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Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

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Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#271
post #127

As a senior manager I worked closely with a VP of engineering on the engineering culture - one of the expected outcome was the improvement of our Glassdoor company rating. But my VP (and probably the leadership) wanted to go fast. So my VP was in touch with someone at Glassdoor and had a way to 'tweak' or remove unpleasant reviews. I don't know the details but if there is definitely a way for companies to do that des…

They can definitely manipulate the default (“recommended”) sort to bury bad reviews. Companies do that all the time. They can also reply to reviews. I’m not sure about control over visibility if a user chooses to sort chronologically, though.

I can confirm that at least 2 of the offending reviews simply disappeared after my VP talked to them.

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will be on the next round of layoffs regardless of your loyalty. "You were updating linkedin" is the excuse. It could be anything else. But the reality is that they found someone cheaper.

I heard non-squeaky wheel look more loyal and are kept around.

"Loyalty" has been dead for decades, just look at that many accounts of successful teams and people that have been laid off in the last year alone. The same exact stories of hard working and dedicated people being laid off on a whim can be found going back decades.

There's a reason that so many people now get prompted by moving "horizontally" between companies, very few companies today properly reward loyalty, if anything most actively incentivize individualism and disloyalty.

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#273
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You think this is that bad? I always said “at least we’re not building weapons we are trying to get people jobs (or keep them in jobs)” But aside from weapons, if you think building a retention tool for HR is bad, you certainly should not ever look at AdTech or the types of things insurance companies are doing from a data perspective. Or ah hem… Palatir for example.

so your argument is that you don't need to be ethical because there exist people that do worse things than you?

No, my argument is that building an employee retention tool is not the same from an ethical perspective as building a weapon system.

One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon.

The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon.

And then there’s AdTech.. lol

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the problem is that if you try to start a bootstrapped company to compete with Glassdoor without ever taking funding, you’ll be outspent on marketing by the companies that did take funding and you’ll go under. There’s a reason so many of these sites are VC funded even when it feels like they shouldn’t be. And VCs are often willing to fund things with a 1% chance of success, so even if multiple VC-backed com…

Why is it impossible for communities to emerge organically in 2024? Why must you raise and spend $20m on marketing alone? I found Reddit literally through organic word-of-mouth when Digg went under. Never saw an ad for it in my life. Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?

Reddit didn't start to attract the critical mass until they became the top result in Google though nor it was able to keep its servers with its own profit. Until they squash all possible opponents, such social networks has never been profitable.

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers and recruiters are always bewildered when I say I don't have a LinkedIn account, or a public Github profile (I have a few tiny open source projects I maintain, but they are all pseudonymous) - and this is exactly why. I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.

My take is exactly the opposite: the more people who know that I exist, the more likely I am to hear of jobs that might interest me. Let them creep all over my profile: so far the only downside is that I have a pile of messages to sort through and say "no, thanks" to.

I'm torn on this. Exactly once have I gotten a recruiting email from someone that turned out to be a good match for me. That job literally changed my life.

But... every other recruiting email I've gotten has been at best something I just wasn't interested in, while the vast majority of them are so poorly targeted, I'm embarrassed for the recruiter for clearly not having a clue how to evaluate if a candidate is a good fit in even the most basic ways. All promising job prospects I've had (whether they worked out or not) came through connections, or active work on my part to seek out positions that interested me.

(Obviously everyone's experience differs; I see you mention downthread that you once found a great match from a cold recruiter call.)

So... did that one life-changing job come to me because of a privacy-minefield site like LinkedIn? I'm not sure how that in-house recruiter found me: it was a cold email to an address that I hadn't used in years, and it was just dumb luck that I signed into it a week after it was sent, which seems at odds with the usual way to get in touch with someone you've found through a job-network site.

I'm at a point where I don't think I really need to maintain a LinkedIn profile in order to achieve my employment goals... but a part of me is too afraid it'll be useful (or even critical) to something in the future, so I haven't deleted it. Meh.

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#276

All US tech companies ever, they are out there to doing the right thing until money rolls in then profits take the priority over quality and they go down the shitter. 1) Evernote 2) Triplebyte 3) Glassdoor 4) Let's not forget Quora

Are you sure it’s just profits? People need money to support themselves. Companies hire people and have to pay them because they can’t work for free. This means companies need revenue. Now, with traditional companies, customers paid for products and services. This revenue allowed companies to pay employees. With the companies you listened, they gave away their product “for free”. That meant they had to get revenue so…

This is just absurd, how much revenue does Facebook need to "survive"?

I'd expect from society in 2024, platforms like Facebook, Quora, GlassDoor to not only exist but to work well in an established way. It's just greed, pure and simple.

Nothing works, and everything is "shittified".

For example, I was really excited about Triplebyte. I thought finally we may have a tool to separate the wheat from the chaff and hoped it would make it's way even to Europe but then it got shittified with dark patterns.

The moment something becomes cool for a few months, it's already a cow to be milked endlessly and sold off to the highest bidder who will do the same and once it's gone they'll find someone to throw under the bus and move on to the next thing.

And that's not even counting personal information which they consistently misuse or sell. I am terrified to use majority of services online with personal name/surname and recently my very unique(identifies just me) name:surname combo got hijacked and was used in a fake review site. I just don't trust any company when they say "your private notes" are private. Yes, they are, if they earn trillions and become like apple. But the moment money is tighter they change the tune.

For example take a site like bumble. The frontend is junior level programming even HS. The backend is a simple DB. It can't cost billions of euros to run that.

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#277
post #182
post #10

If anybody doesn't think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds "at risk employees" which they didn't define but said it included signals such as "they updated their linked in recently" as a signal that they may be on the job hunt. You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment/job/interview behav…

I've never really seen retention risk tooling used for evil in the way that most HN readers seem to think it is; it's kind of interesting and eye-opening to me to see the strong negative sentiment towards it. I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be…

> I've never really seen

I remember reading a blog post by an employee that had gotten on the wrong side of google. When he came in their crosshairs, he said all his google machines forcibly updated themselves, and it became clear he was closely monitored.

I think the idea is that decent relationships have good boundaries, and proactively maintaining them is a worthwhile endeavor. This is especially important when there is a power relationship.

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#278
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so your argument is that you don't need to be ethical because there exist people that do worse things than you?

No, my argument is that building an employee retention tool is not the same from an ethical perspective as building a weapon system. One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon. The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon. And then there’s AdTech.. lol

I'm sure zuckerberg says the same thing to his kids

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#279
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers and recruiters are always bewildered when I say I don't have a LinkedIn account, or a public Github profile (I have a few tiny open source projects I maintain, but they are all pseudonymous) - and this is exactly why. I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.

It's by no means a limiting factor if they don't have one, but when I'm interviewing for mid - staff+ level engineers in my specific field I absolutely love when they have some sort of project portfolio I can look at. Github, Gitlab, medium, whatever. I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this pers…

> Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.

I think this is a really important point. Most companies aren't going to hire some anonymous person on the internet with no track record or verifiable background. Most companies can't even legally put someone on their payroll without knowing a lot more about a person.

People without a real-name presence on the internet are only going to get a pretty limited amount of unsolicited job-opening contact. And that might be what people like that prefer, which is fine. The minimal cold emails that come in may even be of much much higher quality and relevance. But ultimately they're still leaving a lot on the table, even if much of what's on the table is probably poorly-targeted crap. (Again, that's fine if that's what they want.)

Re: Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location

#280

I keep thinking about this response from a glassdoor employee, and what it implies about their decision making processes: I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted or nullified/anonymized from the platform. I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. [...] This is my final determination. I, as well as multiple members of my team, have reviewed your request se…

I can't help but think, how does glassdoor make money?

investigating htis, it is clear - from employers.

They help companies keep a clean image, and also sell them job listings and advertising.

Scrubbing a company's image seems like it would be really lucrative.

It doesn't seem like reflecting reality makes money. I actually don't know if there are any review sites where having accurate reviews makes it profitable.

And it doesn't seem like employees are really a revenue stream, since they are not looking for a job.

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