Yes, when they're glowing. Fake reviews are a great indicator to me and I love how transparent they are.
Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
101–110 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#102When I've looked at the reviews of places I've worked, I've found them to be reasonable, but often painting an incomplete picture. Most of them seem to be from people who never really understood the work or the culture of the place, and therefore didn't perform well.
Also, it will bias towards bad reviews. I've never posted a review of a place I loved working at (and therefore never posted a review). I guess I should, but it would probably just be assumed to be astroturfing.
One other issue is when there are multiple classes of workers. For example Netflix has a lot of negative reviews from the folks who work in the DVD warehouses. But their work environment has nothing to do with the software engineering part of the company, which is the majority of the company, so it skews negative. Amazon has a similar problem, where a lot of the reviews come from the warehouse workers, who, for better or worse, get treated differently.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's also a red flag. Do I really want to essentially play roulette with hoping I find the one good team, or don't land on the one bad team?
It's a pretty multidisciplinary company. What I mean is if you're interested in life as a software engineer it's going to be a lot different than life for a bench biologist. There's no roulette involved, but it's not always obvious which is which from the reviews.
Maybe for your company, but like, for Amazon, when all the bad stuff really came out, one thing that people always said was, "It depends on what team you're on." Do I really want to take the chance that I might end up on one of the crappy teams?
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#104Glassdoor reviews are useful only if you manually read them individually and critically judge each one for what it's worth.
A lot of negative reviews for my current employer are incredibly spot-on.
I had a very negative experience with my former employer, which currently has 11 reviews with a 4.9 star average, which led them to be rated the #10 best employer in a very large tech market.
They were constantly explicitly threatened to fire people. Ran off 2 out of their 3 founders, some of them very abruptly, jeopardizing the staff's pay and benefits (and this was just a couple of months before winning that "best in town" award). They either cynically produced horrible quality code for their clients, or farmed you out as a body shop to local software teams that couldn't attract their own talent directly, and for good reason.
Exactly 1 year later I now recognize exactly 1/3 of the bio/profiles listed on their website, the other 2/3 being totally unrecognized and new.
When I left the place I had a negative sick time balance, which they offered to write off, and also kept my health care running for an extra month after the month that I departed. And during the same conversation they offered that "we should not talk bad about each other," and of course they had the one really nice guy have this conversation with me.
So now, I look for individual negative reviews which seem reasonably articulate and unemotional, and if a place looks interesting enough, try to queue these issues up for questions during a prospective interview.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't make any sense. I've come across colleagues who wrote scathing reviews...typically consistent with their work ethic. Hard to work with, quick to blame others..then it's no surprise when they go to Glassdoor and say 'the people here are morons!' when they get let go for performance reasons.
I understand what you are saying: You hired psychopaths on accident -- but your office is still a great place to work!
Just a bad apple, you see.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#106Looking at Glassdoor for every company I have ever worked at: it's a mixed bag. There are truthful reviews and then there are the really unhappy individuals who can be overdramatic. Unhappy folks are usually not reviewing the company from an impartial position and the stories can be misleading. For instance: looking at a recent review of my company from a few days ago, it saddens me to read something written so well…
> (and not just when it comes to the amount of melanin in your skin). Hopefully this is just by accident, but this comment has the air of downplaying the value of racial diversity. Imagine someone saying "we value diversity of all kinds, not just how much estrogen you have", or "we value diversity of all kinds, not just which invisible being you pray to".
Definitely not trying to downplay anything, quite the opposite. I was trying to suggest that diversity involves more than just the color of your skin.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#107At my company the negative ones are all real, but positive ones (which outnumber them) are mostly fake. I imagine a lot of companies are the same.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#108>Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of extremely positive reviews by current employees have suddenly cropped up for that company as well. So positive they feel a bit like HR plants. Most of the responses here are spot on but I want to address that one specific point. It's highly unlikely those new reviews are HR plants. Instead, the company is clearly aware of the negative review and the fact that it's getting publicit…
This is the way I’ve seen it happen as well. I even had a past employer reach out to me and straight up say that someone had left a nasty review and asked if I would mind sharing my opinion of my time at th company on there. I did so happily, and he obviously reached out knowing that I left on good terms and would likely leave a positive review, but it was far from an HR plant.
It really can be either way.
The only way to make it not look like a HR racket is to let the negative review slide for a few weeks/months. And at a later date decide if you'll leisurely encourage current employees to make reviews. Even better, encourage employees to make reviews prior to there being one bad review to set the tone of the debate.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#109I don't really trust any Glassdoor reviews. I've always figured many positive reviews are fake, and the problem with negative reviews is that they're often written by disgruntled employees who are unable to reliably assess their own contributions to problematic situations. The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by emp…
Agreed. There was one company I worked for that made all the employees write reviews for the company, but the boss asked each person one after the other so that he knew who wrote each review. So of course everyone wrote a good review.
I tried to make mine so over the top that it would obviously be spotted as fake but still within the "compliment" range that I thought my boss would accept it as genuine. Then when I left I wrote a proper review and indicated that most of the other reviews were probably untrustworthy since everyone was asked to write a review.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#110I don't really trust any Glassdoor reviews. I've always figured many positive reviews are fake, and the problem with negative reviews is that they're often written by disgruntled employees who are unable to reliably assess their own contributions to problematic situations. The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by emp…
'Disgruntled' just means 'unhappy,' so a negative review is understandable.