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Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

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Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#271

Post by cs702 »

By and large, GlassDoor ratings are no longer a good measure of how well a company treats employees; they now measure, mainly, whether a company has the ability to engineer and maintain artificially good GlassDoor ratings.

GlassDoor, in short, has become a textbook example of Goodhart's Law:

  "When a measure becomes a target,
   it ceases to be a good measure."[a]
The same phenomenon is known in some contexts as Campbell's Law:

  "The more any quantitative social indicator is
   used for social decision-making, the more subject
   it will be to corruption pressures and the more
   apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social
   processes it is intended to monitor."[b]
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#272

Post by wiz21c »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #185
nsxwolf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like how every company offers work from home after 5 and on weekends.

To be fair, no employee ever checks Facebook or posts on HN during work hours (ahem)? It cuts both ways.

When you're an employee, you're paid for the time you spend at work. The productivity is not part of the equation in the contract.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#273

Post by seanwilson »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #207
hylaride wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of a startup I once worked for. It was failing and the CEO (who had money from a previous company) had the VP of sales take a photo of the emtpy office at 6pm to complain how we weren't "all in". This despite the fact that our pay was late and he was on a month-long trip to his vacation home in the south of France (we were a north american company).

It's remarkable how often companies expect their employees to be completely loyal and do a bunch of work for free, while also treating their employees like free labor and cutting them loose at the smallest disagreement. I've started steering very clear of any company that talks about how important loyalty is, or how the employees are all 'like a family'. Biggest red flags for toxic management imo.

> It's remarkable how often companies expect their employees to be completely loyal and do a bunch of work for free, while also treating their employees like free labor and cutting them loose at the smallest disagreement.

There's lots of other imbalances as well like how you have to tolerate being mistreated so you can get a good reference, and you have to actively avoid mentioning negative reasons you left a company in job interviews to avoid being labelled a trouble maker.

Glassdoor was suppose to help with the above I guess.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#274

Post by ben509 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #258
justin66 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negative review was informative enough. Political, negative work environment and old, dead tech. Blah blah. It's the context that is particularly damning. Whenever you see a heartfelt negative review surrounded by obviously fake or reactionary (do you really not see that?) positive reviews, that is a red flag. It is not uncommon.

I totally disagree. When I read reviews (on Glassdoor or anywhere, really) I try to discount any emotionally charged content and focus on the factual elements of the reviews. I mean, "Political, negative work environment"? Every single group of humans since the beginning of time has a level of political interaction, so when I see comments about things being political I pretty much discount them unless there are some…

People are naturally political, that's precisely why professionalism was invented, and a key function of a manager is to shield their people from the politics higher up.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#275

Post by LinuxBender »

This sounds like a system that is no longer valuable for it's original intended use case.

I am just thinking out loud, but maybe one feasible response would be for people to create their own anonymous blogs about their experience at a company. I consider that a more distributed approach that may be more difficult for companies to game. If I were to create such a blog, I might use a disposable email address and create a blog on something like neocities [1] and other free static web site providers. Perhaps some of these sites would even allow access via Tor or other proxies.

Can you think of any other mediums that may be useful for this purpose?

[1] - https://neocities.org/

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#276

Post by jecxjo »

chaostheory wrote: post #86
commandlinefan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me guess, he laughed when he said it like he was super funny, too, right? Like when I used to ask one former boss which of the ten tasks he'd just assigned to me was highest priority he'd say, "yes!" and laugh like he'd just told the greatest joke and then run out of the room (seriously) before I could pin him down on an actual decision.

imo this is endemic in areas with poor job markets where there's really about 1 or 2 large employers. It's not just time to leave the company; you need to leave the whole area as well.

I worked in an area where the nearest competition was hundreds of miles away. When the engineering staff would question upper management and HR during annual meetings about competitive wages they would always state that we were extremely competitive for our location. After working there for nearly a decade and a half I moved to another state, about 300 miles away and my pay nearly doubled.

Doing my exit interview I stated that the reason I was leaving was because management had this goofy view of the world and it was the reason why we struggled finding talent. They felt that because there was no physical competition in the area they could pay a fraction of what their competitors in the field pay and still retain talent. They also felt that it was appropriate to create a convoluted scheme where you could never really get a promotion, just be given more responsibility w/ almost no increase in pay. (You can only move up a level if you have 1 or fewer "needs improvements" while the managers were told that all employees should have no less than 2 "needs improvements" as they should have things to work on over the coming year).

Most people I talked to about that whole situation would offer the "well why didn't you just move" advice not understanding that the pay was just enough to pay for room and board, college loans, and then choose to put the last few dollars into a 401k or into savings to escape that job. I opted for the former hoping I would work my way up to not have this problem. I made the wrong choice.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#277

Post by Lucadg »

sevensor wrote: post #62
fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #32

I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. I extensively reviewed the rules and reworded my comments and they were removed yet again. My points were fully factually true and were not anything too untoward (pay raises were promised to members of a new team, they never materialized, most team members left). For what it's worth, Path Forward IT is…

> Flexibility works one way there A former boss put it like this, "Sure we have flex time! You can arrive any time before 8 and leave any time after 6."

At my first job in Italy we used to stretch the lunch break a bit. The boss put a paper on the wall with a reminder of the official working hours: 8:30 - 12:30 / 13:30 -

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#278

Post by aerovistae »

NotHereNotThere wrote: post #118
aerovistae wrote: post #16

You don't say! I used to work as an engineer at a truly awful little company, the worst I've been at, and when I left I gave them a scathing review. Not long after, several new reviews popped up. Here are some choice excerpts, get a load of this: > Pros: > For anyone reading these reviews, take it from someone who has been at this company for over 10 years, some people just like to use these review sites as a soundin…

Since you opted to reveal the company's name (Snowbound software), I went ahead and read the reviews on GlassDoor. Your review is very emotionally charged and with very few facts or examples, which makes it difficult to take seriously. Since you were fired I can understand why you would write like this, but it is a bit ironic considering the article is about manipulating reviews. Yours is scathing indeed, but not in…

I did not mean to reveal that, it was an oversight by me.

> Your review is very emotionally charged and with very few facts or examples, which makes it difficult to take seriously.

I wrote the review more than a year after leaving the company. I wasn't feeling very emotional, I was just trying to be descriptively honest. I'm not sure what you're looking for. Transcripts of specific dialogues between employees? I explained the way things are there pretty truthfully, and five years later I still feel it's objectively accurate. The problem is the personalities and there isn't much more to it than that.

> just seems like an attempt to bash the company (1 star, all reds, only pros are low pressure environment and parking?)

If you had worked there this might stop seeming like an exaggeration.

> I don't think Snowbound's positive reviews show manipulation

If you can't see the manipulation going on there, it's hard for me to imagine a set of reviews that you would consider manipulation.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#279

Post by timcederman »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #32

I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. I extensively reviewed the rules and reworded my comments and they were removed yet again. My points were fully factually true and were not anything too untoward (pay raises were promised to members of a new team, they never materialized, most team members left). For what it's worth, Path Forward IT is…

And then Glassdoor refuses to remove reviews that are obviously irrelevant. I noticed a review for SurveyMonkey from someone who takes panel sruveys (i.e. absolutely not someone who works there) and after it was flagged I got this response from Glassdoor:

"Thank you for flagging the post titled “survey taker” for additional review. We take our Community Guidelines very seriously. Before any reviews are posted on Glassdoor, our moderators review them to ensure they meet our Guidelines. A manager has reviewed the post you flagged and decided it does meet our guidelines. Therefore, the post will remain on the site."

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#280

Post by ryandrake »

freedomben wrote: post #84

It's amazing, because I used to (naively perhaps) trust Glass Door reviews. Then I started at Canopy Tax and heard in almost every weekly company meeting, an encouragement to go on Glass Door and rate the company. They would also brag during those weekly meetings about the current Glass Door rating. The "Glass Door" rating was also reviewed in the meeting, with lamenting over any negative reviews that would pop up. A…

What’s amazing is that it’s 2019 and there are still people who trust online reviews written by people they don’t know! Show me one online review system out there that is not gamed in some way by the entities that stand to gain or lose money due to the content in the reviews.
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