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Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

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Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#351

Post by Animats »

mushufasa wrote: post #343
Animats wrote: post #197

This is a great opportunity for a union. The organization that should be running a site like Glassdoor is the AFL-CIO.

I agree there should be some opportunity for them to participate somehow. Any ideas of what that would look like? ALF-CIO and other unions aren't setup to be tech companies themselves, and I don't think they have the internal talent to build and operate a popular web app well on their own. It would have to be some other way for them to interact with a tech company in a mutually beneficial manner.

There are more union tech people than you might think.[1]

[1] https://www.unions-america.com/

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#352

Post by DamnInteresting »

cs702 wrote: post #271

By and large, GlassDoor ratings are no longer a good measure of how well a company treats employees; they now measure, mainly, whether a company has the ability to engineer and maintain artificially good GlassDoor ratings. GlassDoor, in short, has become a textbook example of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[a] The same phenomenon is known in some contexts as Campbell…

> a textbook example of Goodhart's Law

I had never heard of Goodhart's Law by name until about 45 minutes ago, while listening to an episode of Planet Money that originally aired last November. And here it is again. This is one of the more striking examples of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon I've experienced in recent years.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#353

Post by thrrr »

screaminghawk wrote: post #193
victor9000 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the policy I implemented with my team and everyone thought it was pretty reasonable. It's basically pick your schedule, but stick to it. Otherwise scheduling meetings becomes unmanageable. That being said, I was also very clear about the policy during the interview process.

I'm pretty happy with this as well. I work 7-3, but I work those hours every day. I've walked out of meetings that have gone past 3 and no one has complained. It's been a great experience

Same here. What I did was creating an out-of-office calendar event for every day which basically blocks others from inviting me to late meetings. I stick very tightly to my schedule usually just +/- 5 minutes.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#354

Post by wolco »

philbarr wrote: post #184
allenu wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, any more details? That must've been cathartic.

It's great to be able to do this but you need to have back ups first. So find a new job whilst "jokingly" suggesting to your boss you need a raise. Then you actually ask for a meeting and a raise and when he/she laughs you off as you knew they would you resign on the spot and go to your new job you had lined up. With the hope that he/she will see their mistake and not treat the remaining employees that way. The probl…

That's the daydream but by the time you lineup the new job asking for a raise doesn't seem so important.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#355

Post by bduerst »

bradlys wrote: post #269
bduerst wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I just checked it out and the topics seem like troll bait with toxic comments. People actually verify their identity with their employer before posting these things?

I mean, all you're identifying with is that you have a company email address. That's all that is known. For really big orgs, this is not an issue.

Right - the company has a link between everyone commenting and their work email address. It would be naive to assume that won't ever be sold as lead gen or part of a premium model for employers, even if the Blind claims otherwise right now.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#356

Post by AaronM »

tyfon wrote: post #208
philbarr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great to be able to do this but you need to have back ups first. So find a new job whilst "jokingly" suggesting to your boss you need a raise. Then you actually ask for a meeting and a raise and when he/she laughs you off as you knew they would you resign on the spot and go to your new job you had lined up. With the hope that he/she will see their mistake and not treat the remaining employees that way. The probl…

> The problem with this strategy is you can never go back. Reading all these stories about bad managers and stuff, do managers and employees take things personal in the US? So if you leave for a better deal you actually will make personal problems between employer end employee? Whenever someone under me quits for a better deal or another job that I can't match I tell them "good luck and thanks for the time you shared…

I heard that an HR Person was mad at a previous company after I left, and claimed to my old boss I had exaggerated on my LinkedIn Profile to get the new job. I changed careers when I left to be a software developer.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#357

Post by mark-r »

seanwilson wrote: post #273
ryanmcbride wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's remarkable how often companies expect their employees to be completely loyal and do a bunch of work for free, while also treating their employees like free labor and cutting them loose at the smallest disagreement. I've started steering very clear of any company that talks about how important loyalty is, or how the employees are all 'like a family'. Biggest red flags for toxic management imo.

> It's remarkable how often companies expect their employees to be completely loyal and do a bunch of work for free, while also treating their employees like free labor and cutting them loose at the smallest disagreement. There's lots of other imbalances as well like how you have to tolerate being mistreated so you can get a good reference, and you have to actively avoid mentioning negative reasons you left a company…

How does Glassdoor make money? If they're not taking money from the people that use the site, they'll never be an unbiased source of information.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#358

Post by wolco »

muttech wrote: post #119
sevensor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flexibility works one way there A former boss put it like this, "Sure we have flex time! You can arrive any time before 8 and leave any time after 6."

That brings back bad memories of my first day at a new job. We had discussed in the interview that they were flexible with the time I got there. On the first day, one of the first questions I was asked: New Boss: "So, what time will you be here every day?" Me: "I thought we had discussed that being flexible as traffic can be unpredictable?" New Boss: "We are flexible on the time, but you have to be here by that time…

I had that happen as well.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#359

Post by tyfon »

throwawaymath wrote: post #318
StudentStuff wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't LinkedIn just lose a court case over very similar anti-scraping terms? Offering something publicly on the internet, then attempting to block certain uses using your ToS seems like Glassdoor being an Indian giver...

Hence my second paragraph, yes. You’d definitely be sued, and it would definitely be expensive. You might not lose.

If you are sued by someone and win in the US, do you not get your legal expenses covered by the entity suing you?

Also, you can probably just set up the scraper and webpage in another country or something.

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