71–80 of 160 posts
Which is kinda funny because the free market itself is advertised based on how great it is - when there's information transparency.
I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic. And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading. Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the sa…
It's possible, but I know that salary information isn't at all what I'm interested in learning from such sites.
I once worked at a company that started getting a slew of bad Glassdoor reviews. The reviews were real; the company leadership had been making some bad choices and the reviews reflected it. So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.
> So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews. I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, provided there was nothing forcing them to be positive or repercussions for not doing it (or for leaving a negative review). Most people review things only at the extremes (usually negative) unless they are prompted. That’s why Amazon sends people emails with questions or asking for a…
Yeah, it doesn't seem OK to me. The power differential is such that there's no way for a company to ask that of employees without the employees feeling like they have to make the review positive, or less negative than they otherwise might have. So I consider such reviews highly unreliable. That companies do this sort of thing is one of the reasons why I think reviews are pretty close to worthless.
To me the entire idea of Glassdoor is fundamentally flawed so there is a part of me that can't exactly blame for things like this going on. It has been shown time and time again that most people won't go out of their way to leave a positive review for something and will only make the effort when they want to complain. Mix this with something like a job where generally the only reason people will leave is likely due t…
This is why I've left 90% of the jobs I've left. In none of those cases was my leaving a reflection of anything bad about the company.
He mentions ChatGPT in passing but you could write a whole separate article about that. These bogus review companies are going to be able to pump out so many more reviews, of higher quality, with access to LLM-generated content. This problem is only going to get even worse.
They could already do that with pockets deep enough, what openai allows is for the common people to fight back
How so?
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I’d say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty objective… Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.
Wire cutter is hardly objective - check out their bike lock reviews. Every single recommended product is from Kryptonite.
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So is it basically true that there is no objective information out there anymore, because anyone running a successful site gets corrupted with money?
I’d say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty objective… Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.
https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston. When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment. At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company. The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when…
At a healthcare tech startup I worked at for every negative review we got management made us write three positive reviews. The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college to write more and more positive reviews. It was so obvious, any fake review written by HR will always have "keep doing what you're doing!" in the "advice to management" section. Like, even a moderately happy employee will actually have…
A cottage industry of liars. I was pretty naive in college and I still would have been skeptical about that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews. I don’t think this is necessarily wrong, provided there was nothing forcing them to be positive or repercussions for not doing it (or for leaving a negative review). Most people review things only at the extremes (usually negative) unless they are prompted. That’s why Amazon sends people emails with questions or asking for a…
> If a company asks their employees to leave positive reviews, and the employees generally like the place and are willing, that seems OK to me. Yeah, it doesn't seem OK to me. The power differential is such that there's no way for a company to ask that of employees without the employees feeling like they have to make the review positive, or less negative than they otherwise might have. So I consider such reviews high…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews. Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?