91–100 of 163 posts
Culture is also completely different from direction. Some place may have a great culture but a lack of direction, or vice versa.
I would say you should really see if there are reviews from all departments and if the number of reviews correlates to number of employees to paint a realistic picture.
In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away. It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the…
That made me think about the reviews in app stores these days. There will be a valid complaint and rating, followed by a response from the company that might be something like, "this has been addressed in the next version. we're sorry you had a bad experience." Something like that turns a 1 star rating into a positive signal to me. Maybe Glassdoor reviews need the opportunity for a company representative to say, "thi…
Yeah this is a very tricky thing to do well as it will always be abused. Glassdoor has been struggling (they've raised a bunch of flat rounds) and there are so many cases i've seen of bad reviews, followed by HR getting wind of it and burying them in a ton of fake positive reviews. I run a site called TransparentCareer ( https://www.transparentcareer.com ) and we've tried to make all of this data quantitative and ver…
One of the worst thing Glassdoor did was to make it mandatory for people to give reviews before reading reviews. You can see the low quality reviews people leave as a result of this.
The company I'm at -- the best company I've ever worked for, hands down -- has a few negative reviews from over the years that were written by employees who were fired for basically being awful, hostile, aggressive people who fought with everyone and refused to do work. These are the folks who are technically competent and think that gives them a pass for generally being an awful human being to work with. Being willing to fire people like this has resulted in this company having the happiest and most productive culture I've ever personally worked in, but it does lead to some pretty harsh reviews on Glassdoor. You're not going to get any of this context from the reviews.
The most informative reviews are the negative ones written by folks who left voluntarily and were not fired. In fact, these reviews, if they exist, can be a gold mine of valuable information. But it can sometimes be hard to pick these out, as folks who were fired sometimes lie about it and make it seem as if they chose to leave.
A generic tip when reading negative reviews is to look for specific details and concrete examples. The more details -- and the more specific they are -- the more likely the review is to have some basis in fact. This tip alone can filter out a lot of noise in both positive and negative reviews.
If you ever want to write a negative review, the corollary is that you should include specific, concrete examples to convince the reader that you're not just disgruntled. Avoid emotional language.
A negative review written with a calm, collected tone is also a sign that there might be something there.
It's also worth looking for themes that seem to be consistent across multiple negative reviews. As with Amazon reviews, it's often best to look at distributional properties of Glassdoor reviews rather than focus on specific reviews too much.
Looking at Glassdoor for every company I have ever worked at: it's a mixed bag. There are truthful reviews and then there are the really unhappy individuals who can be overdramatic. Unhappy folks are usually not reviewing the company from an impartial position and the stories can be misleading. For instance: looking at a recent review of my company from a few days ago, it saddens me to read something written so well…
Hopefully this is just by accident, but this comment has the air of downplaying the value of racial diversity. Imagine someone saying "we value diversity of all kinds, not just how much estrogen you have", or "we value diversity of all kinds, not just which invisible being you pray to".
Some observations:
- Reviews are more or less accurate, but in the context that it's a big company and most of the reviews apply to their immediate team
- Most reviews don't seem to be aware that they are actually reviewing their team/their manager/their org
- Viewed with that lense/context, reviews are accurate but not representative of the company as a whole
All in all, if you look at the reviews holistically, they paint a good enough picture. Most reviews for the company in this case were positive, a few bad teams, but for the most part the company at least makes an effort to provide a good environment for employees. After reading enough reviews, that theme did come across and I would agree with it
I imagine the site is great for assessing the area you're going into, but only really paints a good picture of the entire organization when the company is pretty small.
In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away. It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the…
I ask, as the payment method is critical to understand it's reliability.
If it is ads, then yes, I think it should be reliable. 'You' are the 'product' in that case. More negative press will likely keep you clicking and searching about, therefore more money.
If it is the companies, then it it not likely reliable. Why would you pay a company to essentially bad-mouth you? You pay them for good press (the pizzeria in NY on Yelp being an egregious exception). I'd say this holds if the companies can pay in any way at all. If they can influence for dollar, even rarely, then the whole thing is suspect.
Anyone know the real answer?
If there are only a few reviews for a company and those reviews are all over the map, I'm not going to put a lot of stock in any of them.
However, if there are a dozen or more reviews, most of which come across as fair and nuanced regardless of the score they assign, then I feel comfortable drawing some hypotheses based on the points they raise.
Also, companies can respond to reviews on Glassdoor. In more than one case the content of the (defensive) response has been more valuable to me than the original review.
Looking at Glassdoor for every company I have ever worked at: it's a mixed bag. There are truthful reviews and then there are the really unhappy individuals who can be overdramatic. Unhappy folks are usually not reviewing the company from an impartial position and the stories can be misleading. For instance: looking at a recent review of my company from a few days ago, it saddens me to read something written so well…
Get ready for people telling you how you're wrong.
But I am going to tell you that you're doing the whole racial diversity thing 'wrong'. Either don't give a crap about this stuff and let your company be a meritocracy, or if you're going to appease that kind of crowd, then do it their way.
Which essentially is,
- Make everyone inclusive, at the same time make that effort seem easy and not forced. Like "tonight we're celebrating Diwali night" rather than "In the honor of victory of light over Darkness from the land of Indian people and to honor Sajeet, we are celebrating Diwali night". - Never say that you're trying so hard to make things inclusive, that violates the earlier point in a literal sense. The whole point is to make things inclusive but not making it obvious to anyone. - Don't claim you hire people regardless of their background (this is a signaling problem, it's like saying "All Lives Matter" it has nothing to do whether you're logically arguing over the point, but rather to let other people know what your opinions are), don't claim that you're a meritocracy, but don't ever claim that you hire minorities first (because this breaks the earlier rule of making your effort look hard).
At the end of the day, understand that you are either hiring the best person for the job or you're "promoting racial diversity" in your company, don't say both the things.