I was working at a small (~30 person) company that had 9 developers leave within the span of a few months due to the same set of fundamental complaints.
Several people posted reviews on Glassdoor. The reviews were negative but did not violate Glassdoor's content policy as far as any of us could tell (no naming individuals or making personal accusations, etc). Company had a 1.x star rating for a time.
After a bit, the company becomes "actively engaged" on Glassdoor and responds to several of the complaints. Even posts a couple of 5-star reviews from managers praising the company. Whatever.
Anyway, shortly after that one of us noticed that several of the negative reviews had disappeared. Someone logged in and saw that their review had been rejected for "violating the content policy." Their best guess was that someone from the company had flagged it and Glassdoor took it down, and that's where I have two issues with Glassdoor that inform my perspective on the quality of their reviews:
1. They did not notify the people whose reviews were taken down that their review had been removed. If they hadn't been closely following the company's profile they never would have noticed.
2. Glassdoor didn't provide any specific feedback on why the review was taken down.
So, because of this experience I don't have much faith in Glassdoor reviews to be accurate: I believe that Glassdoor makes it possible for companies who want to "manage" their profile to do so. I don't think they do it explicitly, but it certainly looks to me like their process is designed to enable it. Also, this lines up with their incentives: they make their money from the employers, no?
Our experience was somewhat different. Most of the reviews were initially posted. One was rejected for a reason that did actually make sense, but was approved with changes. It wasn't until later that they were rejected and quietly removed.
To add to that. I feel like they encourage shit posting when they force users to leave a review to read other reviews. Some people might get grumpy from that alone and leave some bullshit.
A startup had some turnover and several negative glassdoor reviews (none of which were mine). At this point, HR started posting absurdly fake reviews and then a week or two later all but one of the negative reviews had been removed.
The company even went so far as to announce in an all-hands how detrimental it was to post negative reviews on Glassdoor and solicited any and all positive feedback.
I generally operate on the heuristic that negative reviews (if well written) are accurate while positive reviews are never accurate.
Modern companies cannot “be good” in any ways other than high compensation, consistently high end benefits, and retraining people instead of firing them.
Any other description of a good attribute must be ignored. Even if it’s accurate, the company has no obligation to keep it that way, you don’t know the deep political story about it, these are rarely promises anyone can enforce.
Most companies are wildly horrible places to work, in ways that have been studied and documented since Moral Mazes.
This is why it’s imperative to negotiate very uncompromisingly on things like salary, bonuses, and severance agreements, no matter how much people pressure you to believe you can’t negotiate them.
To win a job negotiation you simply have to not want what the other person is offering, and the reason is simple: every job that anyone ever tries to sell you on, for all time, is a total lemon, and ought to require exactly what you want to be paid to do that job. Any time you walk away from a job, you’re making the right choice, because avoidance of the cognitive and behavoral dysfunction that any organization will beat you with (emphatically not hyperbole) is better for you in the long run.
The only reasonable exception is when you’re truly desperate because of some resource depletion, like you’ve been unemployed and have no choice but to compromise. Obviously you can compromise on other dimensions if you just happen to want to, but from the point of view of the business transaction that is a job, the only practically enforceable parts are stated compensation and benefits you can get in writing.
The earlier you realize you must look at all forms of employment this way, the better off you’ll be.
I've worked at three companies and enjoyed them all. Your negativity can be true, but I don't think it's always true. It could be that it's impossible for any one company to be all things to all people. Individuals have different tastes and compatibilities.
Whether you’ve enjoyed working at some place is not relevant. The point is that if you base a decision on aspects of a job you can’t enforce, then what you enjoy about it can change on the whim of some other people, no matter what they verbally promise or reassure you about. It is much harder to do the same thing with stated compensation or certain other benefits.
I’ve had jobs I really enjoyed, then a manager quit unexpectedly and the replacement made the job horrible. I’ve enjoyed perks like working from home, then the CTO changed and disallowed all remote work. I’ve enjoyed a quiet and private office, then HR decided to rebrand us as a hip cargo-cult startup and suddenly I had to do my job embedded in a never ending stream of audio disruptions that headphones can’t mitigate.
If you’ve only had generally pleasant job experiences, then from everyone else’s point of view, your approach is so clouded by insane selection bias due to the absurd rarity of that experience that effectively your perspective has to be ignored for practical decision making.
I also strongly dispute the idea that any part of what I wrote is negativity, not at all. It’s not cynical, not hyperbolic, not an over-generalization. It is a perfectly neutral perspective that accounts for the necessary degree of caution and skepticism you have to have when dealing with an entity (a corporation) that is essentially a legalized sociopath.
"Whether you’ve enjoyed working at some place is not relevant."
It's very relevant.
"The point is that if you base a decision on aspects of a job you can’t enforce, then what you enjoy about it can change on the whim of some other people, "
This is called life; you don't control the Universe.
I suggest this has nothing to do with employment, or GlassDoor reviews, and more of a borderline nihilist take on life in general.
About 90% of Americans enjoy their work on some level [1], and about 50% are 'very satisfied' (58% for folks with Uni), and though most of us would probably quit and sunbathe or golf all day, we don't have that option and so we work together to make a better future for ourselves, our children and our communities.
We all like to gripe, and even in the most perfect circumstances we'll have a tendency to externalize most of our unhappiness and attribute it to other things.
'The system' is pretty good, better than it's ever been, even massively better than it was maybe only three generations ago when most of us were on farms, mines or factories.
It's always healthy to be skeptical and realistic about companies goals.
"If you’ve only had generally pleasant job experiences, then from everyone else’s point of view, your approach is so clouded by insane selection bias"
Given that the vast majority of folks are generally satisfied with their jobs, you might be the one with the 'perspective bias' due to perhaps a bad experience or two, because again - 90% of people are generally satisfied with their jobs, I'll gather you might personally have been somewhere in that 10%, and that the commenter's experience is more normative.
> “This is called life; you don't control the Universe.”
This too is not relevant.
> “About 90% of Americans enjoy their work on some level [1], and about 50% are 'very satisfied' (58% for folks with Uni)”
This is not compatible with either common sense observation nor other hard data such as [1] - [5] below. I utterly do not believe 90% of Americans enjoy their work on some level, even after reading the citation you gave and reflecting on it. That just doesn’t comport with vast other data on the topic.
> “'The system' is pretty good, better than it's ever been, even massively better than it was maybe only three generations ago when most of us were on farms, mines or factories.”
This also seems irrelevant. Just because a very bad thing is perhaps better than it used to be doesn’t make it good, neutral or undeserving of focused skepticism.
> “Given that the vast majority of folks are generally satisfied with their jobs”
They aren’t, and this point invalidates your perspective in your reply as far as I can tell.
The summary among all these is that somewhere between 50% and 85% of Americans “hate their jobs” and only around 13% of employees are engaged in their work (not mentally checked out).
Given the breadth and consistently large effect sizes seen in the numbers reporting they hate their jobs, I simply do not believe the lone YouGov survey with contradictory results has an appropriate methodology.
Your literally arguing that 'Whether you’ve enjoyed working at some place is not relevant' ... and then you provide a bunch of data points to try to prove 'job happiness' one way or the other, as though it's relevant?
You arguing the sky is blue, and then not blue in the next sentence? Which is it?
...
"The summary among all these is that somewhere between 50% and 85% of Americans “hate their jobs” and only around 13% of employees are engaged in their work (not mentally checked out)."
This is absolutely false and there is no reading of those five references (3 of which are irrelevant) which indicates this. The data I provided is more nuanced and reveals that even among the 50% that are 'not satisfied' when given an either or choice, most even those are still at least 'somewhat satisfied'. 'Perfect job satisfaction' was never the objective. Less than 10% 'hate their jobs'.
...
(People happy at work) "This is not compatible with either common sense observation nor other hard data such as"
It is common sense to anyone who's paying attention. Most people are ok with their jobs, and most of the rest are somewhat satisfied - as the data shows.
If you need a house, either you work->get money->pay to have it built - or you build it yourself. Clearly, most of us would prefer to be on the beach than do 'work' ... but if you want a house, you have to do 'work' one way or another, most people understand that reality and are fine with it.
...
"I also strongly dispute the idea that any part of what I wrote is negativity, not at all. It’s not cynical, not hyperbolic, not an over-generalization. It is a perfectly neutral"
Because your position is based on bad facts it is effectively hyperbolic and nihilist.
> “Your [sic] literally arguing that 'Whether you’ve enjoyed working at some place is not relevant' ... and then you provide a bunch of data points to try to prove 'job happiness' one way or the other, as though it's relevant?”
I have not argued that.
I have said that you should consider other reports of someone being happy at a job for reasons other than compensation, benefits or job security as irrelevant because if you infer you’ll be happy based in other factors, which are more easily changed on a whim (thus leading to widespread reported unhappiness at jobs), you set yourself up to make a choice that makes you unhappy.
> “You [sic] arguing the sky is blue, and then not blue in the next sentence? Which is it?”
It seems you’re in a rush to argue, so I’m going to disengage here. I’ve read and reflected on your comment, re-read your source, my five sources, and the polls they link to, and I am just going to agree to disagree with you. You’re invested in “being right” about this but the data don’t support what you’re saying. The interpretation is not “more nuanced” in this case, and it is only one single study claiming that fewer than 10% hate their jobs, with a methodology that conflicts with the surveys historically used to guage that.
I believe you’re wrong, you are responding in a purely reactionary way, and I’m not taking the bait.
> I’ve read and reflected on your comment, re-read your source, my five sources, and the polls they link to, and I am just going to agree to disagree with you. You’re invested in “being right” about this but the data don’t support what you’re saying.
Actually I agree with the other poster that your sources are claiming something else or something much weaker than you do. Your claims of "being neutral" and appeals to "common sense" confirm you have extremely negative bias on this matter. And, considering the quote above, completely blind to it.
Btw if anyone can actually get some proper data on the topic I would be interested in seeing them. My anecdata are not really decisive in either way.
The good thing is that it doesn’t matter if you agree or not, nor if I do. The linked sources are listed above, with direct links to the engagement polls from Gallup.
Even in light of your comment, I still don’t see any evidence that my view is a negatively biased interpretation.
Your comment does read like an ad hominem though, which makes me question your participation in this comment thread. You’re not seeking data, except a throw-away comment at the end that is a bad attempt to undermine the quality of the data already linked in the Gallup polls. You’re seemingly only here to criticize subjective aspects of my reply.
Awesome comment. I wish that more people understood the system where we work. But I guess that most people are sheep, and there is less cognitive dissonance when you believe that free market is something good, and leaders are doing good things for society, and that salary and job creation are somehow inexorably tied to the status quo of the wealthy and powerful.
My old company's reviews are full of lies (through omission). Basically, the company fights vigorously with anyone who posts a negative review (and they somehow manage getting them removed). Anyone who posts a positive review remains :)
Alternative to Glassdoor: Ask an insider. Find old (former) employees on Linked to discuss. Check attrition---the best measure (how many folks joined the firm recently - how many left). If it's a revolving door, don't go there.
the alternative is 1000x harder than just opening Glassdoor's website. We should make an open alternative to Glassdoor that has no financial incentive to please the employers. I feel like this is real important.
Individuals' resumes on LinkedIn could be used to identify companies' attrition rates, though it would miss outliers where people omitted a company from their resume.
I personally don't give Glassdoor reviews any credence, and I've never checked the site during the process of engaging with a potential employer. I think there is too much potential for bias in both directions: people who are leaving often have emotional laundry to air, and people who are staying often have a corresponding need to defend that choice. It just seems to me like any actually useful information is likely to be overwhelmed by these factors. Instead of using a site like Glassdoor that attracts people with these sort of motivations I would rather gather my information on the side band from other sources: who works there, github repos, articles employees have posted, offhand comments on hacker news, etc.
I have worked at one company that paid employees for fake positive reviews.
I’ve worked at another company that ran witch hunts on a regular basis in order to flush out the authors of negative reviews. Management spent time reading between the lines in order to figure out who the authors were based on their writing style.
I had a lot of fun with them by posting truthful negative reviews written in a variety of styles that matched no particular person’s style in full, yet left management believing that they were on the cusp of identifying the author. It was a lot of fun until I realized that these asshats were spending valuable time on stupidity instead of righting the ship, but by then it was already too late.
Anecdotally and just from my own experience they've been accurate but often lack context for an outsider to correctly interpret them.
I have seen cases where the reviews are mixed and they're generally accurate. The problem is that they're describing different departments and a candidate on the outside would not know that, so they'd not understand that one department is a lot more pleasant than another.
The description of my company is accurate, both in the positive and the negatives.
While the interpretation of the positive is usually straightforward, the negative should be taken in context.
An example is "outdated technology". We have both outdated and bleeding edge tech. The outdated part is for some critical legacy software which cannot be refractored for good and bad reasons.
The complaint should rather be "when I was hired or was not made clear that I would be working on X". Those who were told that and accepted the job are happy with the tech.
>I have seen cases where the reviews are mixed and they're generally accurate. The problem is that they're describing different departments and a candidate on the outside would not know that, so they'd not understand that one department is a lot more pleasant than another.
Yes, for example I'll often notice large companies like Google have "work life balance" listed a both a pro... and a con. (Because different teams have different cultures)
From my experience the people writing the most glowing positive reviews are doing it to get you to work there as they are somehow involved in hiring and do so to counter any of the genuine negative reviews. I have seen this happen first hand as a push by a recruitment team once a few honest negative reviews appeared.
There are enough people within a company with a vested interest in having a good image on glassdoor to create a strong inventive to make it look better than it is.
In my experience they used to be extremely accurate until 1-2 years ago. I believe that in the last two yers companies are beginning to pay more attention and try to do the possible to overcome bad reviews. I agree on the complete lack of context. In general they are still a good tool but as already said they must be taken with a grain of salt.
I have some friends with knowledge of companies that are rated as a "best place to work" by Glassdoor. The companies heavily promote their achievement on social media and during recruiting. My friends tell me about the shocking number of employment lawsuits these companies have settled, incredible employee turnover, and general egregious things happening within the company. Unfortunately, non-disclosure agreements prevent those stories from ever really surfacing.
I've heard enough to take all Glassdoor reviews and ratings with a huge grain of salt. At this point, companies actively advertising their Glassdoor status is more a red flag for me, in the same way the I never stay at a hotel that advertises it has clean rooms. If you have to explicitly tell me you're a good place to work, then you probably aren't.
I have a friend who I often chat about job searching with (we're both on the market). They recently had a shockingly bad experiece with a company that prides itself by it's glassdoor rating.
They told me they don't plan on writing a review, because they're worried said company may intuit who wrote they review and blacklist them from future hiring. They insist they must have had an outlier experience.
I can see how this attitude in aggregate, coupled with NDAs laden hush money leads to an inaccurate picture...
In my experience, it's best to look at companies with Glassdoor reviews collectively along a single axis: Are they really bad? Or are they potentially not really bad? I usually try to find a shortcut along a path less traveled, and so I take to LinkedIn or Github (or IRC!) to find people working the job I'm looking for at the company I'm interested in, and then talk to those people. Glassdoor can sometimes reveal when companies have recently been a really terrible deal for employees, but I've had more than one negative review not even make it past moderation (for no reason I could discern). They're clearly scrubbing the stains from company images, one way or the other.
From personal experience, you can scrub bad reviews by writing to their support and claiming that something fishy is going on.
They will investigate and will not tell you the exact results, but if some reviews look like they were posted from the same browser and IP address, they will be deleted.
I previously worked for company X, employing some technology workers but X was primarily not a technology company.
Somehow there existed in Glass Glassdoor a "Company X" company as well as a "Company X Technology" company, which was serving as a magnet to attract some exceedingly low reviews, even as compared to the primary "Company X" company. Company X had an average rating of about 3.5 from thousands of employees, whereas Company X Technology had an average review of < 2.0 from a few dozen employees.
There was no organizational ambiguity whatsoever which should have resulted in there being 2 separate company records, any more than there should have been separate "companies" for HR, Accounting, etc.
I contacted Glassdoor, and after some back and forth they said they would do nothing to fix the nonsensical company split without the approval of Company X, because Company X was a paying customer of Glassdoor.
Although I do not have any reason to suspect the integrity of value of the actually reviews themselves, the profit-based dishonesty that Glassdoor itself demonstrated, created some doubt in what I see on their site. I doubt most prospective job seekers happen to notice two separate companies, either (or both) of which it might behoove them to peruse.
... and I also worked at one place which paid various informal bonuses to departing employees, asking that "we don't say anything negative about each other," an effective strategy which led to them being selected as a top software company to work at in a very software focused city, although believe me when I say that it was not a top company to work at.
There is a substantial amount of astroturfing on Glassdoor. Best to read the neutral and negative reviews, and ignore the positive ones and overall rating.
I buy that there is a lot of astroturfing, but there's a lot of griping as well. Leaving an employment situation is always an odd time, it's hard for us to be objective. Franky I always look at the experience very differently two years out.
As always with reviews: The more negative the experience, the higher the chance someone will post a review. So I usually ignore the 1 star reviews and go more for the 3 star reviews etc.
But really, just read the review rather than looking at the rating. Even then keep in mind that most happy people don't post reviews online (unless it's really good).
Depends. From what I've seen, they don't verify the user actually worked at the company in question. Or at least, it doesn't work too well, since I've seen people accidentally leaving their reviews on companies with similar names to their own rather than the actual one(there had never been someone with said name at the company in question, and they were from the other side of the world). I've also heard a few cases of ex employees each leaving multiple negative reviews under the same job title, and employers getting the site to remove reviews that made them look bad.
Some company pages probably have more accurate reviews than others though. Depends how hard the company fights to get negative ones taken down, or how many disgruntled users/non employees leave reviews on it.
Hmm, you're right. That is an issue, especially when there's bad blood between the employer and employee, and the latter doesn't want it on their CV or LinkedIn.
But that also means everything from Glassdoor needs to be treated with a pinch of salt. A non employee can write lies, a competitor can write lies with fake accounts, a boss can make fake accounts for non existent employees, employees can be coerced by those in power... you can never really be sure of anything there.
Since you asked "Do the expectations the site give match up with what you have experienced?" I'll say no, at least where I'm working now,the reviews do not match my experience here at all. The reviews are rather negative, written by people who quit because they didn't like it, or were fired for various reasons. So most of the people motivated to write reviews had reason to write only negative reviews. I'm super happy here and haven't written a review.
Ie, genuine negative statements are hard to fake (you can tell if someone has an axe to grind, vs a detailed report about practices that are believable but bad). However companies that had bad reviews one they get wind of them often ask staff to write good ones, and a lot of them have a culture where not doing a favour will hurt you.
I knew an investment advisory firm's record. I wanted to see what employees would say about the firm on Glassdoor.
Employees that had left gave me a good indication of the firm's prowess. The review's were accurate from employees. Employees gave negative reviews. (Former management gave glowing reviews.)
Many years ago, I read reviews about Google before joining. None of what I experienced matched what was stated or only did so "technically." Even now, the reviews still sound the same. Either I had an unusual (ly poor) experience, or the reviews are questionable.
Honesty only comes from someone angry at 2am with a MacBook Pro. I feel many negative reviews are revealing - but take it with a grain of salt because the good reviews just DON'T have the same amount of passion.
1. Those who have carefully positioned themselves to be able to speak their own mind without cutting their throat.
2. People willing to take the consequences of speaking their mind.
Sometimes, enough anger creates a person of the second sort. But anger per se is not actually evidence of veracity. It can introduce bias of its own. It can also be evidence that the person who is angry is a problem person.
Conversely, someone angry at 2am might ignore critical details to drive their point home. Often people are likely to blame others and take no ownership of their issues.
I recall a bad review where I knew the person and the company. Something about the company being shit and not intoducing modern processes. On the other side, the business heard and objectively rejected his solutions because they would break customer's workflows and expectations. The company was working on modernization, but it was too slow for this guy and had to be done more careful than he cared for.
Reading a company's Glassdoor reviews takes practice, similar to how judging wheather you will like a movie based on the Imdb reviews, or whether ou should buy a product on Amazon based on the reviews. You get better at it by working at a lot of companies and seeing various failure/success cases [and matching them to how it looks on Glassdoor]. Your NN needs a few training cycles to make good predictions :)
Assuming we're talking about tech/startup companies, keep in mind that in some sense, almost all companies (with the exception of a couple/year) eventually become "failures". What I mean is that all these companies raise money by making big promises, but then very few hit their goals: almost nobody becomes the next FB/G/Uber/Dropbox/Spotify. Somewhere between year 5-10 these companies "fail", and by fail I mean their YoY growth goes below ~25%. At this point all companies start trashing: old talent will leave, and a cycle starts, where different things are tried ("we need microservices!", "we need an experiences product guy to tell us what to do!", "our engineers are not good enough!", "we need to hire more people in the US!", "we need to push hard on sales!"), almost always by hiring new managers, who then hire new people with this focus, etc. Again, this almost always doesn't work out, we know this simply because there are only so many G/FB/etc. During this cycle, as people come and go, focus is changed, pivots are made, it leads to churn. Most companies also experience layoffs, or at least partial layoffs [in some teams].
What I wrote above, almost all companies have that, even the ones where otherwise the culture is okay/good, people are honest, the co-founders are well meaning, etc. So in the "best case", you should expect to find an imprint of the above on Glassdoor. If additionally there are "stupid"/people/culture problems, like "the Head of Product is never in the office" or "the CTO thinks we should write webapps in x86 Assembly" or "the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing refuse to talk to each other", "the COO is an asshole" you should be able to pick that up from the reviews. (Btw. read `Bad Blood` about Theranos for some good stories...)
For a company that's super-young, like <5 yrs, I would want there to be good growth, no culture problems, so I would expect the company to have excellent Glassdoor reviews. Later stage companies, I would expect a good mix of bad and good reviews, and I would keep an eye out for culture/people comments, esp. if there are many saying the same thing. For BigCos like FB/G, it doesn't make sense to read Glassdoor, it generally makes sense to work there, and your experience will depend on what role/team you end up in.
Another thing, I generally disregard reviews that are written by people who still work there. I think reviews by people who left are more valuable. I think the principal component I look at it, of the people who are no longer there, what % leave a mostly negative review, and what % leave a very negative review (and are these highly correlated). Based on the last 2, with calibration, you should be able to get a reasonable picture.
Some companies make employees sign a non-disparagement agreement when people leave. If you write a negative review on glassdoor and they figure out you wrote it, you’d be violating that agreement. I don’t think you have to sign this agreement though.
The premise that you'd have to sign anything to leave any job in the US is ridiculous. I certainly never do. One employer tried to get me to sign a non-compete after I gave notice and only did so because it was laughably unenforcable in Oregon for my position
I was working at a small (~30 person) company that had 9 developers leave within the span of a few months due to the same set of fundamental complaints.
Several people posted reviews on Glassdoor. The reviews were negative but did not violate Glassdoor's content policy as far as any of us could tell (no naming individuals or making personal accusations, etc). Company had a 1.x star rating for a time.
After a bit, the company becomes "actively engaged" on Glassdoor and responds to several of the complaints. Even posts a couple of 5-star reviews from managers praising the company. Whatever.
Anyway, shortly after that one of us noticed that several of the negative reviews had disappeared. Someone logged in and saw that their review had been rejected for "violating the content policy." Their best guess was that someone from the company had flagged it and Glassdoor took it down, and that's where I have two issues with Glassdoor that inform my perspective on the quality of their reviews:
1. They did not notify the people whose reviews were taken down that their review had been removed. If they hadn't been closely following the company's profile they never would have noticed.
2. Glassdoor didn't provide any specific feedback on why the review was taken down.
So, because of this experience I don't have much faith in Glassdoor reviews to be accurate: I believe that Glassdoor makes it possible for companies who want to "manage" their profile to do so. I don't think they do it explicitly, but it certainly looks to me like their process is designed to enable it. Also, this lines up with their incentives: they make their money from the employers, no?