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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#301

Post by vanadium »

lhnz wrote: post #281
alisonatwork wrote: post #15

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…

I wonder if a secondary system which showed the trend line of reviews and any spikes in ratings would be valuable?

Trends are already exposed on the Reviews page, behind a click.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#302

Post by nickbauman »

berkes wrote: post #101
nickbauman wrote: post #80

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…

When I wrote "word of mouth" I meant a mouth that I can see move from someone I know. I should have made that clear, sorry.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#303

Post by pettycashstash2 »

nickbauman wrote: post #80
everdrive wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.

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

Word of mouth has moved into platforms such as next door and moms groups on Facebook. Literally closed circles and small communities with vested trust. I agree with your point to a certain extent.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#304

Post by xnyan »

jamesdhutton wrote: post #144

Glassdoor explicitly denies that they allow employers to pay to remove negative reviews. See this FAQ on their website: https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Can-employers-pay-Glassdo... I am not offering an opinion on this. I am just noting what Glassdoor itself has to say about this.

I think it's instructive to look at how Yelp does it. There is no pay-to-delete button. There are however ways to have non-factual, incorrect, offensive or a myriad of other types of posts removed. How a review is judged as violating policy is an internal decision. Which reviews are surfaced on the front page or how the "average" review is determined or slew of other details that affect how a restaurant or company looks are are also under the control of yelp/glassdoor.

There are enough ways to put the thumb on the scale that you can honestly say that you don't have a delete bad review button, yet money can still strongly influence how positive or negative an org looks on a review site.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#305

Post by sellyme »

anonymousiam wrote: post #286
sdenton4 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, those who live under a modern government have skin in the game in the sense of paying taxes and relying on infrastructure, services, and regulation that make day to day civilization a thing.

True, but property owners pay property tax, which is a big part of where city revenue comes from. Allowing renters to vote on how the money is spent creates the same issue described in the grandparent post.

Money is fungible. Renters have skin in the game, because they paid tax (and because they live in the general society that those tax dollars are being used on). That they paid no property tax is not relevant, because it ceases to become "property tax" as soon as it's paid, and just enters a larger general pool.

People may have differing levels of skin in the game, but it's no more sensible to say that property tax should only be spent on things property owners want than it is to say that property tax paid by people named Dave should only be spent on things that The Council of The Daves want it to be spent on.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#306

Post by ikiris »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #203
mistermann wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also, the structure of our "democracy" is such that there is nothing that citizens can do about this, or most any other obvious major problem at this point. The aligned interests of corporations, the government, and the media seem to have put the citizens of the country into a kind of inescapable checkmate position.

What we're seeing is the inevitable consequence of the granting and concentration of power. An idea I've seen proved true more times than I'd like to count is that "if you don't want power abused, don't create it in the first place." Any power granted WILL be misused and usually almost immediately and because the incentive is always to make it not LOOK like it's being abused, people get hilariously creative in how th…

The problem is you're operating under the fallacy that only concentrated power is a problem. Regulation (concentrated power) is the only thing that keeps distributed power from steamrolling over people just as much.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#307

Post by ikiris »

anonymousiam wrote: post #286
sdenton4 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, those who live under a modern government have skin in the game in the sense of paying taxes and relying on infrastructure, services, and regulation that make day to day civilization a thing.

True, but property owners pay property tax, which is a big part of where city revenue comes from. Allowing renters to vote on how the money is spent creates the same issue described in the grandparent post.

You had a reasonable point, till you veered off into fantasy land that renters aren't just as much in the game if not more so. If anything landowners are generally the problem and renters are the majority population.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#308

Post by sellyme »

jiveturkey wrote: post #233
j2bax wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I mean, their rating is pretty good as an employer... https://www.glassdoor.com/glassdoor

4.2 in SF location. So this is very good info. That's the baseline. Below 4.2 => DO NOT CONSIDER. I know on ebay and amazon I do not buy from sellers under 99.6%, as an absolute minimum. It's ok for the system to be gamed, as long as one can understand the rules.

The eBay ratings - despite being numerically the most egregious - are probably the most helpful. 99.6% ostensibly says that there's a 0.4% chance of you having a bad experience. Star ratings don't really convey any meaning.

I'd definitely adjust my baseline "acceptable percentage" based on what I'm buying. If I'm getting a pack of USB cables for $0.05 each, I'm not going to be too fussy about the rating. I'll take a 2% chance per cable of them not working, that's what I'm paying for. If I'm buying a new GPU, I'm going to be a lot pickier about it.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#309

Post by sizzle »

alisonatwork wrote: post #15

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…

Is there a way to scrape reviews and build an accurate database of all reviews over time that is verifiable by some blockchain type of encoding so you know if they were modified or deleted and can do a check against the current site.

This would yield far more insight than taking their word on their proprietary algorithm flagging reviews. This would also be awesome to use against Yelp that I have first hand experience trying to be extorted by their sales teams affecting a family small business I host a website for and yelp page.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#310

Post by Retric »

alisonatwork wrote: post #99
Retric wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the core issue isn’t paid reviews etc. I think the problem is trying to come up with an arbitrary standard that this restaurant/GPU/shoe stands relative to all others. The simple truth is I want to know two different things, is it functional and would I like it. Star rankings and even short text reviews don’t really answer those questions. A 1 star review because it was DOA says nothing about failure rates. P…

I agree that star reviews are not very helpful, but text reviews absolutely can be. It's true that there might be some fake reviews in there, and that some people are posting in the heat of the moment and will give a biased perspective, but read enough of them and you can get a feeling for common themes that impact certain types of people. Steam is a great example. If you click through to the person who made the revi…

I agree Glassdoor is in an unusually difficult niche, but rating systems are all over the place.

Steam reviews are interesting because I have started watching someone’s YouTube lets play instead. Even bad ones are mildly interesting and they quickly tell you a lot more about the game than what I get from random reviews.

The best online review system for me is Rotten Tomatoes which shows both what the general public thinks and what the critics do. Looking at say https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_rise_of_skywa... I appreciate many of the viewers liked it, but it’s the critics that I find actually agree with. Yep, worse than the prequels, but not quite walk out of the movie theater bad. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_i_the_pha..., https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_ii_attack..., or https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_iii_reven...

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