Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location(cellio.dreamwidth.org) |
Glassdoor updated my profile to add my real name and location(cellio.dreamwidth.org) |
I stopped using the site years ago once it became clear how corrupt they were about handling blatantly fake reviews, but this new name policy is a new low. Glassdoor can't be run out of business fast enough.
Glassdoor has been mostly useless for quite some time now anyway. HR departments offer little trinkets to employees who leave a good review to boost their score, negative reviews can be taken down. Minimal value all around basically.
Meanwhile, all the commenters in here are overreacting as usual, clearly not having read any of the terms of the website, like the part where it says your name is not disclosed until you explicitly elect to share it. But hey let's not let facts stop us from freaking out.
Life expectancy is up, people are richer, people are healthier, we have an amazing number of choices, we have amazing devices, etc.
I think your view is very distorted and you really should check your facts. Here are some questions you should ask yourself:
1) What do you mean when you say “enshitification”? How is the world getting worse? By what measure?
2) Are there any counter examples which could disprove your thesis?
3) How does the world today compare to the world at other times? Why is the world better today? What was better before?
Finally, you should consider individual things instead of the world. For example, you can look at your town, housing, food, culture, etc. Try going beyond good and bad and look at the benefits and drawbacks of various things. Consider whether you need a more nuanced view of the world.
1) What do you mean when you say “enshitification”? How is the world getting worse? By what measure?
More violence, more bigotry, paying more and getting less not because things cost more but because stock price, minimum wage not tracking inflation while political donations do, Donald-Fucking-Trump as POTUS, cyber attacks at a truly breathtaking pace, healthcare and the entire fucking tragedy that is in the US, women's rights, body autonomy, a stock market where market makers can legally and literally steal money from everyone else, CU literally legalizing outright bribes to congress, the rise of US Nazis, the entire fucking state of Texas, judges who ignore any and all legal standing and common sense that enact the stupidest most regressive horse shit, corporations dumping chemicals into the environment by the metric ton and "suffering" profits for it, and much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more.
How about you step outside sometime and look at the world you're in?
2) Are there any counter examples which could disprove your thesis?
There are counters, but they are generally outliers in practically every instance. The simple fact they are outliers is the entire point I'm making.
3) How does the world today compare to the world at other times?
Tech could have been a great thing, but it's being used to abuse people at a greater scale, now, so win?
3a) Why is the world better today?
I would say something like better medical care and that care does exist, but only for the rich since most people cannot afford it. Why? Human greed.
3b) What was better before? Very little.
At no point did I say I pined for the 1860s. You're confusing me with Republicans.
I'm just tired of the human model of "shit on everyone I can, because fuck you, I'm getting mine". I'm fucking tired of people committing crimes for decades, and when caught saying, "I'm sorry". I'm tired of watching a country kill another countries CIVILIANS because they can.
Look at the world's choices.
A 15th carrier group or feeding kids in school?
Tax breaks for those that need them the least, while those with less money pay more or the reverse?
Food Stamps and the ever forward marching of less and less being spent on this very real need.
Social Security. A system you're forced to pay into, while congress plays fucking Lucy from the Peanuts with the benefits. Even going so far as to label them as "entitlements" in the shittiest possible definition of the word instead of entitlements, because its fucking owed.
How about the constant lies and horse shit propagated by media? Not truth, not facts, just bias with the sole goal of selling ad space and consequences be damned.
Maybe I just wanted more of humans than the current "fuck those in need" or "shit on minorities to make ourselves feel better", etc.
I'm truly glad you find the world a better place than I do.
YMMV and I sincerely hope it does, but let's put down the PollyAnna-tinted glasses. That's not the world humans built and pretending it is, is simply disingenuous or wholly ignorant.
Levels.fyi has been really nice.
Second, you find some sketchy thing to do that will boost revenue and burn people's desire to use your product willingly into the ground.
Third, you leave on your golden parachute and the company acts surprised that this proved toxic and changes nothing.
I've always disliked sales. especially when working on projects where a sales is so smarmy, because they get a huge pay - and I, implementing it all - get nothing.
This happened all over. but here is a story of why I cant stand sales:
I was tech designer for LDAC (lucas presidio campus)
So I built out the RFP for network and we were doing selections up at Big Rock Ranch (the only reason this is important is just how beautiful the space is, so it feels really open nice energy, relaxing)
We are doing vendor selection presentations (the vendors come show us why their solution is best match to RFP reqs)
The vendors were Cisco, Foundry, Force-10 (extreme backed out)
Cisco comes in and they're going through their presentation and we are getting through it - I am reviewing and seeing that it was rather weak, more "marketing"-ish reply to the RFP instead of a detailed response on the specs...
I am sitting across from the main cisco sales guy. (this is at the time the largest 10G network in the world as this is just as the 10G switches were made) - so at the time, its a big deal - like ~$80 million in core gear)
The sales guy is leaning back as if... don't worry Toots. Jimmy's got this sniffs coke" https://i.imgur.com/gPdQiW5.jpg
--
So I am going over the RFP with his team, and he interjects:
"I just want to assure you that Cisco has a world class media team - and I will personally be sure they go through this in depth and really create the right solution"
PIN DROPs
(I am the youngest in the room - but its my RFP/design)
"Excuse me. This is the RFP review. Youre presenting your solution here today. So are you to tell me, that you have a "world class media team" and they have not informed your response to this RFP? That the entire point of this meeting" i said a few more things that made this guy die inside.
This guys balls shot into his throat.
Those are the types of people I think of when I think of levels.
(this was also the meeting where the CIO of Lucas Arts demanding a date for "when can you provide me power over fiber" ((his logic was the design was for both power and fiber to desktop - and he was trying to flex on showing 'how can we reduce infra wiring costs' -- it was a truly different world back then, mostly))
The best sales people I've seen are relationship builders. They understand their clients needs (Even if outside the core market) and try to find a solution for their needs. This looks like wining/dining on the outside but it's important.
I would suggestion anyone that wants to build something to try and sell first. Then you'll realize why they get paid and can be very valuable.
weird. I just logged in, and I can't confirm that this is happening. all of my reviews are still properly anonymous. my account knows my name and my email address, of course, but it does not appear anywhere on the site where I don't expect it to.
> So all users will now receive a Fishbowl account once they login to Glassdoor
I'm not real sure what this means - as far as I can tell, 'bowls' are just the equivalent of fb groups, and while there are a few automatically added to your account initially, you can just leave them, and proceed with an empty list of 'bowls' you follow (or whatever the terminology is)
what am I missing here?
you just said it yourself -- consider that the data that is collected and sold is not necessarily on the pages you see
If you pay for the Extra Premium Data Insights Package (TM), Glassdoor will happily give your real name to your employer so they can either see the reviews you've written about past employers or the review you wrote about your current employer.
While this isn't a real product (yet), you can't tell me there is a non zero risk on this one.
You can enter any phone number and the full name of the user will be shown. Previously a user-selectable name, now it's coming from the government database of citizens.
More than likely, their CRM software automatically tied their user-facing account with their support ticket email. Especially if the only unique identifier is based on email address. It's not hard to remove the name and location from the CRM, but because it would become a manual process they just don't want to have to deal with it.
FWIW, this theory could be put to test by signing up an account with username.extrachars@gmail.com and then sending a support email from username.extrachars+1@gmail.com, not sure if they would reject the support ticket as "emails not matched".
I didn’t see a way to delete my data but I don’t think they had much in the first place.
I did use the “deactivate account” option.
1) Evernote
2) Triplebyte
3) Glassdoor
4) Let's not forget Quora
I guess we all know now not to work for Glassdoor...
(Including the unpaid work that built their product in the first place.)
Hello, you've been (semi-randomly) selected to take a CAPTCHA to validate your requests. Please complete it below and hit the button!
Press to validate
No thanks.
How did they get that if you never sent them an email? And if you sent them an email, you gave them your name (whatever name is in the from line)
So he put in a support request, likely via his account; they sent him an e-mail about it, likely to his Glassdoor account's e-mail. He replied from that e-mail address with his full name in the From: field, as most people do, and now they could link his full name with his e-mail address, and update his profile.
Just deleted all my glassdoor contributions, then deactivated my glassdoor account.
null pointer exception
I’ve never understood what compels people to go to those sites, I suspect it’s because people feel that it at least gives them a voice.
The only site with a modicum of value is LinkedIn, and even then you can probably come up with a million reasons to not use it.
Damn this terribly company and their terrible, terrible dark patterns.
accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe
the google popups go away, but if you click on a "login with google" button it will still work.
(I use that filter with Firefox. It wouldn't surprise me if Chrome's bundled spyware somehow breaks this.)
Now, with traditional companies, customers paid for products and services. This revenue allowed companies to pay employees. With the companies you listened, they gave away their product “for free”. That meant they had to get revenue some other way. Usually, this either involved ads, spying (so ads could be better targeted), pay for advanced features (Evernote), or sell services to some third party (Yelp and Glassdoor are two examples of this).
The problem with all of these new business models is companies often struggle to get enough revenue to survive. What is no called ‘enshitification” is basically companies searchimng for a way to survive when their users will not directly pay for the service they are offering. Is this good for users? No, but then again the users refuse to pay for the service.
My main point here is greed is not the only thing driving this process. In many cases, it is incentives and organizations trying to survive. If we want products which delight us, we are probably going to have to pay for them. If we want the cheapest thing possible, we are going to have to accept that it will get progressively worse as companies try to survive or keep their earning growing.
Note that the above earnings growth is probably a short term phenomenon. My guess is that companies who push earnings over quality eventually destroy their product and get a bad product and lower earnings. This process can take years or decades.
I'd expect from society in 2024, platforms like Facebook, Quora, GlassDoor to not only exist but to work well in an established way. It's just greed, pure and simple.
Nothing works, and everything is "shittified".
For example, I was really excited about Triplebyte. I thought finally we may have a tool to separate the wheat from the chaff and hoped it would make it's way even to Europe but then it got shittified with dark patterns.
The moment something becomes cool for a few months, it's already a cow to be milked endlessly and sold off to the highest bidder who will do the same and once it's gone they'll find someone to throw under the bus and move on to the next thing.
And that's not even counting personal information which they consistently misuse or sell. I am terrified to use majority of services online with personal name/surname and recently my very unique(identifies just me) name:surname combo got hijacked and was used in a fake review site. I just don't trust any company when they say "your private notes" are private. Yes, they are, if they earn trillions and become like apple. But the moment money is tighter they change the tune.
For example take a site like bumble. The frontend is junior level programming even HS. The backend is a simple DB. It can't cost billions of euros to run that.
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."
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
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.
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.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.
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
Be sure to select “show more sites” in the sites selection.
And for Glassdoor, bottom of this page:
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.
We need to throw away current cybercrime laws and start over with people who actually know what access means.
You have the option "Delete my personal data"
Based on this story, I already knew to expect resistance, but jesus fuck that was far worse than I imagined.
There was no way to enter my old password, I was forced to now link my account with google which force shared my email & name. I was really nervous about even enabling this linking... I bit the bullet, happily it looks like it is somewhat easy to delete reviews and finally the account. Getting there though, was forced to divulge new information.
I don't think I could have a lower opinion of glassdoor now..
"If you are not willing to allow your name on your profile, you will again need to complete Data erasure once you are able to. However, we cannot remove this for you or make the changes you wish to see for your name."
I guess we know the appropriate action to take here. This is an absolutely BONE HEADED decision with regards to the operation of Glassdoor but I wonder what was the impetus for this? It looks like they're trying to convert their anonymous, Reddit-like, users to First Class Named Users for the purpose trying to compete with Linkedin to me.
I find the rationale here questionable and the execution plain nutty personally.
I get a prompt that I cannot dismiss about "Communities at Glassdoor" that I can't get past without putting in my employment information and name...
I can't even get too my account to delete it or emails support.
Love dark patterns...
They already know more about you than you’d ever want them to know. The fact that they hadn’t automatically matched your name before was either incompetence or simply being blocked by some frayed little law somewhere.
A little off topic, but his is a classic example of the problem where the laws just haven’t kept up with the technology.
Data collection and public government databases weren’t a problem when you had to go into some big office building somewhere to make a request, or maybe wait a couple weeks to sort it out through the mail.
Today, however, it’s easier than ever to gather this data at scales people can’t even imagine and this level of aggregation has eroded privacy to a degree that I don’t think is reversible anymore.
Anyway, here is a link to axcioms portal, although the cynic in me thinks that by requesting your data be deleted, all you’re doing is confirming your identity.
https://privacyportal.onetrust.com/webform/342ca6ac-4177-482...
I don't think it would be missed if it were to disappear tomorrow.
The real name policy had the opposite of the intended effect.
The #1 posture is that if we don't actually need the information for the application to run, we don't take it.
I won't go into detail about how we do what we do, but we don't keep any data, other than the email the user chooses to send us (which can be a DEA or proxied one). We also never export that email outside the server. No marketing aggregations, no trend analysis, etc. The email stays inside the deployed server.
This stance has not made me popular with my coworkers, but it has made our app quite popular with end-users.
So, what's left besides word of mouth?
[0] https://www.golem.de/news/urteil-kununu-muss-im-streitfall-k... (sorry, article in german)
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Some managers are just a--holes, granted.
Some findings show as low as 3.5%
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...
I believe we did do that by showing the HR world that data driven insights could be a better indicator than what school someone went to or whether they played Ultimate Frisbee (a real hiring signal used by a Fortune 500 tech co).
We didn’t solve hiring. It’s a tough problem with many strange human biases and rituals. But I do think we made it better even if only a little.
As soon as I would even touch one word in my profile, a pile of recruiters would be triggered instantly. From experience I know that these recruiters have zero added value for me and often even their customer. On the contrary even, they have a tendency to try to fill any job with any qualification, because when they succeed, they hit a jackpot.
Job vacancies are present on job sites like 'Indeed'. It is very easy to set an appropriate filter and just start sending out your CV to companies.
I got my current job because a recruiter cold-called me about my Linked-In profile. It was a perfect match for a position she was trying to fill.
I wasn't looking, but it wasn't hard to persuade me to switch either.
The majority of job leads I got from maybe the start of LinkedIn to about 8 years ago were crap.
These days, most job leads are not crap, they just are not competitive with my current job. Much improved! Granted, I just updated a couple months ago my profile to say, "Not open to opportunities" and because my profile is recently updated, I get people contacting me daily - even on the weekend.
But... every other recruiting email I've gotten has been at best something I just wasn't interested in, while the vast majority of them are so poorly targeted, I'm embarrassed for the recruiter for clearly not having a clue how to evaluate if a candidate is a good fit in even the most basic ways. All promising job prospects I've had (whether they worked out or not) came through connections, or active work on my part to seek out positions that interested me.
(Obviously everyone's experience differs; I see you mention downthread that you once found a great match from a cold recruiter call.)
So... did that one life-changing job come to me because of a privacy-minefield site like LinkedIn? I'm not sure how that in-house recruiter found me: it was a cold email to an address that I hadn't used in years, and it was just dumb luck that I signed into it a week after it was sent, which seems at odds with the usual way to get in touch with someone you've found through a job-network site.
I'm at a point where I don't think I really need to maintain a LinkedIn profile in order to achieve my employment goals... but a part of me is too afraid it'll be useful (or even critical) to something in the future, so I haven't deleted it. Meh.
All the other recruiters just make chat and email spam easily ignored and they never bother me.
Yelp has become useless, and TripAdvisor is as bad if not worse. The reviews on Google Maps are wholly unreliable as well.
All kidding aside I totally get it. I was lucky and taken under under the wing of a very generous group of people who have pretty much followed one another around to various jobs/projects over the last decade and our skills have just grown non-stop. I WISH I'd gotten into FOSS projects way sooner, like when I was a kid instead of just learning linux and crawling up the sysadmin route.
Like, junior help desk tech support to principal architects nowadays, etc. I try to get my friends who want to level up or change careers to hop into foss projects, #goodfirstissue sort of things. A lot of people just have no idea where to start, and they don't think they're skilled enough to join a project like kubernetes or what not, but those projects actually have Contributor Experience people/teams to help bring new people in comfortably and they need all sorts of help, not just go developers, etc.
Hell, those contributor experience people are absolute diamonds and really make certain communities so inclusive and great to be in. There is a lot of cool ancillary work to be done and everyone has something in their wheelhouse they can contribute.
I think this is a really important point. Most companies aren't going to hire some anonymous person on the internet with no track record or verifiable background. Most companies can't even legally put someone on their payroll without knowing a lot more about a person.
People without a real-name presence on the internet are only going to get a pretty limited amount of unsolicited job-opening contact. And that might be what people like that prefer, which is fine. The minimal cold emails that come in may even be of much much higher quality and relevance. But ultimately they're still leaving a lot on the table, even if much of what's on the table is probably poorly-targeted crap. (Again, that's fine if that's what they want.)
Also, I have gotten used to doing things this way. I’ve been writing software for this particular demographic, for over 20 years.
Feel free to drop me a line.
Also GDPR/CCPA has hamstrung a lot of this and HR depts are fairly petrified about it. Talent Acquisition, not so much…
I mean the data part is a little scary. Look up People Data Labs. There are lots of these data aggregators and that data can be used for a lot of scary things. HR in practice is probably the least scary.
So there's that.
I think the founders of those companies would be fine with the millionaire outcome, as it beats crashing and burning in pursuit of billions.
The problem is the VC mindset.
Greg: I'm good, anyway, cuz, uh, my, so, I was just talkin' to my mom, and she said, apparently, he'll leave me five million anyway, so I'm golden, baby.
Connor: You can't do anything with five, Greg. Five's a nightmare.
Greg: Is it?
Connor: Oh, yeah. Can't retire. Not worth it to work. Oh, yes, five will drive you un poco loco, my fine feathered friend.
Tom: The poorest rich person in America. The world's tallest dwarf.
Connor: The weakest strong man at the circus.
At a 5%/year withdrawal rate, that's $250K/year. That's absolutely livable. You won't live like a king, but that's a solid middle-class living in most suburbs outside the Bay area.
Sometimes I wonder if being fake is seen as pejorative as it used to be. I mean the whole "social media influencer" thing is super fake, but people seem to eat that shit up and a depressing number of kids aspire to be one.
There are people on this very forum who are 100% subscribed to the "if you work hard you will make it" propaganda and also the often unspoken corollary of "if you didn't make it, it's your own fault". Arguably that's the entire ethos of this VC/startup focused community.
We are extremely irrational creatures, who have pretty much only advanced by being able to write down information and curate that body of work over the centuries, enough to tease out a couple semi-working systems that produce better than a coin flip results enough of the time to manage to advance. Even the best educated, smartest, or most successful of us are absolutely chock full of irrationality and bias opposed to direct evidence. Even Einstein abandoned the data when it disagreed with his beliefs.
There's also some preliminary data that younger people consider the awkward, scammy, low production value feel of things like tiktoks to be "more authentic" and therefore more trustworthy to them. All you have to do is say ten words very confidently and some insular community will adopt it as part of their belief system. Look at all the absolute dreck, nonsense pseudoscience that makes up the incel community.
Media literacy is completely irrelevant to all the people who lack it. When you haven't learned HOW to pick apart and interrogate a source of information, you have no option but to fall back to shittier, brand or ideology based source analysis.
Marketing comes in lots of forms.
levels and blind sort of feels that way, but that's part of the issue:
1. these kinds of sites are a paradox in that you want employees to be anonymous but also verified. So you can't just spin up a site in a week and have valuable data
2. despite the comparisons, I'm sure both levels and blind were in fact vc funded. The models feels indie but it probably isn't. But they did their part for SEO and marketing and yadda yadda. So it got the eyeballs it needed before word of mouth set in
>Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?
to be frank, because most people don't try very hard to find the grassroots. They are lazy and will take the first thing that looks good on Google.
maybe not :)
Absolutely agree, and I try to do this more often now. A visit somewhere new and untested for lunch or dinner isn't like a product purchase, where I might regret a bad purchase for months or years. If a restaurant doesn't work out, I've only lost an hour or two of my time, and a bit of cash that likely still went to providing me sustenance, even if the experience and taste was poor.
And if it turns out to be great -- well... great!
OMG please don't do this - it's more gamed/scammy than online reviews: people will routinely post sponsored content disguised as personal recommendations. The FTC occasionally cracks down on it (or sends warning labels) but it's still so ubiquitous.
The choice is between "scam" and "bias".
I've done that too and am sure many people here on HN realized how gameable and gamed they are but sadly it still works for the masses who fall into these traps like flies to a candle. When these this kind of deception will stop working we will have reached a total trust of 0.
"Could" is such a big word. It means nothing, but it is intended to be very valuable. Get that promotion in writing. Otherwise it's a carrot to dangle upon you.
> they'd better not send you on that expensive training course
You know what's worse than training people and then these people leaving? Not training them and then these people staying.
You insist on giving me reasons to stay away from that company.
Get it in writting? When in the history of the mankind it ever happened? Not to anyone I know, and I would never make such promises as well. Promotion depends on a lot of things, and promising something like that in writing is stupid.
And once you're tagged as someone who might be leaving, some employers really may prefer no to invest in you. Why should they? You might leave.
The whole argument of "the risk of training and they staying" depends entirely on how you gauge risk. In this case, if you have positive evidence that they are unhappy, then you know that the risk of leaving higher than staying.
Big Tech started with a lot of power in labor due to the knowledge economy, and is losing a lot of their core power. Thus wages will start slipping more and more and converge to general market rate for talent. Reclaim that power!
What a great reason to encourage employees at the margin to job hop! Better pay, negotiation of those expensive training courses and/or big important projects.
What's the downside here, exactly, to a more fluid labor supply/supplier's market?
There's a reason that so many people now get prompted by moving "horizontally" between companies, very few companies today properly reward loyalty, if anything most actively incentivize individualism and disloyalty.
There is always "we fired 20% of the people, now their workload is on your shoulders or you will also be fired".
There is always "here is a book titled 'use agile to deliver twice as fast' now the deadline is in 3 months instead of 6 or else".
The only defense against that is having more options.
A customer asked if it could be used internally (we already had their ATS/HRIS data) so a new feature was born.
Yes money was a motive but this particular feature didn’t seem like an evil idea to be used to increase employee misery.
That said, We did build some things that I do regret now.
Companies try to keep employees happy and committed, and part of that is making sure they see a potential future / growth for themselves. As a manager I try to both make sure this is based in reality and that employees are picking up the message.
I like to think I am good at this but it's a difficult skill, and external signal to "hey, you might want to check in with Bob a bit more carefully next time to make sure he's feeling as good as we think he is" could always be valuable.
So even from Bob's perspective it's positive - he may get the extra conversation that increases his options where he stays. On the flip side, what's the malicious use case? "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you" doesn't sound like company policy that's going to be implemented anywhere because it makes no sense.
You might be close to quitting (via perceived signal) so I’m going to give the high visibility project to someone “loyal”.
You may be perceived as a quitter so I’m going to give discretionary budget for the next raise to the employee who is more loyal.
You might be perceived as quitting, and my company requires me to stack rank employees. The lowest gets fired. I put you there to keep the rest of my team. You become a “sacrifice” since you were going to quit anyways.
And these are just the examples my friends at Amazon talk about. I’m sure there’s more.
Now consider all of the above, but now you’re on a visa. Losing your job means you have a few weeks to replace it or get deported.
It’s more like a roll-up metric that can be looked at globally, by role, department, location, etc. yes, it can also be used at the individual level but again, HR is the buyer and they are the most fearfully bureaucratic department in most companies .
From a data and capability perspective, I agree it’s a little scary. But in practice I doubt it’s used this way and if so, there’s your retention problem.
To me it's no different than a company hiring a PI to follow me around so they can report back how many drinks I have on the weekend at a barbecue. Or following me around to find out if I bought a new suit and tie (oh no, might indicate I'm going for an interview!). Just because it's being done digitally doesn't make it any less invasive.
What's next? Grocery stores start selling my buying habits to my employer? That would definitely give them more insight into whether I'm happy and committed. Banks/Credit card companies selling my purchase history?
As far as I am aware, almost every credit card company already does this. They tell you they are doing it too.
I always said “at least we’re not building weapons we are trying to get people jobs (or keep them in jobs)”
But aside from weapons, if you think building a retention tool for HR is bad, you certainly should not ever look at AdTech or the types of things insurance companies are doing from a data perspective.
Or ah hem… Palatir for example.
If everyone in my country decided to stop working in or sponsoring the arms industry, we'd be invaded by an authoritarian dictatorship tomorrow.
If in contrast we all summarily banned these aspiring social credit tools, the negative side effects would be negligible to nonexistent.
People are working for evil companies like Facebook or Purdue Pharma without moral issues.
Job is just a job, people needs money...
The unspoken part of that phrase is the second half of "so since it will happen anyway, it's not wrong for me to reap the rewards of doing the bad thing"
I hope you understand how inherently wrong that is.
Wheels gotta move I guess, it's in their nature after all.
Hmmm, why not together? You might be on to something there...
One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon.
The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon.
And then there’s AdTech.. lol