Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 500 posts

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#421

Post by mjevans »

victor9000 wrote: post #175
muttech wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 can't even remember the last time I had a productive meeting for work.

Everything that meetings at the places I've worked at, my entire life, should have been sent out in advance in /some/ format (today it'd be email) for review.

When you do that, you can also have a deadline for rounds of comments... 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, up to a decision deadline where whomever's allowed to make the decision can make their choice with all the views and objections/opinions laid out.

There's literally no reason to ever /actually/ have a meeting of the kind that I've been a part of.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#422

Post by noir_lord »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #364
jorblumesea wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a really backwards view to see your company as the "only game in town". Physically, it might be true, but you're competing with remote only companies, and regional competing cities. You're also indirectly competing with hubs such as California or Seattle where jobs are plentiful. This is a really interesting comment, thanks for sharing.

But that same dynamic is even more prevalent in non-tech sectors. My wife had two such jobs so far. In the first case, the boss was quite explicit about abusing the scarcity of office jobs in the area (a cluster of small villages and towns). Forced overtime, late paychecks, bad working conditions and verbal abuse were all maintained by a simple threat - "where else will you go?". In the second case, the job had decen…

If I was a slightly less calm person I’d have already beaten the shit out of my partners boss, he is making her absolutely fucking miserable though his ineptness.

I keep telling her to quit, we can live on my salary indefinitely while she finds another job but she won’t.

What makes it doubly annoying is that she is conscientious and has a work ethic.

I fucking hate it to be honest, you’d think by now large companies would have figured out the trickle down effects of bad management and have better systems in place to weed it out.

The first thing I’d look at as the boss of a large company is a) department sickness rates, b) department turnover rates

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#423

Post by java_script »

steve222 wrote: post #418

Hello everyone, am very happy to share this little awesome testimony about Dr Adam a great herbal doctor who help me enlarge my penis size from 4.2 cm to 9.4 cm longer with his herbal cream mixture, am so amazed with the autonomous size of my penis , if you are also in need of help on how to enlarge your penis size to become bigger and stronger I adverse you to contact Dr Adam today on his email (adamokpoko@gmail.com…

You should make a quick landing page and post this as a "Show HN".

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#424

Post by mushufasa »

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…

You are correct that companies' direct incentive is to optimize their ratings.

Don't you think that's correlated with improving actual employee experiences, though? I agree they're not the same thing. But if they spend HR effort to improve the ratings, that means they're looking at the feedback, and presumably they will try to address some or part of it where possible.

Essentially, the fact that people optimize metrics doesn't mean that the whole process is hopeless. Anyone who has built metrics systems will agree that you can rarely measure the exact thing you're looking for -- the ideal is to get as close as you can.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#425

Post by basilgohar »

tyfon wrote: post #359
throwawaymath wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recovering legal fees is not automatic just because you're innocent.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#427

Post by clavalle »

ionforce wrote: post #411
clavalle wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not by the company, of course; the candidate.

That makes even less sense. How does the candidate "ding" you? That's just a rude, incompetent interviewee. "How dare you ask me about this thing I claimed to know!"

They go on Glassdoor, write up a bad review for the company, and mention me, specifically.

I mean, it's not affecting me in any real way but I have to admit, it bugs me.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#428

Post by freedomben »

nhumrich wrote: post #386
freedomben wrote: post #84

It's amazing, because I used to (naively perhaps) trust Glass Door reviews. Then I started at Canopy Tax and heard in almost every weekly company meeting, an encouragement to go on Glass Door and rate the company. They would also brag during those weekly meetings about the current Glass Door rating. The "Glass Door" rating was also reviewed in the meeting, with lamenting over any negative reviews that would pop up. A…

Im curious how you felt this was "manipulation". No one said "if you have something good to say, leave a review", which is common in retail, but moreso, it was just "go leave a review". Yes, the company is proud of its reviews, and yes, obviously there will be skoff over bad reveiws. How is any of this manipulation?

It's manipulation of the glass door rating because it alters the organic state of reviews. You're not getting a baseline of reviewers that were motivated enough by their experience to go out and leave a rating. If every company were doing this same thing, then for the candidate looking for insight it would still be reasonably easy to get a fair comparison. With some companies manipulating the results and others not, it's not a fair comparison.

To claim that it was not manipulation, it seems to me that you'd have to argue that the reviews that were created under this encouragement would have all happened anyway, without the encouragement, which I find to be a dubious claim.

I wonder, if a product manufacturer were encouraging their employees (that were themselves users of said product) to go on Amazon and review the product, would you consider that manipulation of the Amazon reviews?

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#429

Post by mindcrime »

Jach wrote: post #321
mindcrime wrote: post #47

My approach to Glasdoor reviews is similar to my approach to Amazon reviews... ignore the positive reviews, and focus on the negative ones. Now, "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence", but a large number of negative reviews is a strong "stay away" signal. A small number of negative reviews is, more or less regardless of the positive reviews, a "neutral" indicator to me.

Nitpick: Unless you're confusing "evidence" and "proof", absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Proof: http://oyhus.no/absence/index.html

Fair enough. But in the colloquial sense, the meanings are close enough that nobody has any trouble understanding the point.

Re: Companies Manipulate Glassdoor by Inflating Rankings and Pressuring Employees

#430

Post by kansface »

mushufasa wrote: post #368
kansface wrote: post #330

The capture of rating agencies by the entities they would rate seems to be common if not inevitable given the incentives - the companies being rated have a strong financial incentive to fix their ratings while at the same time, the consumers don't pay for the service. So, the agencies eventually go after the only money in play and turn into a protection racket, and perhaps make room in the market for a new agency sub…

Yes this is the dynamic. Is it inevitable? Are there solutions, or at least mitigations? This is also a problem (huge problem) with credit ratings and investment rating agencies.

> Is it inevitable?

How would you change the incentives? The incentive for a restaurant to leave a fake review is much higher than the incentive for a customer to leave any review. For crowd sourced reviews, introducing a trust model opens the door to account selling/paid reviews. You can't really punish the bad actors or you open yourself to a different kind of abuse. You really need a PageRank equivalent for reviewers? Is there some feedback loop (like following clicks) to the things you recommended (and seeing engagement on that page from GA)?

Post reply on HN