
Glassdoor and its effect on workplace culture - PascLeRasc
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-workplace-culture-one-review-at-a-time
======
Yabood
My experience with Glassdoor has been terrible. A couple of months ago I found
an email notification in my inbox that someone had left us a review. I was
surprised because we're an early stage three-person startup. We never hired
any employees or contractors. The review was bad, and the reviewer who was
anonymous claimed that he/she had done an internship with us. As the "owner"
of our company's profile on Glassdoor, I had no access to any information
about the reviewer, nothing. I flagged the review hoping that Glassdoor would
take care of it. A day later I received an email saying, we're sorry, there's
nothing we can do, the review stays. They told me that my only option was to
reply to the review and hope they'd see that its not for us and remove it.
Needless to say, I was not happy. I took a closer look at the review, and
found out that the reviewer had mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did
some digging and found another company with the same name in Singapore. I
reached out to Glassdoor again with all this info, screenshots, website links,
etc and there response was basically the same. Something about their community
policy. I was forced to reply to the reviewer who eventually realized we were
not the same company and ended up removing the review. The whole process was a
huge waste of time and energy. Never again will I trust Glassdoor or anything
on it. By the way, there's no way to remove your company's profile. Think long
and hard before you create a profile there.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
This all seems quite reasonable though. You want people to be able to signal
terrible employers to the rest of the market. It really sucks that you got
stuck in that situation, but if Glassdoor starts agreeing to take down bad
reviews then they just turn into a shakedown racket like Yelp.

~~~
IntronExon
The review was for _the wrong company_ though!

 _I took a closer look at the review, and found out that the reviewer had
mentioned "our office" in Singapore. I did some digging and found another
company with the same name in Singapore. I reached out to Glassdoor again with
all this info, screenshots, website links, etc and there response was
basically the same._

------
calvinbhai
As an employee, I had a bad experience with Glassdoor.

I got shafted by my employer who promised to start the green card process
immediately on joining, managed (knowingly or not) to delay the start, and by
the time it started, they prepared the petition so weak, that it was too late
to complete the process before my 6yrs of h1b expired(because they had to redo
the petition a few times).

Now I explained this very clearly in my review and just mentioned that if you
are an high skilled immigrant who has precarious requirements, then don’t join
this company. In fact I added all the good things about the company, but
always made a point to glorify the fact that they screwed me and left me
jobless (because my authorization ended).

What happened to that review?

It never showed up in Glassdoor reviews for that company. And my account was
suspended. I thought there was some “pay to remove negative review” option for
employers.

Now, that employer has more than 4.5 stars average reviews, and its glowing
overall. If this is how Glassdoor works, I don’t think it is meant to help the
past, current, prospective employees.

~~~
Judgmentality
I've seen something similar with my company. I actually regularly check it,
and will notice negative reviews almost always disappear within a couple days
(positive reviews never disappear though). I emailed Glassdoor asking about
their community guidelines and how to ensure I could leave a review that
wouldn't be removed, and they responded with nothing of substance.

As far as I'm concerned, Glassdoor makes their money by pandering to the
companies who have a vested interest in hiding negative reviews and is an
unreliable source of information.

~~~
Udik
Same here, the company I used to work for had a lot of strongly negative
reviews by disgruntled employees (in fact the turnover was pretty high).
Magically most of them disappeared, while glowing positive ones have filled up
the void (all written in the same upbeat language that is the trademark of HR-
written job descriptions: "we work hard and play hard", etc.).

Glassdoor claimed some of the reviews were removed because they violated this
or that community standard. However, this wouldn't justify removing the
numerical score, would it?

------
aluminussoma
Despite what the article says, Glassdoor still hasn't solved the fake review
problem. The pay data is also woefully inaccurate. It works best only with a
combination of other sources.

The biggest impact to my career has been the semi-anonymous mobile app Blind.
I realized I was getting underpaid and I quickly fixed it. I thought I
negotiated hard in previous jobs but maybr it was all a ruse to make me feel
like I was getting the best salary. Glassdoor and Paysa had lower total
compensation numbers for my position.

~~~
aok1425
Best source of pay data I've seen is H1B pay info: h1bdata.info

~~~
aluminussoma
I used to think so but I think that is incorrect for the following two
reasons: \- Stock compensation is not included. This is significant now. \- I
believe the salary numbers are purposely underreported. The numbers are given
to show they are paying a professional wage. I heard (not confirmed) that
someone getting paid $200k/year in base salary can be reported as $150k/year,
since 150k clears the threshold. I saw salaries in my company that did not
reflect what I understand to be the market rate.

~~~
fencepost
I thought the conventional wisdom these days was to treat stock compensation
as nonexistent unless the company already IPOd because in so many cases you
end up paying to exercise and pay taxes on options that end up worthless.

------
tdumitrescu
I love this analogy: "Glassdoor upended workplace power dynamics in the same
way that Ratemyprofessors.com altered the power dynamics of college lecture
halls, where, suddenly, professors had to worry about whether their students
found them to be “inspirational” or “hot.”"

As a former professor I have always found that site unbelievably odious. Did
higher education improve when students (as paying "customers" of the
university) got the upper hand in areas like grading practices and curriculum-
setting? Does anyone think college education is in a better place today than
20 years ago, except the bizdev and admin staff? Surely Glassdoor could work
the same wonders for workplaces...

~~~
marcell
I agree with the concerns about professor rating. Students are in a weird
position where they are a “customer” in a sense but their incentives are not
aligned with the university for grading. They may ensure up paying $20k to
have a professor give them a (justified) failing grade.

For employees, it’s a bit better. It is reasonable to look for a good work
environment, and employers won’t always be upfront in an interview setting.
Having the inside scoop helps the potential employee.

~~~
solidsnack9000
Separating teaching and grading might fix this.

~~~
jimmybot
Is this realistic?

~~~
bowlich
Sure, my understanding is that's how Oxford works.

------
sidlls
I find the Glassdoor website unbearably slow and a terrible experience all
around.

The negative reviews for the engineering department at the company I work for
are mostly accurate. The positive reviews are almost all too generic or over
the top to be useful. Some of them are clearly written by HR in a PR campaign.

I'm actually surprised it has much of an impact, given how slow and horrible
the UX is and how easily gamed the review system is.

------
bgutierrez
I personally saw the reaction within Zillow Group when Spencer Rascoff got a
bad rating on Glassdoor. The reviewer was located, the review was quickly
deleted, and Spencer's rating continues to be a source of pride for him.

Don't get me wrong. He's extremely capable and will probably continue to run
ZG very well for years to come. But his Glassdoor rating should be lower and
it irks me every time I hear it touted.

------
code4tee
Glassdoor has a big problem with fake or bad data. The salary data is often
very inaccurate (at my last company we had people posting data for offices in
cities where we didn’t have offices and with salaries that were just not
true).

Fake reviews is also a problem—both positive and negotive reviews.

Glassdoor does little to help employers correct obviously bad information
although they are happy to sell you “premium” services where you can bury
things you don’t like further down the display of data. Their sales people
call this “featuring” content. Sigh.

~~~
erikb
I love how you put the whole business case into a single comment.

Officially they track an objective interpretation of the company. Only few
companies would really get positive review though. So they also offer a way
for the companies to improve their reviews for cash. And that is the main
income probably.

------
lkrubner
Consider a company that only has 1-Star and 5-Star reviews:

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-
Reviews-E659519.htm](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PrivCo-
Reviews-E659519.htm)

What should you think about a company that has no 2 or 3 or 4 star reviews? It
only has the extremes, nothing in the middle.

Someone writes:

" _Take a look at the distribution of reviews - either 5 star or 1 star. Seems
a bit fishy to me. Nonetheless, I would still rate my experience a 1._ "

Perhaps there are many companies like this?

~~~
kelnos
I think it's just selection bias: the people most likely to take the time to
write a review are those who either had an amazing experience or an abysmal
one. People with feelings in the middle usually aren't as motivated.

~~~
Clubber
I would say it is selection bias, but the people who had a miserable
experience wrote their reviews, and then management/ownership flooded the site
with 5 star reviews to offset the bad reviews (instead of fixing the company
of course).

------
goddamnsteve
Have been having a touch time fighting Glassdoor to remove fake reviews. I
have no clue whatsoever how Glassdoor verifies their reviews, and their
support is probably the worst I've ever experienced with any American company.
Not sure how much this is going to change or affect them. But still, thought I
should tell this out.

------
danieltillett
The question is if there is any signal in all the noise. In aggregate I assume
yes, but for individual companies with small numbers of reviews I have my
doubts.

------
stevenwoo
It's interesting to me they are using human moderators and Americans at that
(for what seems to be American/British companies) - I don't know much about
machine learning but it seems like this is the only way to do this somewhat
accurately given the expressiveness of written English. The current attempts
by the (admittedly much larger) Facebook and Google to use English literate in
foreign countries to moderate content is almost self parody at this point from
the examples given in that documentary that made the front page of hacker news
last month.

------
kazuki
A few months ago I've been interviewing with small startups (say companies
with 20 employees) and Glassdoor wasn't useful at all. These companies either
have no review at all (everyone is working so hard and don't have time to
write a review; or just is afraid writing something and later identified), or
have lots of 5-star review (which probably indicates management team asked
employees to write good reviews for hiring).

------
px1999
It's a shame that people don't see glassdoor for what it probably is - just
another shakedown racket (like yelp, tripadvisor, BBB etc).

------
noemit
Anything that strikes fear in the hearts of employers is good.

------
jordache
glassdoor pay data is stupidly innacurate.

Take a company that is headquartered in bay area. If they have an office in
location X where X != bay area, the est salary for that company in the context
of location X is always going to be much higher due to the bay area HQ. I
suspect they may not even filter out bay area salary estimates for location X
estimates.

There is no way company will pay for bay area salaries for sat location in
Omaha.

~~~
perfectstorm
I believe you can filter salaries by location.

------
perfectstorm
former Glassdoor employee here.

I see lot of people complaining about their reviews being removed from
Glassdoor (GD) site and the occasional allegation that GD take money to remove
negative reviews.

AFAIK glassdoor doesn't take money from any company to remove negative
reviews. I left GD a year ago so things could've changed since then but I
doubt it. People complain because their reviews were removed but have you read
it objectively ? Do you single out a particular person because that's against
GD rules.

I know a former coworker of mine (@GD) who left a 1 star review. His review
was promptly removed from GD page because he was bashing his manager. For a
small company like GD it's easy to figure out who that manager is based on the
employer title. After removing his review, he was given an opportunity to edit
it but he refused to edit it. I wrote an OK review for GD after I left and
it's still up there on GD site.

As for fake reviews it's hard to remove them automatically. A good number of
people uses those temporary email addresses to leave a review (10min emails)
so you can't really compare the email addresses. I guess they could compare
the IP addresses and remove duplicate submissions from the same IP ? But
sometimes multiple users share same IP (correct me if I'm wrong) so that would
result in more confusion and allegations.

When I joined GD any engineer could access the reviews table on
production/admin page but they have tightened it up since then. only selected
engineers have access to production table and they started implementing
granular controls on the admin page. I remember seeing fake reviews on my
previous employer's page but I chose not to flag them. My former employer's
CEO himself left more than three 5 star reviews to bump up his ratings.

Nowadays I use GD for job search, reviews, interviews and benefits research.
Salary data is very unreliable especially for engineers in the Bay Area. I
know they keep talking about archiving old salary data or making adjustments
but I don't know if they ever implemented it.

The thing about reviews is that you have to read it between the lines. If it's
a 5 star review and the only con says something like the commute sucks there's
a good chance that it's a fake review.

About Salary: they did release a Know Your Worth tool sometime in 2016 which
is pretty accurate in my case (Bay Area + Sr. Software Engineer). Ironically I
know a few people who left GD because of this tool :)

------
deviationblue
The pay data on glass door is almost always lower than the market.

~~~
drdeadringer
How can I tell?

~~~
deviationblue
Use other sites to compare, like Paysa.

------
DickScarington
Glassdoor routinely removes negative comments on companies.

~~~
xchip
I'd be interested in seeing any evidences of that, do you have any?

------
Zaheer
Glassdoor's effect in this space is undoubtedly huge and typically the first
stop for most people seriously considering an offer from a company. There are
several new players though that I think importantly complement Glassdoor in
different areas:

Salaries - www.Paysa.com

General Discussion - us.teamblind.com - Important because this is for current
occupation rather than Glassdoor's focus on future occupation

Leveling / Titles - www.levels.fyi - Disclosure: I work on this

------
holydude
I found glassdoor insanely accurate. It just really reflects the reality most
of the time. I observed at least 3 workplaces and it was exactly like the
reviews mentioned. Obviously it is harder to know if it applies to the whole
company or just your team but if you can do your research it is fairly
accurate

~~~
pcurve
I think the main problem with Glassdoor's rating system is, it can attract
high number of negative reviews when a company is going through rough patches,
such as mergers and acquisitions, lay offs and integrations. Then it's going
to be a steep uphill battle to climb out of that hole and improve the average
scores. If I were job hunting, I'd only look at reviews written in the past 18
months because things can and do improve quickly.

~~~
justin66
> If I were job hunting, I'd only look at reviews written in the past 18
> months because things can and do improve quickly.

I can offer one counterexample. I worked at a fairly awful place two and a
half years ago and the Glassdoor reviews reflected that awfulness. At some
point in the last year, management got wise and started planting hilariously,
obviously fake positive reviews to go alongside the negative reviews. HR also
started leaving comments on every single review, which had a chilling effect.

The average rating would certainly be higher over the past 18 months, but it's
not because anything has improved at the company. They're just better at
exploiting Glassdoor.

~~~
pcurve
Yes, I've witnessed that myself. On the flip side, those fake reviews:

1\. Are usually hilariously easy to spot. 2\. Beget more angry reviews with 1
star rating in attempt to neutralize their effect.

Hence, I'd read them pretty carefully to look for patterns.

------
draw_down
I worked at a place that started featuring Glassdoor reviews on pages about
companies (stock ticker pages). Shortly thereafter, they became one of
Glassdoor’s top places to work! Wow! Probably a coincidence.

------
DickScarington
Glassdoor routinely removes negative reviews.

------
ilamont
_The very idea of a website that encourages people to anonymously critique
employers is ludicrous and irresponsible. I think its use is widespread
because it makes money. That fact impresses HR executives and the public,
leading them all to base business decisions on admittedly untrustworthy
information.

Just think about it: Any disgruntled employee or job applicant can trash a
company publicly. An HR department can spam Glassdoor, singing its own
praises. (It seems this happened with the company you quit.) Honest comments
will get lost. Meanwhile, Glassdoor has no incentive to keep it all clean by
making participants accountable. (The argument for anonymity is that people
wouldn’t post honest comments if employers knew who they were. Duh. That
justifies graffiti?) They make money with every posting. That’s how Glassdoor
is like the job boards.

In fact, Glassdoor is a job board. Like LinkedIn, the site uses the honeypot
of “community” to lure you into an ulterior revenue model._

[https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-
glassdoor-...](https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/7453/can-i-trust-glassdoor-
reviews)

~~~
emodendroket
I'm not exactly surprised that as head hunter would dislike a service that
makes his job harder by reducing information asymmetry.

~~~
hux_
How do you tell if it's increasing Information corruption or reducing
Information asymmetry? Nobody has an objectitive view. Glassdoor isn't going
to come out and say they are producing negative population scale effects, just
like Facebook didn't.

Once upon a time when Wikileaks/Arab Spring was unfolding everyone thought
reducing information asymmetry would be net positive. But here we are with a
24*7 fake news culture in the "information age", and Snowden sitting in Russia
of all places.

~~~
emodendroket
I don't think "fake news" is actually a uniquely modern issue.

~~~
Clubber
It's not. It's the norm. It was once called "Yellow Journalism."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)

Reading the opening paragraph, to me it describes just about any news source
today:

 _Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a US term for a type of
journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and
instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.[1] Techniques may
include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering or sensationalism._

