
Ask HN: Are Glassdoor reviews a reliable indicator of a company's culture? - startupfreak
A particularly negative review of a London startup[0] by a former employee has been doing the rounds on social media recently. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of extremely positive reviews by current employees have suddenly cropped up for that company as well. So positive they feel a bit like HR plants. But then again, the original feels like a gleeful hatchet-job and is maybe a bit extreme going the other way.<p>Is Glassdoor reliable, and if not, are there any reliable alternatives?<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.glassdoor.co.uk&#x2F;Reviews&#x2F;Employee-Review-ROLI-RVW17219691.htm
======
llaith
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 company will hire a firm to write them positive reviews and
disparage those who have left bad reviews, and not realise that prospective
employees can completely tell the difference between the level of detail in
the negative reviews 'eg, there was a pm who used to try to physically
intimidate the female members of the team by leaning over them when he talked,
I saw this on a weekly basis for 6 months until he was promoted to the
programme manager and stopped working in our office', and the BS positive ones
like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews
are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.

You'll see what I mean as you read them.

Sites like glassdoor are the only safety net we have to protect ourselves from
those kinds of situations.

~~~
Balgair
Does anyone know how GD is funded? Is it ads or do companies pay somehow to be
listed?

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?

~~~
KGIII
So far, it looks like they are supported by VC funds. I can't find any info on
how they intend to become profitable but a few comments, drawn from memory,
suggest they are expecting to fund with ads and a couple of people have
suggested they will have a subscription service.

However, I can't find anything official about either and Wikipedia isn't very
helpful. They do have some information about their existing funding:

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

A part of me thinks this type of thing would make a good not-for-profit
enterprise. I'd even consider some sort of government backing. I'd say a
service like that has good social potentials and can help society to make
nformed choices.

~~~
Balgair
I'd think so as well! But as we have seen in healthcare and other sectors,
regulatory capture is possible, if not probable. Though, to be fair, the
credit bureaus are in a similar niche and they are frankly a catastrophe. It
seems that any 'word of mouth' type business or board that is of any use will
eventually become useless as they try to squeeze blood from turnips.
Subscriptions/payment may be better, like The Negro Motorist's Guidebook of
the 1950's.

~~~
KGIII
Yeah, I'd think it'd have to be a not-for-profit enterprise with some sort of
forced independence and verification. I keep mulling it over and thinking that
it's be simple to do, but each idea I come up with finds me also finding ways
it can be abused. So, it's not really that easy, I suppose.

------
nilkn
I don't really trust any Glassdoor reviews. I've always figured many positive
reviews are fake, and the problem with negative reviews is that they're often
written by disgruntled employees who are unable to reliably assess their own
contributions to problematic situations.

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.

~~~
john_moscow
_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._

If this happens consistently over a longer period of time, I'd say there's a
problem with conflict management in that company. Technically competent people
usually start pushing back if they see a better/simpler way of solving the
problem they are given, but instead of taking their feedback or giving
constructive criticism, the management just tries to shut them up.

~~~
nilkn
It's just a few cases in 10 years. I don't think there's much of a pattern
there. It's certainly not a perfect company, and conflict management is one of
the hardest parts of being a manager. But overall the situation you describe
was not the issue in these cases.

------
blakesterz
I've looked at a few companies only, and from what I've seen, in my limited
experience, is that the only people motivated to leave reviews were those who
were fired/layedoff/let go. So we're left with 100% negative reviews. These
are not tech companies, so no one working there has any idea that glassdoor
even exists. The place I work now has TERRIBLE reviews, and it's pretty
obvious who left the reviews, and it's obvious to me why they left those
reviews, but it does not reflect the reality of working here at all.

I guess I should go leave a positive review, but the motivation of an
angry/hurt person is WAY higher than those of us who are happy.

~~~
ep103
My company has two departments, a lot of amazon turk like manual labor for
things that haven't been automated yet, and a dev team automating the crap out
of everything. Dev is pretty good to work, most of the time. Manual labor
department is hell on earth. Reading glassdoor, the reviews are 95% negative
from the manual labor department, mixed with reviews from people we turned
down during interviews (our interview process used to be horrible), and about
two bad reviews from previous devs. One who was let go for basically being as
asshole (bad hire, not really his fault, life just got hard and he was young),
and one that had some legitimate complaints.

(shrug)

------
rothbardrand
Negative reviews seem to be pretty reliable, you have to have a motivation to
post them, even if the content may not be objectively accurate. I worked for a
company with terrible management and every time an employee would leave they
would leave a negative review.

However, glassdoor is not completely objective-- companies can get negative
reviews removed simply by complaining about them, and the quality control on
this is not good. So that means that over time the HR department can just keep
making accounts and complaining about the negative reviews and they disappear.

Thus if you leave a negative review you have to be a watchdog... and if it
gets removed, even without cause, glassdoor won't let you leave another one.

However they can't hold back the tide, here's a comment from a recent review
(redacted for privacy): " Forced "culture". It's explicitly stated that
culture fit is a huge part of this backwards company. If you are too tired to
go to a happy hour when the XXXX crew comes to town prepare for awkward
questions why and being told you're not supporting the culture if you don't
attend - by the CTO."

Reading the reviews of this company (that I worked at and know first hand) I
see a lot of negative recent reviews, but the overall score is 2.4... way too
high to be accurate.

HR is still grooming the reviews and leaving fake positives, to keep that
overall rating up, and the negatives are all relatively recent (though they
describe problems that have existed for 5 years.)

~~~
xenophon
There are all kinds of motivations to post a negative review, and not all of
those motivations map "reliably" to accuracy. Leaving a job can be traumatic
for employees for reasons that have nothing to do with the company's culture
or behavior--a disgruntled employee fired for cause has a strong motivation to
leave a bad review, but that doesn't mean it is reliable.

Glassdoor has the same pros and cons of any review aggregator. It is
susceptible to gaming (perhaps uniquely so, like Yelp, because the companies
being reviewed are also Glassdoor's advertisers). But it provides a
directionally accurate view of a corporate environment given a large enough
sample size of reviews--and as with any review, more credence should be given
to examples that are clear, detailed and well-written.

~~~
jonnathanson
The conflict of interest (companies are also advertisers) is powerful, and it
appears to be exerting a significant effect on the directional reliability of
aggregate reviews for any company large enough to be a major advertiser.
Companies can badger Glassdoor into removing negative reviews, and Glassdoor
will ask few to no questions before taking summary and unappealable action in
the company's favor.

The negative reviews are pretty much the _only_ interesting data points on the
site. Take them with a grain of salt, sure. But you have to take the positives
(especially large cohorts of positives over short time intervals) with the
whole freaking salt shaker. The aggregate scores offer some directional
guidance, but bear in mind that you are not looking at the total sample size
of reviews; you are looking at _the sample size after the company has culled
and gamed what it can_ , which is often quite a lot of the original pool.

This is sort of like the directional reliability of eBay scores, now that
there is a short decay on past reviews, and pretty much anyone with 10 minutes
on their hands can get negative reviews expunged.

------
davidcbc
I wouldn't take everything on Glassdoor at face value, but if there are
recurring negative themes in the reviews then that can be a red flag. I read
them the same way I read reviews on Amazon, I look at the distribution of
scores and then read a handful of each rating.

If there is a low distribution of 1 star ratings, then either the 1 star
people are outliers or there is some sort of incentive for the higher ratings
(either pressure from management to give positive reviews, or the company
could just pay for fake reviews). Sometimes this is obvious, like a bunch of
positive reviews that sound the same posted in a short timeframe, and
sometimes it isn't. At the end of the day it is going to be a gut feeling.

~~~
mancerayder
I'm 100% in agreement. I disagree with those who say that negative reviews are
more pure, and the 5-stars are HR / corporate drone-types. However, 'themes'
and patterns are what I look for. Several times I've validated the experience
of these negative themes, joining a place anyway or leaving a place and seeing
confirmation. And just the same, if the positive ones say eye-rolling things
like, "This place rewards the best, but they expect a lot from you. This is
not for 9-5 whimps. Grrr." then I also see that as a pattern.

Before I was a contractor [ where reviews mean much less as you're not
marrying your employer ], I'd take more of a Goldilocks approach to the
reviews. The outliers (like a product review on Amazon) have to be smoothed
out somewhat mentally.

------
framebit
This is not a direct answer to the question of GlassDoor reliability, but I
have found negative GlassDoor reviews something interesting to bring up in
interviews.

For example, I interviewed at a company that had a fair amount of negative
reviews on GlassDoor, as well as some positive ones that came across (in my
opinion) as astro-turfing. I brought this up with the guy doing my interview,
and it lead to an interesting discussion about the internal dynamics of the
company and what the real pros and cons are. His answer was basically that
Division X had some real issues but they were working on it, but this position
was going to be in Division Y which functioned in a different way. I
ultimately decided against this offer for different reasons, but I appreciated
the candor of the interviewer when I brought it up.

The usefulness of GlassDoor probably decreases as the company gets larger. I
doubt the reviews of, say, Google or IBM have any bearing on reality because
they're so massive and the experience inside the company is certainly not
universal. Likewise, it's probably not that accurate for tiny companies.

I'll close with a (guarded) anecdote. I happened to know from insiders that a
particular startup (~100 employees) was very dysfunctional and the leadership
had severe issues. The GlassDoor reviews had detailed scathing review after
detailed scathing review for a little while, then switched to entirely things
along the lines of "[ThisCompany] is great! It's sooo great! And I love the
leadership, especially [CTO who is a known jerk and known to be driving the
company into the ground]. He/She is tough but fair and sooo smart!" So, take
that anecdote for what it's worth.

------
Mitchhhs
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](https://www.transparentcareer.com)) and
we've tried to make all of this data quantitative and verify that the person
actually worked at the organization and what role they were in. We are getting
ready to release a qualitative type review/question answering system using the
same verification method and you will be able to see what department within
the company the review is in reference to.

I would love to hear how people think this could be done better as we are
currently developing the product and would love if it could solve this need in
the best way possible. Is employee verification the biggest problem or is it
something else?

~~~
nailer
> followed by HR getting wind of it and burying them in a ton of fake positive
> reviews.

Or even worse, from
[https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Lab49-Reviews-E257101.ht...](https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Lab49-Reviews-E257101.htm)

> * Requiring new joiners to write a Glass Door review as part of their on-
> boarding process, presumably in an attempt to improve their rating.

~~~
1_2__4
My last company was like this. Desperate to get people to write reviews their
first week.

~~~
Mitchhhs
Interesting, sounds like it would be useful to understand how long the person
has been at the company when the review was written.

------
brianwawok
It can be a red flag, but it is often not 100% of the truth.

The larger the company gets, the less useful glassdoor is. The same company
could have very awful very political teams, and very awesome and great teams.

More useful.. go out to the bar with your future team. If you didn't enjoy it,
then pass. If you enjoyed it, then think about working there.

------
basseq
Glassdoor is an interesting data point, but not "reliable" as a standalone
rating system for multiple reasons:

1\. It tends to attract complaints and unhappy (ex) employees more than
anything else. The ratings tend to skew low as a result. Look for common
themes, and take them with a grain of salt.

2\. Complaints can be specific to a department or role. Complaints about
Amazon, e.g., may be related to working in one of their distribution centers,
not in HQ/IT.

3\. Current employees don't tend to leave reviews. Unlike an annual employee
survey—which would be a better indicator if companies chose to publish
them—Glassdoor tends to ignore current employees.

~~~
scalesolved
A counter to your point #1, a few companies ago where I worked we were asked
on mass to provide positive reviews on Glassdoor to attract new candidates.

I think overall it's good for a quick check on morale if there are >20
reviews. The salary data is worthless, high earners within companies do _not_
advertise what they earn.

------
jmcgough
Every now I'll be contacted by a recruiter and look up their company on
glassdoor and see like a flood of 1 star reviews on it (both from applicants
and employees)... like you can tell that there was a mass exodus of employees
and that it's falling apart, so they're trying to rehire for those spots. You
inevitably also see a ton of recent five star reviews that say something like:

"Wow I don't understand these five star reviews, I'm totally a real person who
works here! Positives: <everything is amazing>; Negatives: <something
inconsequential>"

Anyways, that's when you politely decline to interview.

~~~
jmcgough
(one that contacted me years ago and apparently still exists is kind of
amazing to read: [https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Tobi-
Reviews-E315372.htm](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Tobi-
Reviews-E315372.htm))

~~~
s73ver_
"You can bring your dog, I think"

This kind of thing is generally a yes/no type of thing.

"There's a parking lot"

Wow, this company is reaching for the stars there!

(Note: I don't know where the company is located, but generally having a
parking lot isn't a bragging point.)

~~~
kvonhorn
Actually, if the company is located in an area where the housing is
unaffordable, then having a parking lot is indeed a bragging point. It means
you can live in your van super close to work.

------
rl3
Positive reviews can sometimes be just as valuable as negative reviews.

For example: I came across a company with many glowing 5-star reviews, and one
of those reviews was from a software developer who very matter-of-factly
stated that it was not a place for people who take issue with working overtime
on a regular basis, as if doing so was somehow a point of pride within that
company's culture.

Yeah, no thanks.

------
oceanghost
Personally, I've worked at companies far worse than described in this letter,
and if you think places like this don't exist you're young or foolish, or
both. I've seen real emotional, and psychological violence at companies
treated as everyday business. As an employee I was threatened for almost any
reason whereas managers sexual/racial harassment, rape, yes rape, were
dismissed as "he's just like that."

~~~
shivaodin
This is painfully accurate. With the recent barrage of sexual molestation
cases against employees at Uber, Akamai and the ilk, it is all the more
important to develop a transparent platform which rates companies.

~~~
oceanghost
You know what bothers me the most about this? There are no laws (in the US)
against abuse unless it is motivated by being a member of a protected class
(impossible to prove).

What does this say about us? "It's ok to abuse people, just do it equally."

------
rm999
A few years ago I was at a failing company. The quick influx of detailed
negative reviews (from people who were both still there and who had recently
left) was perhaps the only public indicator that things were going poorly. I
felt so terrible for all the people who were joining based on rosy promises
while glassdoor reviews laid it _all_ out.

So yeah, in many cases glassdoor is a strong signal. Don't just look at the
average rating, read the reviews from the past few months and look for trends
and red flags.

------
Peroni
>Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of extremely positive reviews by current
employees have suddenly cropped up for that company as well. So positive they
feel a bit like HR plants.

Most of the responses here are spot on but I want to address that one specific
point. It's highly unlikely those new reviews are HR plants. Instead, the
company is clearly aware of the negative review and the fact that it's getting
publicity and has asked/encouraged their current staff to post their own
reviews.

~~~
rco8786
This is the way I’ve seen it happen as well. I even had a past employer reach
out to me and straight up say that someone had left a nasty review and asked
if I would mind sharing my opinion of my time at th company on there. I did so
happily, and he obviously reached out knowing that I left on good terms and
would likely leave a positive review, but it was far from an HR plant.

------
whalesalad
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 that is so inaccurate. The
content opines that people of color would not be welcome at our organization.
I cannot tell you how completely FAR off that is from the truth. Diversity is
something we value tremendously. That being said, we are a tech company in the
agricultural space that is located in the midwest. The fact of the matter is:
our pool of candidates is simply _not that diverse_ to begin with.

Because we are a small startup focusing on survival, we hire the right person
for the job, regardless of their background! Ethnicity, sexual orientation,
gender, etc... is never part of the decision! When this sentiment was shared
with the organization, the reviewer interpreted it as "we do not care about
diversity and people of color". Not making a specific point to hire diverse
folks is NOT the same as not appreciating a diverse team!

Now this is almost a self fulfilling prophecy: a person of color might read
that post and be completely turned off from even giving our company a shot. It
hurts to imagine this scenario.

Long story short: the unhappy folks are usually the loudest and so I think
you'll tend to get the 'jade colored' glasses.

Another anecdote: my fiancee was warned by a friend who previously worked at a
company she was interviewing at. This person warned her that her manager was
mean and grumpy and she'd be unhappy there. My fiancee has been there for
months now without any problems whatsoever, and this manager tends to confide
in her more than others on the team.

So I think you need to use every available resource you can to gather data
points that can feed into your decision... but a lot of it needs to be taken
with a grain of salt.

~~~
hyperpape
> (and not just when it comes to the amount of melanin in your skin).

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".

~~~
whalesalad
Definitely not trying to downplay anything, quite the opposite. I was trying
to suggest that diversity involves more than just the color of your skin.

------
seem_2211
I take Glassdoor reviews in the same way I take Yelp Reviews. If there are 9
positive reviews, and a single negative review, that's probably not a problem.
If it's 50/50 and the majority of the positive reviews seem like slightly
changed variants on the same review, then I'm very suspicious.

~~~
wickawic
glassdoor seems like a great opportunity for fakespot.com to take a crack.
They don't have the same types of things they can reference though, since most
people probably don't have > 1 reviews on the site for cross-referencing.

------
innocentoldguy
I worked for about six months at one of the worst places of my 28-year
software engineering career. I left a negative review on Glassdoor when I
left, but Glassdoor removed the review after the company's HR department hit
them with a mountain of whinging.

I also interviewed with a well-known company two weeks ago and they told me,
during the interview, that they've had to have Glassdoor remove comments about
their idiotic interview quizzes. I still look at Glassdoor, but I don't take
it as seriously as I do reviews on Amazon or Yelp.

------
arwhatever
Glassdoor reviews are useful only if you manually read them individually and
critically judge each one for what it's worth.

A lot of negative reviews for my current employer are incredibly spot-on.

I had a very negative experience with my former employer, which currently has
11 reviews with a 4.9 star average, which led them to be rated the #10 best
employer in a very large tech market.

They were constantly explicitly threatened to fire people. Ran off 2 out of
their 3 founders, some of them very abruptly, jeopardizing the staff's pay and
benefits (and this was just a couple of months before winning that "best in
town" award). They either cynically produced horrible quality code for their
clients, or farmed you out as a body shop to local software teams that
couldn't attract their own talent directly, and for good reason.

Exactly 1 year later I now recognize exactly 1/3 of the bio/profiles listed on
their website, the other 2/3 being totally unrecognized and new.

When I left the place I had a negative sick time balance, which they offered
to write off, and also kept my health care running for an extra month after
the month that I departed. And during the same conversation they offered that
"we should not talk bad about each other," and of course they had the one
really nice guy have this conversation with me.

So now, I look for individual negative reviews which seem reasonably
articulate and unemotional, and if a place looks interesting enough, try to
queue these issues up for questions during a prospective interview.

------
quantumhobbit
Companies definitely try to inflate their rankings with fake or forced
reviews. But these are usually pretty easy to spot. They are often short vague
5-star reviews.

Read longer reviews and judge for yourself. Don’t trust the star ratings.

------
galeforcewinds
In my experience, the data points most accurate in Glassdoor are those related
to tone from the top and the CEO or owner. I've not seen one that didn't match
my experience either as an employee or as a customer.

But it's important to remember that these are static data points in time, so
there are certainly factors you should weigh based on other available data.
For public companies, it can be important to assess changes in organization
structure including and around the CEO. For private companies, sale of company
is worth considering, though that top leader may still be in place post-sale.

Depending on the role you intend to enter, a negative tone may be what you're
looking for -- lots of managers enter roles to help turn around a company.
That the problems have been called out directly provides an important starting
point in understanding whether you will actually be in a position to fix the
problem. And public disclosure of the problems also provides a clear target
for response through subsequent Marketing/PR and corporate improvements.

------
gxs
This prompted me to log in and check out reviews for the company where I work.

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.

------
raverbashing
I wouldn't trust one bad review. There are a lot of "haters" out there that
like to unfairly review some companies.

I would trust the ensemble and the overall tone of reviews

------
consultutah
No. Somehow, someone wrote a review for my company that has never had any
employees other than myself. Unless I have multiple personalities, then it was
me.

------
S_A_P
The companies with the best glassdoor reviews are most likely the companies
that know how to "hack" the system. For instance, a former consulting company
I worked for made leaving a "glassdoor review" semi mandantory as part of the
onboarding process. So right after you onboard with all the rah rah rah about
"unique culture" and "fun environment" you tend to leave a review to that
effect. This particular company tended to have a 5:1 ratio of "this place is
awesome" to "This place is awful" comments. I also think that if you see a lot
of responses from the CEO for negative reviews that lean toward defensive then
you need to view that as a red flag. I personally would see GD as one of
several indicators not a final word on where to work. If you can spot a trend
such as "So much unpaid overtime" or similar negative post, you can probably
trust it as being at least semi accurate. However, one persons great company
is anothers personal hell, so you need to decide if the place is a fit for
YOU.

That said, I am a big fan of ROLIs products, and the JUCE framework is a great
audio/plugin framework used by tons of companies in that arena. Seeing the 2/3
reviews makes me sorta sad, but I can see how they would have to be a lean,
long hour hard work wearing many hats kinda place. Building semi pricey gear
for musicians is a hard sell, as musicians are usually a lower income segment
of the population...

------
maxxxxx
I wouldn't take Glassdoor reviews as absolute truth but when I read the
reviews for my current company they generally are pretty accurate at giving
you a general sense of the place.

------
j-c-hewitt
Every single online review platform can be gamed by just soliciting reviews
from people who have just had a positive experience and shunting people who
have just had a negative experience to some kind of alternative channel where
their complaints can be hidden from the public and/or resolved.

The more aggressive the company is in managing public perception through
online review platforms, the more challenging it will be for anything negative
to get out there.

Companies have a strong incentive to systematically manipulate online review
systems. The people leaving the reviews 'organically' just have some intrinsic
motivation to write them. Over time the shills will win no matter what kind of
rules you set up to prevent it. To some extent also the capacity to run a good
shill program is a signal of the health of the business doing the shilling, so
it doesn't completely destroy the value of them.

The main way to counteract this kind of shilling is for objective and trusted
third parties to compare companies, products, etc. with tests that cannot be
faked and perhaps combined with some subjective evaluation. If the user is not
paying to maintain the accuracy and objectivity of the reviews that they're
using to inform their decision, then why should they expect it to be anything
other than some combination of shill-spam, the odd lunatic, and the
increasingly rare fair-minded and well-informed reviewer? The aggregate of all
those things is not necessarily the ideal wisdom-of-crowds outcome because all
of the inputs can be defrauded or otherwise manipulated in various directions.

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patmcguire
You can generally recognize a few broad themes pretty reliably. How strictly
or loosely things are structured, the power distance between management and
employees, etc. There are sometimes things too weird to make up that come
through (One I saw had a bunch of reviews like "great place except there are
too many dogs", "didn't get a promotion, hated it, tons of dogs", "great
benefits, love dogs in the office", "woof, terrible job")

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ayrnieu
I look at trends by job titles and I look for consistent incidental remarks,
not negativeness or positiveness.

Example of the first: when evaluating one employer there were many negative
reviews, but mostly from a particular high-churn part of the company; the
experience of easy-come easy-go customer-facing support may not tell you much
about the experience of someone even one level removed from that position. The
odd positive review was usually a higher-level tech, and even if they had a
negative outlook on the company or its future, such reviews would still add
"but don't listen to _these_ guys--they just couldn't hack it."

Example of the second, same company: it's very easy to get hired by this
company but training is limited and you could just as easily get fired for
poor performance -- i.e., the company's hiring requirements were significantly
less than their actual on-the-job skill requirements.

So I applied to this company based on mostly negative reviews. I was aiming
for a higher position, and I was confident in my ability while having very
little evidence of it: if their hiring requirements had actually matched the
job I got, I would never have gotten it.

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CityWanderer
Yes, I think they are very reliable. I worked for a London Startup that
currently has 100% negative reviews and I regret not looking at them before I
joined.

From what I've seen, a lot of good or decent places tend to have a general
positive rating, and the really bad ones are going to have multiple negative
reviews.

Take individual reviews with a grain of salt, but as a group I think it's
fairly accurate.

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hijinks
The positive ones are not.

I worked for a ecommerce company and the CEO gave anyone who wrote a positive
glassdoor review a $50 credit on the site.

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jedberg
When I've looked at the reviews of places I've worked, I've found them to be
reasonable, but often painting an incomplete picture. Most of them seem to be
from people who never really understood the work or the culture of the place,
and therefore didn't perform well.

Also, it will bias towards bad reviews. I've never posted a review of a place
I loved working at (and therefore never posted a review). I guess I should,
but it would probably just be assumed to be astroturfing.

One other issue is when there are multiple classes of workers. For example
Netflix has a lot of negative reviews from the folks who work in the DVD
warehouses. But their work environment has nothing to do with the software
engineering part of the company, which is the majority of the company, so it
skews negative. Amazon has a similar problem, where a lot of the reviews come
from the warehouse workers, who, for better or worse, get treated differently.

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eldavido
This is a textbook case of something every first-year statistics student
studies: voluntary response bias.

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

If I remember, things like these tend to draw out extremes, but the missing
middle tends to be more moderate.

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hamstercat
IMO, finding a job you like is so much about finding a place where you'll be
able to tolerate the bad sides. Negative reviews are the best places to find
that.

It's a fact of life that there are no perfect jobs, and the difference between
happiness and soul crushing is often about how you can deal with the negative
sides of your job.

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boffinism
Any anonymous system is open to abuse, or at the very least to distortion of
the truth. People who didn't like a company who left can say whatever they
like and are free to stretch the truth, and likewise companies can write their
own exaggeratedly positive reviews.

If you want to know what a company is like... go look for yourself?

~~~
rothbardrand
Companies are generally pretty good at not letting people who aren't company
cheerleaders do interviews.

~~~
boffinism
I have two counter-examples to this from my own experience.

The first is when I was asked to do interviews for my replacement after I
handed my notice in at one company. Everyone knew that I was leaving because I
hated it, I didn't even have another job lined up. But I was the person on my
team _least_ likely to give a bad impression of the company.

The second is when I was interviewing for a startup tech lead role. One of the
engineers gave me a tech test, then we had a chat, and I asked, "What's the
worst thing about the company?" She told me: "Basically the CEO has no idea
how software development works, or agile development, and we have loads of
arguments and it's really frustrating. We're trying to hire a tech lead to
shield us from that." Needless to say, I didn't take the job...

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robotfactory
Negative reviews can be removed from Glassdoor if the company works hard
enough. I know of a local employer who has tons of terrible feedback on
Glassdoor and devoted someone full time for several weeks to comb through the
reviews and get the most inflammatory removed.

I would take Glassdoor with a few grains of salt.

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darkstar999
No. I know of companies who have management post good reviews to minimize the
impact of a real negative reviews. One bad review from a real former employee?
Post five good reviews!

Also, I've seen evidence of one employee posting multiple bad reviews. It's a
bad system all around.

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JSeymourATL
> are there any reliable alternatives?

The Old School method was to ask around, find actual company insiders or
former employees.

These days it's relatively easy to find these individuals via a quick sort on
Linkedin. Simply, reach out and talk to these people direct.

~~~
s73ver_
How reliable is that? I mean, how honestly would you answer such a thing?

~~~
JSeymourATL
Can you gauge sincerity in a live 1:1 conversation?

If someone pinged you with a transparent motive-- _We share a mutual
connection in 'Mike D', I'm interested in learning more about your experience
in (company/ex-employer) because they a have a job opening I want to explore.
Would you be open to a brief 10 minute call/Skype?_

Wouldn't you tell that person the straight deal?

~~~
kvonhorn
I'd be concerned that anyone asking me for a 10 minute call or Skype was
trying to scam me or say something they would try to use against me. If I got
this kind of email and was inclined to reply, I'd advise them to check
Glassdoor.

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wavefunction
Negative reviews are accurate I believe. Obviously you have to take them with
a grain of salt but the positive ones seem to generally be written either by
HR or through exhortation of the employee base to paint the company in a great
light.

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ghostly_s
My employer is consistently ranked as one of Glassdoor's 'Best Places to
Work', and also regularly encourages staff to write reviews on the site
(though without any actual or implicit incentivizing, as far as I know). Make
of that what you will.

In my view, encouraging staff to speak honestly of their positive experiences
with the company is a reasonable objective from a PR perspective (this is
really a PR issue, not HR). Coercing such feedback of course would be
unethical, but I think it's awfully presumptuous to assume any company was
doing such just because some good reviews showed up with auspicious timing.

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DesiLurker
Just my 2c, I tend to give more weight to longer reviews unless they get
rambling or show some other obvious personal distortion. I also totally
discount short ones at either end of rating spectrum, for reasons.

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mankypro
A with most systems like CSATs and NPS Glassdoor ratings reflect the extremes,
those who have an axe to grind and those with an investment to protect the
brand of the company reviewed. Could be competing company shills, disgruntled
employees, those with emotional investments related their self-worth and such.
The truth always lie somewhere in between. The best thing to do is to talk to
employees and use your gut in the interview process or during your decision to
support the company as a customer as you interact with people there.

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subpixel
Reliable, no. Useful, yes, but mainly in the aggregate.

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.

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kyriakos
I left both good and bad reviews for bad employers but I do think negative
reviews are usually more reliable since employees who hate a company are more
likely to be bothered to write a review.

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bencollier49
Absolutely. I once made the mistake of ignoring a Glassdoor review and it
caused me no end of trouble. What a stinker of a company. The reviews were
completely accurate.

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southphillyman
I generally will give a firm the benefit of the doubt and discount 1 or 2 bad
reviews. When there is a consistent negative theme in the reviews then I trust
it completely. I have turned down several interviews because of Glassdoor
reviews and have bought up bad reviews during interviews. Everytime the HR
person has confirmed that the reviews had truth to them and that they were
working on the issue or it was already fixed.

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clavalle
No. They tend to skew negative, in my experience.

I once got a bad review because I had the audacity to quiz a candidate that
said they'd done work with databases before about SQL. We're talking 'what's
the difference between INNER and OUTER JOIN' level of questions. They were
interviewing for a position where they'd be expected to write plenty of SQL.
At that moment I completely discounted Glassdoor.

------
peterwwillis
Culture is often local, not global (to a company). A single team may have a
great culture, and the team sitting right next to them might be horrible.

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.

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nhumrich
A lot of people talk about how only upset employees leave a review, but the
opposite side f the spectrum also leaves reviews. Really happy employees also
write reviews. Distribution goes to the 5* and 1* For example, my current
company has 100% 5* reviews on glassdoor. I guess part of what incentives us
to leave reviews is that we are hiring like crazy, and want smart/good people
to work with us.

------
TwoNineFive
In years past, I had written two reviews for employers on Glassdoor.

One was positive, and it remains.

The negative review was removed.

I don't bother writing any reviews or using Glassdoor anymore.

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iDemonix
At my company the negative ones are all real, but positive ones (which
outnumber them) are mostly fake. I imagine a lot of companies are the same.

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mixmastamyk
Reviews often say more about the reviewer than the reviewee. Keeping that in
mind however, the reviews of my former employer were accurate.

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tmaly
It would be great if fakespot added GlassDoor reviews to their set. I would
love to see how well it could identify real verse paid for

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jotjotzzz
Glassdoor has been reliable in most cases in my experience. Watch out for the
warning bells and patterns negative/positive within the reviews, as they are
most likely true about that company. There are also companies that have HR
fake review their company, these reviews become pretty apparent as other
people will call them out on it.

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neerkumar
Glassdoor has a huge conflict of interest. Its customers are the companies
themselves.

And it is not just a review problem. Even for job interview questions, where I
work we were unhappy that someone wrote a detailed and correct answer to a
question we usually ask. HR emailed glassdoor and they removed the answer
saying it didn't comply with ToS.

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rajacombinator
You have to read them with a strong grain of salt and make your own judgment.
Most people don't like their jobs and aren't capable of writing a fair and
balanced review. But sometimes enough obvious red flags pop up, or too much
astroturfing, that can be reliable indicators.

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rudimental
Glassdoor is moderately reliable. Not sure of better alternatives - that would
be great.

HR often plants or strongly encourages employees directly or through managers
to post How Great Things Are Here. Negative reviews can go away mysteriously,
are buried. It's disconcerting. A lot like Yelp.

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itaintmebabe
A company I used to work for had a bad review posted (not by me). It was taken
down 2 days later.

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jonnycombust
Like any review site the reviews will always be either super positive or super
negative, and with Glassdoor I think this natural effect is heightened because
employment can be very emotional for people (versus a review of a burger on
Yelp, for example).

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mchesler
Having left a horrible company in the past and later decided to write a
negative review, I can tell you that my experience has definitely been that
Glassdoor is an awful indicator of a company, unless you're extremely picky
about the metrics.

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gdulli
My company changed a lot of stuff and as a result had a turnaround from high
engagement and low turnover to the opposite within the last year. But lots of
positive reviews still up there reflecting a company that doesn't exist
anymore.

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jghn
For my employer I'd say they are _if_ you manage to link the reviews to the
particular organizational unit as the culture and life of these can vary
wildly. Unfortunately an outsider is unlikely to be able to do this.

~~~
s73ver_
I think that's also a red flag. Do I really want to essentially play roulette
with hoping I find the one good team, or don't land on the one bad team?

~~~
jghn
It's a pretty multidisciplinary company. What I mean is if you're interested
in life as a software engineer it's going to be a lot different than life for
a bench biologist. There's no roulette involved, but it's not always obvious
which is which from the reviews.

~~~
s73ver_
Maybe for your company, but like, for Amazon, when all the bad stuff really
came out, one thing that people always said was, "It depends on what team
you're on." Do I really want to take the chance that I might end up on one of
the crappy teams?

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i_feel_great
I worked for QSuper in Brisbane, Australia. All the negative reviews are
accurate.

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mathattack
Generally accurate though it's possible for one person to generate a lot of
noise, and companies can talk a Glassdoor into removing reviews. (Generally on
the basis of it pinpointing one individual)

------
duncanmeech
Have you ever been asked to provide a positive review for a place that you
formerly worked at? I have, I suspect this is common.

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jdlyga
It's better than nothing.

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bg4
Ignore the outliers, look for the general trend.

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t1o5
I do think reviews are reliable source of current situation of a company, I
trust negatives ones more than the positives. Its not just for glassdoor but
for any reviews that you see on yelp,google or fb. I sift through the negative
reviews and try to find a common factor in the reviews, that would be a way to
validate the review.

I trust negative reviews more because if I had a good experience, I don't have
any incentive at all to login to a webpage, create credentials if its needed
and then go through the myriad of steps to post a positive review. But on the
other hand, if I had a bad experience, the only way to vent it out is by
giving them a bad review. I am willing to go through the hoops of signups and
surveys so that I post that one bad review about the service. There is an
incentive for me there.

Tailpiece: There are many services that you can purchase to write positive
reviews for your company/service. The trend to identify this is that whenever
there is a negative review, it gets buried by a bunch of near 5 star positive
reviews, mostly with a one liner review text.

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kapauldo
No, they're skewed toward disgruntled ex employees.

