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?
Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
111–120 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#112Earlier 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#113Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#114The 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?
#115I 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?
#116In 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…
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#117HR 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?
#118In 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture?
#119That 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?
#120I 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…
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.