If anybody doesn't think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds "at risk employees" which they didn't define but said it included signals such as "they updated their linked in recently" as a signal that they may be on the job hunt.
You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment/job/interview behaviors.
Let them squirm. Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives. Take it even to starting a union if needed.
You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.
The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable.
The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.
> Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives.
If you're working for a company that actively monitors this sort of thing, I don't think that management's response will be "let's make our employees; lives better."
Employers and recruiters are always bewildered when I say I don't have a LinkedIn account, or a public Github profile (I have a few tiny open source projects I maintain, but they are all pseudonymous) - and this is exactly why.
I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.
It's by no means a limiting factor if they don't have one, but when I'm interviewing for mid - staff+ level engineers in my specific field I absolutely love when they have some sort of project portfolio I can look at. Github, Gitlab, medium, whatever.
I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this persons interests and skills over and over again.
When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice.
But I also couldn't care less about being "creeped" on. Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.
You're using a completely random throwaway nick to stay anonymous on here, while I've literally gotten jobs from hn and grown my career from it. Just like I did on IRC when I was 13. It's an interesting difference of use.
I don't mean one is better or worse at all and I totally get wanting to be anonymous.
For the vast majority of developers, this is the smarter choice. If you contribute to a very popular project, it might be different. But otherwise keep a bit of privacy.
Companies already tried to get rights to software created in your free time. Why even allow any attack surface here?
I've never really seen retention risk tooling used for evil in the way that most HN readers seem to think it is; it's kind of interesting and eye-opening to me to see the strong negative sentiment towards it.
I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be greatly in an employee's best interest, as it would be another justification to the higher-ups for a raise or better job assignment.
To be clear, I'm personally generally against these kind of panopticon data-slurp initiatives overall, I'm just surprised that the initial reaction is so strongly "my manager will use this to fire me" when I've only ever seen the opposite.
For me it is more like: "my manager sees that I'm looking for a job", and I really rather tell him that I will be leaving, as soon as I'm certain of a new job. It's none of his business before that point.
I remember reading a blog post by an employee that had gotten on the wrong side of google. When he came in their crosshairs, he said all his google machines forcibly updated themselves, and it became clear he was closely monitored.
I think the idea is that decent relationships have good boundaries, and proactively maintaining them is a worthwhile endeavor. This is especially important when there is a power relationship.
Well the article is about glassdoor, which is where you write reviews.
You better believe that if databrokers will buy information on whether you updated linked in that they'd also buy information on whether you gave the company a 1 star review.
Heck, you can even post your salary to glassdoor, so maybe your next employer would buy that information so they know the least they could offer you.
I've never even heard of these tools before now, but my impression is the same as yours: the people they flag are more likely to be the kind of people that you want to keep.
The basic assumption at play here is that data about you that you don't control is likely going to end up being used against you, which I think isn't unreasonable. Flawed risk metrics, even if they are only used to benefit those who are flagged, may still turn out to be unfavorable for some employees (eg for the false negatives).
It reminds of a concept, which barring a better name, is "action through inaction" — if you know an employee is unhappy through external signals like these, you could make the active effort to not engage with them knowing that it may lead them to quit; instead of a lengthy severance/redundancy discussion.
I've seen similar insights, derived from a person's social-graph through email exchanges, and it was decided to not be used by managers as it could be a liability.
This can be a positive too, proactive dive & save to retain an employee who's manager feel they're about to leave isn't unheard of in my company.
If you're good at your job and highly rated there should be obvious signs when they're trying to preemptively backfill you and at that point you can just communicate about how excited you are about your growth at the company or something to make them take a step back.
I think this was done to me. I didn't even signin or anything, just looked around at what options are out there and started getting questions about my plans to leave.
What I've learned is if you plan to change jobs assume everyone at your current job will find out the minute you have an interview booked. Only applies to big companies that pay 3rd parties to monitor their employees like that though.
Sometimes I wish we had germany's privacy laws for employees in the US.
The trouble is, often it can't be helped, management, and sometimes whole companies often change hands. In the firm I work at, so far I've survived 4 rounds of massive retrenchments over 3 years due to restructure and more recently a complete takeover. The only thing in my control is to leave, yes.
It can be useful to know who's near the door so that you may rectify the situation, it doesn't necessarily have to be slimy. Benefit of the doubt I guess. DX (getdx.com) has it and it's very pro-worker.
I keep thinking about this response from a glassdoor employee, and what it implies about their decision making processes:
I stand behind the decision that your name has to be placed on your profile and it cannot be reverted or nullified/anonymized from the platform. I am sorry that we disagree on this issue. [...] This is my final determination. I, as well as multiple members of my team, have reviewed your request several times, and I am considering this matter closed.
I can't help but think, how does glassdoor make money?
investigating htis, it is clear - from employers.
They help companies keep a clean image, and also sell them job listings and advertising.
Scrubbing a company's image seems like it would be really lucrative.
It doesn't seem like reflecting reality makes money. I actually don't know if there are any review sites where having accurate reviews makes it profitable.
And it doesn't seem like employees are really a revenue stream, since they are not looking for a job.
Sounds like a platform that will wither away and die. Glassdoor users are emboldened by anonymity and know exactly what happens to people who put that kind of information on Facebook or LinkedIn next to their real name.
I think Glassdoor has the issue in that its not a growth business, but needs to be. You can't have a website like Glassdoor that is VC funded, owned by PE or publicly traded and not have it go to shit. The organic usage is people looking for new jobs, or posting about jobs they hate, or companies responding. A website that has <20 employees and is fine with being a $10M a year business living off of ad revenue could absolutely do this and be successful. A business seeking to double revenue can't.
Yeah, and the problem is that if you try to start a bootstrapped company to compete with Glassdoor without ever taking funding, you’ll be outspent on marketing by the companies that did take funding and you’ll go under. There’s a reason so many of these sites are VC funded even when it feels like they shouldn’t be. And VCs are often willing to fund things with a 1% chance of success, so even if multiple VC-backed companies in a market have failed, it won’t dissuade them from investing.
It does sometimes feel like we're missing out on these "reasonable company with reasonable expectations" type businesses and funding and crashing a ton of companies that would otherwise maybe live on reasonably?
It’s not good enough to run a business that supports you, your family, and your employees families anymore. Everything has to be the next billion-dollar big idea that’ll make the books. Even small businesses have the feel of soul-less big business because of this. It’s disheartening that this is what the tech industry has become.
What is the line from The Social Network? "Its not cool to be a millionaire, its cool to be a billionaire" or something along those lines. I think a lot of people aren't happy with being just very wealthy I suppose.
This is the essential problem with any platform whose value consists of user-generated content. For example, Reddit doesn't have to hold an IPO to continue being Reddit, they don't have to paywall their API, and they don't have to make their website a global dark pattern to force engagement; they chose to sell stakes and play the growth game. Medium is another example, as is Quora, LinkedIn, and a hundred other tech companies that are essentially specialized takes on PhpBB forums.
Yep, it's so disappointing how many web projects provide solid value for many people, have a reasonable business model, but go to absolute shit and eventually fade to nothing chasing unsustainable returns. It's staggering how much better the web could be if the demand for exponential returns hadn't become so dominant on the business side.
Fully agree with that. But you've just stated one of the major problems the software industry has in general. There's almost an inevitable flow that leads businesses that feed on VC funding to develop like this. They will turn shitty because they are as big as they should get, but not as big as they must get.
Decided to visit the website to delete my account. Lo and behold, the "Deactivate Account" button kicks off a perpetual loop that asks you to "Sign In Again To Delete Account" then dumps you on the same profile setting page, which prompts you again to log in... so you can't really delete your account, at least on web, without the help of support.
Edit: figured it out, is confusing
1. Remove social connection if this is how you logged in
2. Log Out
3. Upon login, request a password reset
4. Reset and login
5. Request Deletion
6. Enter newly created password
Strange, do you have any browser security extensions, aggressive cookie-blocking, or something similar? I was able to complete the process (see my comment below). I'm using Brave with ad blockers. The "deactivate" language is pretty misleading, but after entering account credentials, it did seem to delete the account completely.
Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway? Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I know of two multinational conglomerates (one Indian, the other Argentinian) that requires all newcomers to post a GlassDoor review and a LinkedIn post praising the company, the onboarding gifts, and such things. Both are absolute hell to work for unless you're upper management, according to acquaintances that have been there and climbed outside the bog of low-level positions.
> Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I very briefly worked at a toxic company that was aggressive about Glassdoor reviews. From what I heard, they couldn’t get them removed just by asking. They had to carefully examine the Glassdoor rules and find a reason that a review violated the rules.
They used the argument that reviews revealed confidential company information most of the time. It didn’t always work.
When I left, I used a throwaway email and coffee shop WiFi to leave a completely accurate, honest review. I carefully made sure to comply with every letter of Glassdoor’s rules.
There’s something odd in the lifecycle of these sorts of sites. I wonder if it goes like this:
Review site starts out as community driven, connected people tend to get involved. This provides a filter for competent users.
Companies become aware of the site, start looking for ways to manipulate their score. Companies gain access to competent employee. It is bearable for a while.
The scores are manipulated to the point where the site no longer provides a good signal. Only out of the loop dummies still use it, and it becomes a negative filter.
From this point of view, community sites are more like a crop that gets harvested. It would be better for people if it didn’t happen, but the incentive for the company seems to be: be the first one to start consuming the site.
Oh, a mini-cycle could be: at first, the companies that start manipulating the reviews tend to be the more connected and on-the-ball ones, so users don’t mind as much, since the companies that are trying to exploit the rankings them are also filtered for competence.
I wonder if it could be considered securities fraud, in the Matt Levine sense of "Everything is Securities Fraud."
I certainly would take CEO approval rating and employee's reviews of overall job satisfaction into account when investing in a company. If you see very low reviews, you know the company is under-investing in employees and will likely need to increase spend on employee retention in the coming years, which is not reported in their current financial reports. Likewise, if you want to be cynical, a consistent 5 star company has some fat it could trim, which would increase it's investment value.
Perhaps we'll see a shareholder lawsuit following a mass employee resignation event which was arguably concealed by manipulating employee reviews.
* Review not tagged as English, or neither Full-Time or Part-Time, and those are the default filters
* Default sort is "Most Recent" and the Featured Review at the top of reviews is always a positive hand chosen review
* "Found 515 out of over 530 reviews" - I suspect they maybe take those 15 other reviews into account for the rating average, but you just can't read them right now so technically not taken down
* Negative review stays in Pending state while being screened by Glassdoor for over a month, but the time it's approved, it's buried by newer reviews
Many companies just post fake positive reviews about themselves directly. Glassdoor reviews come from two places: aggrieved former employees and HR departments. The whole thing is garbage.
> Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I can verify this was true at least a few years ago. My friend's company had some bad (but totally honest) reviews. They requested them to be removed. Denied. A few days later they received an email from Glassdoor, talking about some sort of premium plan. They signed up. The bad reviews disappeared a few days later.
> Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway?
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but all online aggregate reviews are a scam. There are countless ways to game them and with AI it's only going to get worse. At best, they're a weak signal of whether something is bad or good. And the bigger and more popular a review site, the worse the quality/reliability since the impact of manipulating reviews on a site with a huge audience is that much higher.
I know for sure that Glassdoor has no problem with companies flooding their page with fake positive reviews. I worked for a shady company that did exactly that in the most blatant way possible. They consistenly posted short vapid 5 star reviews on a regular weekly schedule from the same IP. I tried reporting it to Glassdoor two different times and they could not have cared less.
My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.
I think Yelp only survives through its integration with Apple Maps. If Apple ever decides to build its own review feature I can’t imagine Yelp surviving.
I basically stopped reading Amazon and Yelp reviews. They do more harm then good. Now it's all about human-curated information. Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.
Should I eat here? Should I buy this product? Etc.
With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.
it wasn’t always the case (or at least most people believed it wasn’t) and they exist for a long time – the suggestion I think is for the people like me, who wrote something there over 10 years ago and now their posts would possibly stop being anonymous.
Glassdoor seems very has-been at this point. They’re trying to move beyond the mix of folks trashing their employers and then charging employers to make the profile look better to now trying to be more of a serious career site. The ship has sailed on that front and they just seem on a slow march to irrelevance as has happened to lots of other similar career and employer review sites.
I just logged in for the first time in years to delete my account, and before letting me do anything they required me to add my full name and other employment info.
I'm now known as John Smith, student at Brookdale Community College with an associates degree, aspiring to be an "Assistant Dog Catcher" (yes, that was one of the options in their auto-complete field) in Lodi, CA.
There was no option to delete the account, but after clicking "Deactivate", it still said that my account was now deleted, so who knows.
Edit: And now I received 2 emails from them that my recent submissions (filling in that form?) violated community rules.
I haven't logged in in years and I don't think I did much back then. Given everything I've read here, I think it might be safer just to let my account lie.
Same. Thought I must not have been signed in and was getting pushed into a signup flow or something, so I cleared cookies and got the same behavior once I logged in.
Forcing you to give them your real name before allowing you to use the site when logged in is incredibly scummy behavior I hope they are punished richly for.
Readit News
You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment/job/interview behaviors.
You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.
The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable.
The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.
If you're working for a company that actively monitors this sort of thing, I don't think that management's response will be "let's make our employees; lives better."
Deleted Comment
I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.
Let them creep all over my profile: so far the only downside is that I have a pile of messages to sort through and say "no, thanks" to.
I learn so little from a persons bullet pointed resume that when I don't have those the interviews feel like I'm pretty much walking in completely ignorant to this persons interests and skills over and over again.
When I can go "oh neat, jbob99 worked on a foss project I used a few years ago!" it's nice.
But I also couldn't care less about being "creeped" on. Half of my career was built because I'm not an anonymous random software guy and companies know my work.
You're using a completely random throwaway nick to stay anonymous on here, while I've literally gotten jobs from hn and grown my career from it. Just like I did on IRC when I was 13. It's an interesting difference of use.
I don't mean one is better or worse at all and I totally get wanting to be anonymous.
About an hour later she called me again with an invitation for a job interview.
I don't really know what LinkedIn would change here...
Companies already tried to get rights to software created in your free time. Why even allow any attack surface here?
I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be greatly in an employee's best interest, as it would be another justification to the higher-ups for a raise or better job assignment.
To be clear, I'm personally generally against these kind of panopticon data-slurp initiatives overall, I'm just surprised that the initial reaction is so strongly "my manager will use this to fire me" when I've only ever seen the opposite.
For me it is more like: "my manager sees that I'm looking for a job", and I really rather tell him that I will be leaving, as soon as I'm certain of a new job. It's none of his business before that point.
I remember reading a blog post by an employee that had gotten on the wrong side of google. When he came in their crosshairs, he said all his google machines forcibly updated themselves, and it became clear he was closely monitored.
I think the idea is that decent relationships have good boundaries, and proactively maintaining them is a worthwhile endeavor. This is especially important when there is a power relationship.
You better believe that if databrokers will buy information on whether you updated linked in that they'd also buy information on whether you gave the company a 1 star review.
Heck, you can even post your salary to glassdoor, so maybe your next employer would buy that information so they know the least they could offer you.
I've seen similar insights, derived from a person's social-graph through email exchanges, and it was decided to not be used by managers as it could be a liability.
The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.allegisgroup.com, allegisgroup.com
hiring solved
Deleted Comment
If you're good at your job and highly rated there should be obvious signs when they're trying to preemptively backfill you and at that point you can just communicate about how excited you are about your growth at the company or something to make them take a step back.
What I've learned is if you plan to change jobs assume everyone at your current job will find out the minute you have an interview booked. Only applies to big companies that pay 3rd parties to monitor their employees like that though.
Sometimes I wish we had germany's privacy laws for employees in the US.
I'm not convinced this is always an ultimately bad outcome if someone finds that.
Dead Comment
investigating htis, it is clear - from employers.
They help companies keep a clean image, and also sell them job listings and advertising.
Scrubbing a company's image seems like it would be really lucrative.
It doesn't seem like reflecting reality makes money. I actually don't know if there are any review sites where having accurate reviews makes it profitable.
And it doesn't seem like employees are really a revenue stream, since they are not looking for a job.
fuck these companies
I found Reddit literally through organic word-of-mouth when Digg went under. Never saw an ad for it in my life.
Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand
Edit: figured it out, is confusing
1. Remove social connection if this is how you logged in 2. Log Out 3. Upon login, request a password reset 4. Reset and login 5. Request Deletion 6. Enter newly created password
It's not a lot, but it's weird it happened twice.
I’ll never make a post about a company even if I end up loving my time there, it’s just not going to happen. It looks fake and everyone knows that.
I very briefly worked at a toxic company that was aggressive about Glassdoor reviews. From what I heard, they couldn’t get them removed just by asking. They had to carefully examine the Glassdoor rules and find a reason that a review violated the rules.
They used the argument that reviews revealed confidential company information most of the time. It didn’t always work.
When I left, I used a throwaway email and coffee shop WiFi to leave a completely accurate, honest review. I carefully made sure to comply with every letter of Glassdoor’s rules.
My review is still up.
Review site starts out as community driven, connected people tend to get involved. This provides a filter for competent users.
Companies become aware of the site, start looking for ways to manipulate their score. Companies gain access to competent employee. It is bearable for a while.
The scores are manipulated to the point where the site no longer provides a good signal. Only out of the loop dummies still use it, and it becomes a negative filter.
From this point of view, community sites are more like a crop that gets harvested. It would be better for people if it didn’t happen, but the incentive for the company seems to be: be the first one to start consuming the site.
https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-ca...
> You can't pay us to take down reviews and we apply the same content moderation rules to our clients that we use for everyone else.
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
I certainly would take CEO approval rating and employee's reviews of overall job satisfaction into account when investing in a company. If you see very low reviews, you know the company is under-investing in employees and will likely need to increase spend on employee retention in the coming years, which is not reported in their current financial reports. Likewise, if you want to be cynical, a consistent 5 star company has some fat it could trim, which would increase it's investment value.
Perhaps we'll see a shareholder lawsuit following a mass employee resignation event which was arguably concealed by manipulating employee reviews.
* Review not tagged as English, or neither Full-Time or Part-Time, and those are the default filters
* Default sort is "Most Recent" and the Featured Review at the top of reviews is always a positive hand chosen review
* "Found 515 out of over 530 reviews" - I suspect they maybe take those 15 other reviews into account for the rating average, but you just can't read them right now so technically not taken down
* Negative review stays in Pending state while being screened by Glassdoor for over a month, but the time it's approved, it's buried by newer reviews
*
Interesting that of the 4 options to address bad employee reviews, none of those options is:
* Address the review by improving your company culture or policies
you're paying to "flag and report reviews for additional scrutiny"
their process then co-incidentally always seems to agree that those reported by paying customers are bogus
(same as paying for trustpilot)
I can verify this was true at least a few years ago. My friend's company had some bad (but totally honest) reviews. They requested them to be removed. Denied. A few days later they received an email from Glassdoor, talking about some sort of premium plan. They signed up. The bad reviews disappeared a few days later.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but all online aggregate reviews are a scam. There are countless ways to game them and with AI it's only going to get worse. At best, they're a weak signal of whether something is bad or good. And the bigger and more popular a review site, the worse the quality/reliability since the impact of manipulating reviews on a site with a huge audience is that much higher.
Still somewhat shady.
I can't remember the last time I looked at yelp, pre-covid maybe?
Deleted Comment
Should I eat here? Should I buy this product? Etc.
With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.
Be sure to select “show more sites” in the sites selection.
And for Glassdoor, bottom of this page:
https://help.glassdoor.com/s/privacyrequest?language=en_US
There was no option to delete the account, but after clicking "Deactivate", it still said that my account was now deleted, so who knows.
Edit: And now I received 2 emails from them that my recent submissions (filling in that form?) violated community rules.
Deleted Comment
We need to throw away current cybercrime laws and start over with people who actually know what access means.
Forcing you to give them your real name before allowing you to use the site when logged in is incredibly scummy behavior I hope they are punished richly for.