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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

#461

Post by james_s_tayler »

gcb0 wrote: post #410
jecxjo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

well, their plan seems to have worked out perfectly. they got you for 15yrs on half the pay! sadly the world is run by bean counters :(

Sadly, yes. They were not exactly wrong in their approach.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#463

Post by souprock »

jecxjo wrote: post #276
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 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 s…

This isn't enough info to tell if you were being ripped off. Normally, companies pay more in expensive areas, but not enough to make up the difference.

If the pay was half, we might expect the cost of living to be a third. Was it? (that is: by moving you doubled your salary and tripled your costs)

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#464

Post by netheril96 »

chii wrote: post #406
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there is a big difference between "awful, the company treated me poorly" and something like "I got 4 consecutive quarters of positive reviews, including a bonus and a raise, but then when there was a change in management I was let go with the reason being 'poor performance'." Something like that would let me know the company is immature with respect to how it managed employee growth.

Just because there's some numbers doesn't mean it's factual. Annecdotal, not factual. And both should be treated with same level of scrutiny.

> Annecdotal, not factual.

Anecdotes are not the opposite to facts. They are only opposites to whole facts.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#465

Post by ab_c »

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."

This reminds me of my former workplace where even though they tout having a "balanced work life culture", one of the VPs outright said that employees who "only work 8hrs/day" are lazy and entitled.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#466

Post by lixue »

bartread wrote: post #266
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…

> I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. You don't even need to pay Glassdoor. At $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER I managed to get a negative review by an employee who we'd let go removed just by asking them. Don't be too horrified yet because it gets worse: I stand by asking them to remove it. The review was extremely negative and posted by somebody wh…

The problem is, "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management. If you were already disillusioned, it's possible that it really was a bad atmosphere, and they were just less shy about calling a spade a spade.

I've also noticed that people tend to measure whether someone looks busy, not whether they're producing results. Some people will just start writing code, and they get called "productive". Others nip off for 2 hours to think it over and sketch out architectural diagrams, and then finish the whole task in half the time - but they're the ones that get called lazy because they weren't at their desk.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#467

Post by [deleted] »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #124
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.

That's pretty much how it's like in most cities in Europe apart from the few large tech hubs. If you burn yourself with a couple of bad managers you might not have anywhere else to go without leaving your family behind and being accused of job hopping so employees just have to put up with it. At my second to last job I put up with a manager that had severe anger management issues and would swear at employees and thro…

[deleted]

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#468

Post by TeMPOraL »

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 is pretty much the most conscientious / hardworking person I've ever seen, and despite all the abuse, it's hard to get her to quit. She feels quitting because of workplace conditions is like giving up, a personal failing for not persevering. That first job I mentioned got her near mental breaking point before she quit, and it took us two years to undo the damage. It got better the next time around, but she still needed an excuse to not feel like quitting because it's too hard.

> The first thing I’d look at as the boss of a large company is a) department sickness rates, b) department turnover rates

Oh, yes. If one of her bosses did that, he might discover that there's a high turnover rate + pretty negative opinion of the workplace in the region now, caused by one particular manager that's verbally abusive. But employees don't dare complain, because he and the boss are family. They just transfer or quit.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#469

Post by bartread »

lixue wrote: post #466
bartread wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. You don't even need to pay Glassdoor. At $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER I managed to get a negative review by an employee who we'd let go removed just by asking them. Don't be too horrified yet because it gets worse: I stand by asking them to remove it. The review was extremely negative and posted by somebody wh…

The problem is, "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management. If you were already disillusioned, it's possible that it really was a bad atmosphere, and they were just less shy about calling a spade a spade. I've also noticed that people tend to measure whether someone looks busy, not whether they're producing results. So…

> "nothing but trouble" describes both genuinely problematic employees, and those that simply push back against toxic cultures or bad management.

For sure, but that's not what I'm talking about here: every now and again one makes a bad hire. It happened very rarely, particularly in product development where this individual was, but that's what this individual was - just a bad hire.

Now there were reasons why they were a bad hire that I think were perhaps not their "fault" (although fault/blame isn't a helpful concept here), which I'm not going into the specifics of due to #reasons, but the fact remains they chose to deal with that by acting out and introducing toxicity into their team.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#470

Post by bartread »

Jach wrote: post #315
bartread wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had negative reviews flat out removed by a company that was paying glass door for some sort of premium service. You don't even need to pay Glassdoor. At $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER I managed to get a negative review by an employee who we'd let go removed just by asking them. Don't be too horrified yet because it gets worse: I stand by asking them to remove it. The review was extremely negative and posted by somebody wh…

What changes did you make to the hiring process to better filter such people out?

Every now and again you make a bad hire: even companies with the best hiring processes do. Hence the probation period, and letting this person go during that period.

Not to say we didn't do a retro to see if there were improvements that could be made, but you're never going to be perfect at hiring.

What you do need is robust processes, and the appropriate culture to support them, to deal with the situation quickly on the rare occasions when you do hire someone you shouldn't have.

(Btw, bad hires are extremely costly, even at entry level, not just in terms of hiring costs or productivity, but in terms of the effect they have on people around them: they can be a serious morale drain and, whilst their departure often leads to a bump in morale, the effects can be quite long-lasting. A bad hire in a leadership role is positively dangerous, because you multiply all of the above - and actually it becomes likely you'll lose people who work for them - and on top of this you risk serious erosion of trust in those more senior leaders who hired the person in the first place, which leads to further problems with retention.)

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