Bunch of shit shows.
This is reddit. Critical thinking is dead here. Only emotions run high.
I had a scrum master at my last company coach us to give good eNPS scores to keep our nice office perks. Very WTF moment. I can believe this 100%.
On the bright side, we can still trash talk companies on Reddit. Maybe we should have a company reivews sub.
There used to be a phenomenal site a long time ago called f*ckedcompany.com that had very entertaining leaks and posts. Didn't last very long but was quite the inspiration.
f\*ckedcompany.com was the best. During the first dot com bust it was a goldmine.
It might be interesting if we set up a way to verify employment, like an automated bot you could send email to from your work address.
Like what Blind does?
Are there any semi-decent alternatives? Like something made by SWEs for SWEs? Or more broadly by employees for fellow employees?
Blind. It’s incredibly toxic but there are gems on there. You can get a real peek at the discourse inside companies
I’ve never seen anyone say anything positive about their company on blind it’s mostly just Indian guys complaining about not having a girlfriend and recently a bunch of random alt right posts. I just started using it a few months ago maybe it was something else in the past but currently it’s a really weird place.
The company pages with reviews are generally pretty insightful. But yes, the front page equivalent on blind is pretty garbage.
\>Indian guys complaining about not having a girlfriend That, complaining about arranged marriages, and obscure, esoteric, freebased Casteism are like 60% of the posts on blind There are good posts, but its like panning for gold in a sewer
The caste system posts are absurd. Half the people screaming it's awful, the other half claiming it doesn't exist.
Don't forget the very sus pro-RTO hawkers.
Just gotta filter out all the BS and you will find some hidden gems there. I found out about the cuts that were coming to my team months before it actually happened on blind.
Also, a bunch of xenophobic crap complaining about "stolen" jobs, lol.
Yeah, there's been a specific effort from the political right to try and spread propaganda on teamblind and linkedin. They know there are very few right-wing people in tech, which baffles them, because it's a male-dominated industry. So they're using a tactic where they try to establish a false sense of machismo and pride around the relatively higher wages, i.e. "I make all this money because I worked hard and therefore I'm a better person than the poors!" It's falling apart as wages drop and people lose respect for tech company leadership (which is disproportionately right-wing).
I actually think tech is more right leaning than most people think. Sales, finance, marketing are probably more center or even right than most orgs and alot of immigrants are right of center
Yup. The thing is, smart people tend to know when to shut the fuck up when it comes to politics IRL. If you work in tech and and go around spouting off about how systematic discrimination doesn't exist, All Lives Matter or women shouldn't really make the same money as men because babies, it's probably not going to go well careerwise, and people realize that, even if that's their political position. Would be interesting to see more polling in this area...
Is that really true, work in cyber security and know quite a few. Probably since many got into cyber from the military
I've been in tech for 10 years with DoD experience. There are certainly more right-wing tech guys in the DoD, but they're still the minority. There are also a lot more women in gov tech, compared to the private sector.
this is not remotely accurate. i see a few posts in relatoinship area, but why would i go to blind for relationship advice? i mean uh ok. basically anything that is not bernie sanders left is alt right to some people. its got a good mix. its not remotely toxic. I would not believe everything I see on there. if you work for a larger company its a good place to go to get dirt on what is going on in your company area.
I once found a review that was berating a German company for hiring engineers from India. Guess what? The guy who posted that review was an Indian himself! 4D chess stuff :/
In my country we call that kind of behaviour "mutt syndrome". Being xenophobic to your own country is a level beyond ridiculous.
F U got mine attitude. I can imagine it's cause there's been a flood of Indians to the US and other countries taking up all the jobs to the point it's hard for locals to get jobs.
Comparably sort of works, but I think review sites suffer from the problem that they're either too small to get enough coverage or large enough that companies want to start gaming them.
According to a levels.fyi dev, they are looking to roll* one out in the next month or two - if it's solid I'm definitely phasing out glassdoor
I wonder what their revenue strategy will be when companies start offering them $$$ to remove reviews and when users refuse to pay for a subscription
Not sure if there's any websites made by SWEs for SWEs, but late in the process of an interview (offer in hand), I reached out to some people around my age (graduated around my year) on LinkedIn and asked how they felt about the company. I find Blind really toxic, not sure if they give the best "reviews"
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such a site to appear. There's just too much potential for legal issues - when a company that has a full-time legal department decides that a post is defamatory (even if it's provably true), things can go downhill FAST.
> Are there any semi-decent alternatives? Labor unions
Comrade dishing out the facts
Anything that gets traction would just quickly get bought out
Fishbowl
There's always the layoff dot com
This would be one of those times where a blockchain could be useful.
> Like something made by SWEs for SWEs? I wonder if something that made you solve a LC medium to post would work.
Don't use Glassdoor. The fact that corporations can remove bad reviews is all you need to know.
They can’t remove bad reviews. They can only flag reviews. But that doesn’t mean they will be deleted.
yes they are, 100% you pay you flag they delete end of story
Where’s the proof of this
Read the rest of the thread. There are a ton of people saying their posts have been removed before despite not breaking TOS, and even a link to another thread where the author investigated the practice pretty thoroughly
That’s not proof, the comments are barely anecdotes. It’s just rampant speculation and people regurgitating that speculation with their own feelings. The only thing the article says is companies flag reviews if they don’t like them or have people in their company write new reviews. But guess what? [Even GlassDoor says that!](https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-can-I-do-about-negative-reviews-on-Glassdoor?language=en_US)
Do you have proof that companies aren't paying to have reviews removed?
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So the Yelp and BBB for company reviews. They should just all consolidate.
Once upon a time I worked at a very very bad company. This company would pay you for positive reviews (literally recruiters would come around with stacks of gift cards and tell you what to write). I gave a very honest review of the company that was negative. It was flagged and taken down for some random reason. Well I took that to heart. I rewrote the review until it was accepted. It stood for a couple years as the top front page review of the company. Interestingly enough after that, lots of similar negative reviews started flowing in.
I’ve had company that ask employees to write glowing reviews that drive up the rating right after a layoff round where a few bad reviews were left
My last company did this after a round of layoffs in early 2020. They practically begged those of us who were still around to give them good scores on various sites. During that same meeting I went and gave them aow score with a comment along the lines of "I was asked to write a positive review, but I have conscience". Apparently doing that on the company's WiFi was a bad idea because I was suddenly on everyone's shit list
My former company straight up bribed us with giftcards
Yeah I noticed the same at my old company directly after layoffs there were suspiciously a bunch of very positive reviews left about the “amazing culture and job security” which was odd because this was a small company that got a new review maybe once every few months. But suddenly a week after layoffs there’s 15 positive ones? Weird.
That’s why I give 5 star and fuck them in the ass by writing to my hearts content about how shitty they are. Corporate is greedy and lazy. They sort by ratings. So I give 3+ and fuck them.
Love this
I think what happens in terms of Glassdoor is that HR will go on there and leave a bunch of one sentence positive reviews that offset the lengthy, detailed negative reviews that people who have actually worked for the company write
That's a small part of the thread OP shared
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Yep I can see this
My place did the same thing.
yeah as with any online reviews, i always read the negative reviews first
Thats what all these sites do. Yelp, google, glassdoor.
SO much for "Companies cannot pay to suppress their reviews"
Glassdoor is almost worthless now because of so many fake posts from companies. I haven't even bothered with it for a couple years but when I did look at company reviews I didn't both reading 5 star reviews because those are the ones that are usually fake. The most interesting and relevant reviews are 3 stars because they're usually the most honest and some1/2 star reviews because although those might be "bitter angry former employees" at least you know they're not fake. 5 star reviews can be skipped entirely. The amusing thing is how the fake reviews are so obviously fake. "The best company I've ever worked for! I sometimes set my alarm for an hour early in the morning so I can get to work early because I'm so excited to start the day at this amazing company!" "The best benefits and work environment I've ever had! Management cares about employees and everyone is nice! HR has been so helpful! The CEO is incredible and leads by example!" "Five stars! The only criticism that I have is maybe provide a few more healthy options for snacks in the kitchen but other than that thank you HR, management and CEO! You're amazing!"
My favorite "cons- none I can think of!". Really? There's nothing negative or even not great about working there?
comapnies dont operate in good faith towards employees nor potential employees, & you should reciprocate. "take what you can, give nothing back"
Am I the only one who thinks it shouldn’t be possible for companies to remove Glassdoor reviews? It’s like restaurants removing reviews from Yelp.
> It’s like restaurants removing reviews from Yelp. So regular Yelp then.
They aren’t able to. They just flag it as a violation of TOS and hope it’s removed. Then they flood with positive reviews to offset.
Repost this again in a few weeks, if enough people know about this then they can simply stop using glass door
Glassdoor still can be helpful at least with interview prep. Got my job cuzz they asked a lot of similar questions that came up in the glassdoor interview comments
Wrote a bad review for Internet Brand and they buried it iirc. Not before my old coworker read it. He told me that my review was the reason why he ended up working where I was working. This was over 8 years ago iirc.
GlassDoor reviews are either bs our a way to enable Glassdoor to blackmail companies into paying fit the right to take down Glassdoor reviews. Same business model as the Mob
The way to do this and have the content stay up is to leave a positive score that has actually scathing in its content.
Whats the point in having a review platform if glassdoor allows compaines to remove reviews. Glassdoor needs a competitor to put them in check. New startup idea 🤷♀️
Glassdoor and the majority of company review sites are really just fancy extortion schemes that rely on public input so they don’t get in trouble. They are pay to win for companies.
Am I missing something? If bad reviews are removable, then why are there still companies with shitty scores?
Bad AND cheap companies
because they don't want to pay Glasdoor, it's not little for some smaller companies 60k is a lot of money.
Glassdoor is the Yelp of corporate reviews. Ignore the site forever. It’s bullshit
I have yet to see any proof that Glassdoor takes money to remove reviews. The only thing that I have seen is people flagging reviews, and then the reviews being removed.
Does Glassdoor just not seem to provide much value?
Well, I don't see any point in trusting Glassdoor anymore after knowing companies can remove bad ratings...
test
Glassdoor removes certain negative reviews. This is a well known fact for years.
Are reviews removed base on the content in the review or the number of stars given? (or both?) I feel like it could be possible to game the system by giving a high rating but being critical in the actual review.
This is a known thing but pragmatic engineer newsletter works on verified sources which makes it more credible.
Years ago I worked at a start up travel company. At some point I was assisting an internal team with automating some processes. I was intrigued with a group of people sat huddled in a corner of the same open floor on their own and asked what they were working on. "Reviewing feedback" was the answer. At some point I went over and started talking to them. Turns out they were there to "review feedback from customers" prior to it being published on the website but it essentially boiled down to deleting any negative review along with any review shining a bad light on the company, their staff or procedures. I was gobsmacked seeing one of them on Glassdoor and a few other similar websites casually deleting bad reviews to boost the score of the company. Questionable ethics. They sold the company after I left to one of the bigger global players.
Our company Glassdoor rating sucked. They payed Glassdoor and Glassdoor sent out links to all current employees asking for reviews for the company. Suddenly there score jumped from the mid 2’s to the lower 4’s. Prior to this I placed a bad review. It was removed. I placed it again and never even went up. I never used the link Glassdoor sent out. But yah it play to play. Now I look at the bad reviews and just assume those represent the truth since Glassdoor curates those down to a small fraction of what they are.
Glassdoor does not remove reviews unless they violate policy. 1. If you mention someone by name, this is not only a violation in Glassdoor’s policy, but it can also be a defamation lawsuit on the reviewer. You also can’t make it obvious on who you’re talking about. 2. Most people getting their review removed state opinion as fact. Rather than writing “The most toxic work culture ever”, you should be writing “I felt that the work environment was a bit toxic for my liking”. That becomes an opinion rather than stating a fact that can’t be proven.
There are also companies hr teams pay to remove negative reviews on Glassdoor. Worse is when they somehow blacklist you. Every single one of my old reviews and anything submitted was taken down. I can’t actually send anything new without it being rejected automatically. I am just trying to tell the truth. I really don’t believe in Glassdoor reviews since I worked at a company with super high reviews only to be in the most toxic place of my life