Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#431

Post by jki275 » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:51 AM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #156

chaostheory wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm in an area with lots of employers, but 20 years ago I did some job-hopping (four jobs in four years between 95 and 99), and that STILL comes up as a negative in job interviews. If you bail on too many bad managers, you can find yourself locked out anyway.

Good lord. I've done 3 jobs in a single year this past year alone and I'm hoping to do one more in about a year.

But in your case I wouldn't even put all those jobs on a resume' -- it's too far back.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#432

Post by nhumrich » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:02 AM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #428

nhumrich wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im curious how you felt this was "manipulation". No one said "if you have something good to say, leave a review", which is common in retail, but moreso, it was just "go leave a review". Yes, the company is proud of its reviews, and yes, obviously there will be skoff over bad reveiws. How is any of this manipulation?

It's manipulation of the glass door rating because it alters the organic state of reviews. You're not getting a baseline of reviewers that were motivated enough by their experience to go out and leave a rating. If every company were doing this same thing, then for the candidate looking for insight it would still be reasonably easy to get a fair comparison. With some companies manipulating the results and others not,…

Ok, I understand you now. You feel its manipulation because you now have "noise" from people who wanted to stay silent. Thats fair, but, I mean, this happens everywhere. Restaurants, mechanics, dentist offices, apps, retailers, all ask for reveiws. Some even enter you into a "sweepstakes" of sorts for one. What your saying is the review system as a whole is inheritely flawed. An example of goodharts law, sure, but not sure any of this is glassdoors fault. It also becomes "normal" as more companies do it. At a certain point, that might be manipulation, but at least they aren't manipulating what is said in the reviews.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#433

Post by 52-6F-62 » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:08 AM UTC

souprock wrote: post #392

52-6F-62 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main use of Glassdoor as an employee is not the company reviews - it's for interview questions. I'll add that it's salary survey information as well. Similarly with Indeed. They've saved me a lot of time when I've had companies want to set me up with unpaid hours upon hours of interviews and testing while offering effectively half of what I was seeking, with few other benefits. At one company, the reviews did i…

No, that is nonsense. According to Glassdoor, my workplace supposedly pays highly specialized engineering talent about the same as they'd get flipping burgers. The claim is $44,000 for experienced cleared vulnerability researchers in San Antonio. This, I'm sure, is impacting recruiting. Such a low value is below our minimum for a freshman college intern in the office with the lowest cost of living.

Wow. I haven’t seen it that dramatically bad here in Toronto, after cross-referencing.

As another user mentioned there seems to be an attempt at downward pressure. I hadn’t thought of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Sadly.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#434

Post by freedomben » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:14 AM UTC

nhumrich wrote: post #432

freedomben wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's manipulation of the glass door rating because it alters the organic state of reviews. You're not getting a baseline of reviewers that were motivated enough by their experience to go out and leave a rating. If every company were doing this same thing, then for the candidate looking for insight it would still be reasonably easy to get a fair comparison. With some companies manipulating the results and others not,…

Ok, I understand you now. You feel its manipulation because you now have "noise" from people who wanted to stay silent. Thats fair, but, I mean, this happens everywhere. Restaurants, mechanics, dentist offices, apps, retailers, all ask for reveiws. Some even enter you into a "sweepstakes" of sorts for one. What your saying is the review system as a whole is inheritely flawed. An example of goodharts law, sure, but no…

Yes, agree 100%

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#435

Post by souprock » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:16 AM UTC

52-6F-62 wrote: post #433

souprock wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is nonsense. According to Glassdoor, my workplace supposedly pays highly specialized engineering talent about the same as they'd get flipping burgers. The claim is $44,000 for experienced cleared vulnerability researchers in San Antonio. This, I'm sure, is impacting recruiting. Such a low value is below our minimum for a freshman college intern in the office with the lowest cost of living.

Wow. I haven’t seen it that dramatically bad here in Toronto, after cross-referencing. As another user mentioned there seems to be an attempt at downward pressure. I hadn’t thought of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Sadly.

Where is the motive?

We sure didn't make such a post. I suppose a competitor could have done it, intending to create downward pressure by making other employers (like us) look bad. Can you see a motive for Glassdoor to do this on their own?

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#436

Post by jacques_chester » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

mushufasa wrote: post #424

cs702 wrote: post #271

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…

You are correct that companies' direct incentive is to optimize their ratings. Don't you think that's correlated with improving actual employee experiences, though? I agree they're not the same thing. But if they spend HR effort to improve the ratings, that means they're looking at the feedback, and presumably they will try to address some or part of it where possible. Essentially, the fact that people optimize metri…

> But if they spend HR effort to improve the ratings, that means they're looking at the feedback, and presumably they will try to address some or part of it where possible.

No. In any control loop you have two ways of reducing error.

One is the arduous business of actuation. Doing things. Soul-searching. Working hard. Investigating. Listening. Making it better.

The other is to lie to the sensor. This is always easier.

From the controller's POV, it's indistinguishable.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#437

Post by dgzl » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:20 AM UTC

I recently quit a software company that spent a lot of time doing two things: fluffing the employees with various benefits, and asking them to write reviews on Glassdoor.

Pretty much everyone understood that the actual job sucked in several ways, but the company also had fairly low requirements for acceptance (i.e. don't necessarily need CS degree). Since this type of job is usually considered out of reach for many people, they feel thankful for being accepted, take advantage of the benefits (free dinners and drinks, yearly vacations), and try to work through the daily pain. (pain such as: working in places with low quality of living/food, working for clients who have employees that pee on the bathroom floor, using very small desks in small offices)

Every once in a while I would review them on Glassdoor, describing the very real pitfalls of working for the company in various ways. It doesn't take long for the review list to be flooded with people praising the benefits, and I felt like the more honest reviews get buried.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#438

Post by poopchute » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:49 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #280

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.

I think ratemyprofessors is a fairly decent online review system. Even without the scoring, just hearing peoples descriptions of how the prof teaches is quite beneficial

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#439

Post by mrhappyunhappy » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:49 AM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #422

TeMPOraL wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that same dynamic is even more prevalent in non-tech sectors. My wife had two such jobs so far. In the first case, the boss was quite explicit about abusing the scarcity of office jobs in the area (a cluster of small villages and towns). Forced overtime, late paychecks, bad working conditions and verbal abuse were all maintained by a simple threat - "where else will you go?". In the second case, the job had decen…

If I was a slightly less calm person I’d have already beaten the shit out of my partners boss, he is making her absolutely fucking miserable though his ineptness. I keep telling her to quit, we can live on my salary indefinitely while she finds another job but she won’t. What makes it doubly annoying is that she is conscientious and has a work ethic. I fucking hate it to be honest, you’d think by now large companies…

My wife was like this, staying at a job with a dipshit boss. I told her to quit because we could live on my income but she refused. She brought her stress home and it impacted our marriage for the worse. If I could go back in time I would work harder to convince her to quit.

It takes 2 to make an employment relationship. The employee has just as much if not more power than employer.

Personally, I can't put up with a sliver of bullshit from anyone without going postal on them. This is the reason I stay in consulting, setting my own rules.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#440

Post by mrhappyunhappy » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #156

chaostheory wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm in an area with lots of employers, but 20 years ago I did some job-hopping (four jobs in four years between 95 and 99), and that STILL comes up as a negative in job interviews. If you bail on too many bad managers, you can find yourself locked out anyway.

Why couldn't you just say you worked at 2 places and not 4? Do people really check that sort of thing? Or omit 3 and say you ran your own business for those 3 years. If employer is too dumb to understand your reasons, a little truth bending wouldn't hurt.