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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#261

My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews…

Glassdoor was acquired by Indeed, who is moving all paid job postings ($$$) over to Indeed. That leaves Glassdoor without a business model, hence this internal pivot.

Source: https://www.chadcheese.com/episodes (scroll down to see the Glassdoor/Indeed episodes)

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#262
post #249

Well I don't want to suggest this is the whole answer, but game theory in economics and evolution tend to say that signalling has to be expensive in order to be honest. So peacock's feathers and money-back guarantees are the type of thing that people often quote as signalling fitness. The point of Glassdoor or any other review site it to make signalling cheap and reliable, so it's trying to square a circle. Word-of-m…

Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book (Skin in the Game) under a similar premise: “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

Sounds like an interesting book. I will check it out. I am wondering if in it, he addresses voting rights? Please don't mistake my retelling of history for bias when I say that before 150 years ago, voting in the United States was limited to white male property owners. The race and sex restrictions are not relevant to my point, but restricting voting to property owners was a prime example of ensuring "skin in the game".

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some amazing advice I have to say.

But I’m not sure it passes its own rules for advice worth listening to, which does create a bit of a paradox

There's a distinction between experiential or reputational advice, and theoretical advice, even where both are empirically based, largely having to do with verification costs.

For an experience, where direct validation is expensive, it's necessary to replicate the experience in order to achieve direct validation. An alternative is to collect multiple assessments --- to check references, or sample public opinions. Reading additional reviews on a given online site (Glassdoor, Amazon, Yelp, RottenTomatoes, etc.) is appealing for ease of access, but is subject to various problems, whether unreliable reviews, curation (negative or positive), rater kickbacks or extortion, etc.

Essentially these are examples of the censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and monopoly dynamic I highlighted recently:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470)

A preferred mode is to bypass any intermediary and directly sample those with relevant experience. Where such experiences are thin, this is difficult. For broader experiences, forms of statistical sampling are powerfully useful, and, contrary to widespread popular opinion given random sampling "large number" estimates can be achieved with sample sizes of as low as 30, and reliable small-sample estimates well below this. Sample bias matters far more than sample size.

For advice on theory, validation can be performed through experiment or by checking with trusted authorities. Note that 'trusted authorities" != "appeal to authority". That is, trust is based on both expertise and reliability, rather than position or office.

That's easiest when specific references are given,[1] but even here, @lordnacho has provided both keywords and reasonably cogent arguments supporting their views.

Their comment is a great example of why the vetting problem is so hard and enduring, though.[2]

________________________________

Notes:

1. There are reasons I frequently cite or footnote my own contributions on numerous sites.

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetting

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#265
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.

From this I get you mean "word of mouth" in a very physical way? As in "my cousin Jane says..."? Because "Word of mouth" over the internet would imply that The Internet still has a big role to play in disintermediation. Would "reviews" from your network, any network, physical, or digital, of people you know, be valuable? I believe that a "review" is only useful if you know the reviewer well enough. Regardless of the…

I think "word of mouth" just means opinions about products that are communicated to you via a network of acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, etc. that is very unlikely to have any underlying commercial incentives. That communication can obviously still happen over the internet.

The point is that when you're looking for a toaster oven and your friend says that his coworker's spouse just got a ToasterGenius Model Z and they're happy with it, you can be fairly confident they're not shilling for ToasterGenius. They may not know anything about toaster ovens, and they may not have the same toasting needs as you, but at least you can probably trust that their opinion is genuine. Of course, I suppose it could turn out that ToasterGenius is running an MLM and your friend's coworker's spouse hosts ToasterGenius home parties to sell ToasterGenius products!

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#266
Whilst I understand online reviews for products, services or jobs has always been a bit shady. I am very surprised that a company whose main offering is honest company reviews & remuneration statistics is gaming the responses.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the fundamental problem is trust, are you really suggesting that "it can't be hard to create" that trust?

A distributed trust network is a really interesting hard problem but does seem solvable in some ways (as seen by blockchains, though they have their own issues). I've wondered if a somewhat simplistic graph based solution could work, inspired by organizations like medieval guilds and the mafia, where you generally need to be invited to the trust network and promoted to be more trusted within the network as others vou…

It sounds like you're describing a product review site implemented as a distributed trust network, and the plan to establish the trustworthiness of contributors is to bolt on a contributor review site implemented as a distributed trust network.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#268
post #24

In response to people in this thread claiming Glassdoor will remove reviews if you pay them: Maybe our company was just unlucky with the sales rep assigned to our profile, but altering reviews was something they made clear would not happen regardless of if we paid or not. At the time our company was getting negative reviews meant for a different company in a different country with a similar name. It was a major hassl…

> IMO they shouldn’t allow reviews on public company profiles until there is a critical mass of reviews such that any 1 review won’t dramatically swing the star rating Are you this accomodating towards potential employees? Such as, if a potential employee got a single very bad recommendation from one past employer, or one negative past online experience or reputation hit? I don't know, you may well be, but I suspect…

> Are you this accomodating towards potential employees?

Yes.

1) Reference checks are the very last stage of our hiring process. If you made it that far, we've already made the decision to hire you (assuming references come back in check).

2) If a reference reveals something negative that we didn't know previously, we would give the candidate an opportunity to address it.

But you're right, large companies may be less forgiving, especially if reference checks come early in the process.

> one negative past online experience or reputation hit?

Similarly, I dislike that it's not possible to dispute Google search results when someone searches your full name.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the fundamental problem is trust, are you really suggesting that "it can't be hard to create" that trust?

Blockchain! Proving that reviews haven't been removed might actually make this a real application for a blockchain.

Of course, there's no reason whatsoever to use a blockchain for this. The review website could simply offer dumps of their data signed with their private key.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#270

Well I don't want to suggest this is the whole answer, but game theory in economics and evolution tend to say that signalling has to be expensive in order to be honest. So peacock's feathers and money-back guarantees are the type of thing that people often quote as signalling fitness. The point of Glassdoor or any other review site it to make signalling cheap and reliable, so it's trying to square a circle. Word-of-m…

It's too bad that giving critical feedback in your own name (to show skin in the game) is going to burn you in other jobs. Few want an employee that can bite the feeding hand. Interestingly, I tend to trust more some anonymous answer on Quora because the person won't get any upvotes to display on their profile so (hopefully) their only incentive was sharing their story.

I wish the people downvoting you would say why. I think you make a good point and if there are good counter-arguments then I'd like to hear them.
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