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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#231

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…

Agreed. My complaint isn't even so much about the abuse itself, it's the accompanying song and dance about the superiority of democracy, the trustworthiness of the press, the claims to the systemic & cultural superiority of the US over "authoritarian", "speech-restricting" countries like China, etc etc etc. It stops being funny after a while. At least China's leaders are honest about what they are: communist authoritarians. They also seem to be doing a much, much better job at governing on almost all points (obvious issues like the Uyghurs situation excepted of course).

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#232

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…

Some amazing advice I have to say.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#233
post #187
post #10

Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope yo…

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.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#234

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…

maybe this works if you have to 1) be invited and 2) also pay to get in?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#235
post #31

Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong b…

Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more looking at the founding team.

Quora has already gone downhill. They are just a few steps from Yahoo answers. The answers just happen to be more polished and checked for grammatical mistakes.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#236

Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong b…

Is it not possible to design a for-profit, open source, transparent architecture that could allow for a trusted review mechanism? If its clear that there are no code paths or questionable "algorithms" which would permit sale-to-a-higher-bidder, then it might be possible to give a lot more trust in the site as a user.

One would think that some sort of production deployment using completely open source/transparent technologies might be possible. I guess the drawback to this would be that you basically couldn't have system admins, and competitors could easily just git clone and copy your whole stack?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#237
Reviews have always been a deeply flawed process, particularly anonymous reviews online. The rating system doesn't mean the same thing to everyone, and it is easily faked. Companies are incentivized to sell control over reviews to the parties being affected by the free crowd sourced reviews. Think of yelp and the people who give a restaurant 2 stars because another patrons child was crying. Or the onslaught of faked Amazon reviews.

At a previous company, we had someone whose entire job was to talk to coworkers about what they posted on social media, getting good reviews for the shit company online, etc. The most shocking thing about this post to me is how many people actually valued the reviews on Glassdoor. Not sure if I'm too pessimistic/skeptical about this, or if others aren't pessimistic/skeptical enough.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#238
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, you will be forced by courts to remove some reviews for the usual reasons, making you instantly untrustworthy

Blockchain can't be "forced" to remove a review. Not how that works. You can force a public facing site to stop displaying it, but if it's decentralized it is still there. The disadvantage being of course there is no way to remove fake/scam reviews.

You usually build a chain of hashes of messages, not of the messages themselves. Meaning that you can delete the message, leaving evidence of the deletion in the form of a lonely hash in the chain.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#239
post #10

Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope yo…

The jobs industry is incredibly scummy. Everyone comes in thinking, 'Wow, I'm going to help people get into a job they'll love!'.

You leave because you get tired of pushing Uber jobs on everyone because they have unlimited budget to spend to attract job seekers.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#240

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…

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
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