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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#241

Post by sct202 »

dsizzle wrote: post #100

Separate from the review issue, but does it seem that Glassdoor's salary estimates are low? The estimates in Glassdoor seem lower than those in levels.fyi, e.g., although it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. It may also be because those who are lower paid are more likely to post, but it also seems worth pointing out that it would be in management's interest to report a lower salary estimate.

I think a lot of glassdoors data is really old. Just looking at some of my submissions, my 5-10 year old contributions are still showing up and seem to have a pretty large impact on titles where there's only a handful of contributions.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#242

Post by closetohome »

cvhashim wrote: post #229
closetohome wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue is complicated by the fact that there's a thriving ecosystem of marketers and scammers who operate around Yelp, and will call and tell you they work for Yelp and can have negative reviews removed and other things. So people really are getting these calls, it's just that it's a scam.

Isn't this just extortion and racketeering with extra steps. "Hey I have this magic problem I created for you, now you have to pay me to fix it or your business will dry up."

I think you missed that it's third parties offering to perform these services. They target Yelp because it's one of the more prominent review sites, but I've gotten calls from people claiming to be able to manipulate Google reviews as well.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#243

Post by AmericanChopper »

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 formula for interpreting a rating out of 10 on an Uber service is (rating - 4) * 10.

It has to be very bad to dip below 4, so that 4.x is the only thing you really can look at.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#244

Post by WilTimSon »

gnicholas wrote: post #207
zerop wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would guess that Quora's algorithm could be gamed pretty easily by having an employee leave a positively-biased answer to a question and then having a bunch of other employees upvote the answer. The company could even have an employee seed the question, then have other employees answer and upvote in order to bury other questions that have negative responses. Basically, Quora appears to tolerate quite a bit of spam,…

I used to frequent Quora and stopped specifically due to this. Leave a few answers on popular topics, especially about apps, and your inbox is flooded with requests to answer questions like "Is it true that X company is the most amazing and affordable software development outsourcing service?" and "Why is Some_Random_App much better than Popular_App_That_Our_App_Copies?". Sometimes they were brazen enough to post questions about X app with names like XMary or XJohn.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#245

Post by ptmcc »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #26

I'll admit that I was bit by Glassdoor astroturfing. The company had an almost 4-star average review and the first three pages were glowing 4 and 5 star reviews. My first week at the company was nothing like the great workplace describe on Glassdoor. I'll spare the details, but suffice to say it was the most abusive workplace I've ever seen. Later, I realized that all of the 4 and 5 star Glassdoor reviews started aft…

I empathize, and I feel like I watched this happen a few times to new hires at my old job. A glowing Glassdoor profile is as much a reflection of engagement with Glassdoor as it is the quality of company and work environment. An "engaged employer" badge on a company's profile almost certainly means the numbers are juiced upward.

My previous company of 7 years had 4.9 stars on Glassdoor. They cared a lot about maintaining their profile.

My current company of 2 years has 3.5 stars on Glassdoor. They don't care much at all about maintaining their profile.

Even accounting for the jadedness that comes with tenure, my current company is a much better place to work in many ways. Old company was fine, good even, but lol at 4.9/5. I won't be going back anytime soon, despite the standing invitation.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#246

Post by city41 »

speeder wrote: post #9

Today I was thinking about this kind of thing, for example Epic not allowing reviews at all, Valve "off topic" review hiding, metacritic changes to their system, or Netflix removing their review system... I concluded that review systems often are on the losing side when their income comes from what they are reviewing, reviews you can trust are those that are unrelated. For example a famous bastion of review is the Mi…

Reviews for entertainment are of very little value, and always have been. The only time this isn't true is if you get to know the reviewer and understand that your tastes and theirs line up. I suppose if something is universally panned that could be useful information, but that isn't very common.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#247

Post by Diederich »

everdrive wrote: post #51
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…

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

My wife and I used to use Yelp at our go-to, day to day review platform. After some of my wife's customers directly experienced some serious WTF behaviour on Yelp's part, our trust in it was, as you said, completely broken.

I'm not at all surprised that Glassdoor is playing similar games.

The following isn't necessarily meant to disagree with you.

A common thread is that Yelp and Glassdoor directly make money based on their reviews. That's their core product. Other comments about how trust should be a core product are relevant, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening.

My wife and I started using Google reviews. To be clear: we are by no means starry-eyed Google fans. We're quite aware of many their problems and WTFisms.

In this case, though, unless I'm mistaken, Google reviews are at most very indirectly a product for them.

This is important, because in my mind, that makes it far less likely for them to meaningfully/substantively fuck around with the results.

It would be easy (and perhaps fun!) for me and anyone else reading this to inject doubt into this assertion.

I'm happily open to additional illumination here, particularly as far as a practical daily use review system.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#248

Post by dheera »

everdrive wrote: post #51
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…

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

The main problem is that review systems of today are funded by investors who want profits, not honesty. That will always translate into unscrupulous companies paying to manipulate reviews, which will generate more cash than honest reviews.

A good review system can exist but it shouldn't be a venture-backed startup expecting unicorn returns.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#249

Post by rocha »

lordnacho wrote: post #197

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…

Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book (Skin in the Game) under a similar premise: “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#250

Post by dr_orpheus »

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.

A bit of a tangent, but I feel like I have also created an artificial scale on a rating system myself. I use Untappd to score beers. But it turns out there is a pretty wide variety of beer that I like so most of them end up as 4 +/- 0.5 our of 5.

But I'm not the only one. The overall rating system most beers end up in the 3.5 to 4.5 range. Where 4.5 becomes "oh my god, these brewers are doing incredible things with this beer" and 3.5 becomes "ugh, this tastes worse than bud light"

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