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Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

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Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#111
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With NLP and ML any company can know who wrote what review if they wanted to. They have all your emails and thus writing style is easily ascertained.

> With NLP and ML any company can know who wrote what review if they wanted to And the motivation to dedicate resources to this is...? You already fired the person, what does it matter if you find out who they are?

Current employess sometimes write scathing reviews as well, so there's clearly a potential for retaliation there.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#112
post #93
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the worst thing Glassdoor did was to make it mandatory for people to give reviews before reading reviews. You can see the low quality reviews people leave as a result of this.

It doesn't have to be a review. It can be a salary or something else.

Coercing people to provide it drops the signal to noise ratio imo - especially since there is no verification step.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#113
Like any review site the reviews will always be either super positive or super negative, and with Glassdoor I think this natural effect is heightened because employment can be very emotional for people (versus a review of a burger on Yelp, for example).

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#114
Every single online review platform can be gamed by just soliciting reviews from people who have just had a positive experience and shunting people who have just had a negative experience to some kind of alternative channel where their complaints can be hidden from the public and/or resolved.

The more aggressive the company is in managing public perception through online review platforms, the more challenging it will be for anything negative to get out there.

Companies have a strong incentive to systematically manipulate online review systems. The people leaving the reviews 'organically' just have some intrinsic motivation to write them. Over time the shills will win no matter what kind of rules you set up to prevent it. To some extent also the capacity to run a good shill program is a signal of the health of the business doing the shilling, so it doesn't completely destroy the value of them.

The main way to counteract this kind of shilling is for objective and trusted third parties to compare companies, products, etc. with tests that cannot be faked and perhaps combined with some subjective evaluation. If the user is not paying to maintain the accuracy and objectivity of the reviews that they're using to inform their decision, then why should they expect it to be anything other than some combination of shill-spam, the odd lunatic, and the increasingly rare fair-minded and well-informed reviewer? The aggregate of all those things is not necessarily the ideal wisdom-of-crowds outcome because all of the inputs can be defrauded or otherwise manipulated in various directions.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#115
I do think reviews are reliable source of current situation of a company, I trust negatives ones more than the positives. Its not just for glassdoor but for any reviews that you see on yelp,google or fb. I sift through the negative reviews and try to find a common factor in the reviews, that would be a way to validate the review.

I trust negative reviews more because if I had a good experience, I don't have any incentive at all to login to a webpage, create credentials if its needed and then go through the myriad of steps to post a positive review. But on the other hand, if I had a bad experience, the only way to vent it out is by giving them a bad review. I am willing to go through the hoops of signups and surveys so that I post that one bad review about the service. There is an incentive for me there.

Tailpiece: There are many services that you can purchase to write positive reviews for your company/service. The trend to identify this is that whenever there is a negative review, it gets buried by a bunch of near 5 star positive reviews, mostly with a one liner review text.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#116
post #34

In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away. It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the…

You can see the time series of ratings for a company under "Rating Trends". If it ticks up spontaneously, I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that HR stepped in.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#117
Glassdoor is moderately reliable. Not sure of better alternatives - that would be great.

HR often plants or strongly encourages employees directly or through managers to post How Great Things Are Here. Negative reviews can go away mysteriously, are buried. It's disconcerting. A lot like Yelp.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#118
post #66
post #34

In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away. It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the…

This is purely speculation, but I've often wondered if some of the inexplicable positive reviews at bad places I've worked are the product of the company HR team - I wouldn't be surprised at all if some companies try to game their glass door rating if it gets too bad. I've certainly worked some places where there were a bunch of positive reviews that looked suspiciously like the work of a single person.

Yes this is true for nearly any meaningful online ratings: Amazon, Imdb, Yelp. Negative reviews are the more reliable indicator.

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#119
The companies with the best glassdoor reviews are most likely the companies that know how to "hack" the system. For instance, a former consulting company I worked for made leaving a "glassdoor review" semi mandantory as part of the onboarding process. So right after you onboard with all the rah rah rah about "unique culture" and "fun environment" you tend to leave a review to that effect. This particular company tended to have a 5:1 ratio of "this place is awesome" to "This place is awful" comments. I also think that if you see a lot of responses from the CEO for negative reviews that lean toward defensive then you need to view that as a red flag. I personally would see GD as one of several indicators not a final word on where to work. If you can spot a trend such as "So much unpaid overtime" or similar negative post, you can probably trust it as being at least semi accurate. However, one persons great company is anothers personal hell, so you need to decide if the place is a fit for YOU.

That said, I am a big fan of ROLIs products, and the JUCE framework is a great audio/plugin framework used by tons of companies in that arena. Seeing the 2/3 reviews makes me sorta sad, but I can see how they would have to be a lean, long hour hard work wearing many hats kinda place. Building semi pricey gear for musicians is a hard sell, as musicians are usually a lower income segment of the population...

Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?

#120
post #94

I don't really trust any Glassdoor reviews. I've always figured many positive reviews are fake, and the problem with negative reviews is that they're often written by disgruntled employees who are unable to reliably assess their own contributions to problematic situations. The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by emp…

The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by employees who were fired for basically being awful, hostile, aggressive people who fought with everyone and refused to do work. These are the folks who are technically competent and think that gives them a pass for generally being an awful human being to work with.

If this happens consistently over a longer period of time, I'd say there's a problem with conflict management in that company. Technically competent people usually start pushing back if they see a better/simpler way of solving the problem they are given, but instead of taking their feedback or giving constructive criticism, the management just tries to shut them up.

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