365 points

That’s a fantastically efficient way to destroy their business. There’s no way to get honest reviews of employers from employees who know their identities will be exposed whether they consent or not. Doesn’t even matter if the review is after leaving that job, future employers can go nosing too.

Absolute techbro-brane gold.

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183 points

This is what happens right before the major money holders abandon ship. There’s no way they don’t know this is business-suicide. I bet they got a big payday from some companies that paid Glassdoor to shoot itself in the face!

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52 points

Yep, we’ve seen this happen over and over before

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40 points

Imagine if a fediverse version of Glassdoor would appear after this

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7 points

i don’t really see a point in federating employment reviews, but there certainly needs to be a non profit providing such a service

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6 points

Maybe a start would be a forum for employer reviews

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18 points

I’m normally not a conspiracy dude, but this just fucking SCREAMS sabotage to me.

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3 points

This screams liability and damages avoidance to me.

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31 points

Good way to get yourself blackballed from the industry if you give a bad complaint from previous employer.

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27 points

A former employer actually did send lawyers after me for a bad Glassdoor review. The dumb thing is that it wasn’t even my review.

This is beyond stupid.

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4 points
*

Welcome to the point of the change. Kill off the liabilty & associated damages.

Doesnt matter if the facts are true. In fact it matters more if they are!

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2 points

I expect their logic is their review “curation” racket is a sideshow and the real money is selling information to agencies and sales companies.

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267 points

I just went in and manually edited my display name to my previous asshole of a boss. Two can play this game. If they want to get rid of anonymous content, then let them deal with poisoned content.

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47 points

😂 Awesome

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43 points

Oh shit, that’s good.

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32 points

This is the way

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25 points

I put a review up for my previous employer a while back. My whole profile uses fake data. Even in my review, since it would be very obvious who I was, I was light on details and generalized as much as I could and used false dates for when I was hired/left.

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12 points
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This screams liability protection, your name change is both logged so they can transfer liability to you.

Reputation slander and damages can get astronomical

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3 points

No one can afford a lawsuit that hacky.

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5 points
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Uh, reminder that these giant corporations don’t shop for lawyers like you or I would have to, they’re already on retainer. It would literally cost them nothing they’re not already paying to sue someone (except their reputation, which they’ve already thrown away).

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225 points

Exactly how do Glassdoor expect people to give earnest reviews of their employers (which is literally the core of their business) if those people can’t trust Glassdoor to not to throw them under the bus when they give honest reviews of malicious employers?

Talk about sabotaging your own business model - idiots.

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41 points

The anonymity was the whole point to that site.

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17 points

Exactly how do Glassdoor expect people to give earnest reviews of their employers

They don’t. The enshitification has begun and they only care about short-term profits now that they’ve built up a user base.

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-37 points

earnest reviews of their employers (which is literally the core of their business

I don’t understand the need for a site like this. I just assume that my employer is going to suck in standard corporate suck fashion.

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91 points

There are levels to that suck though

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42 points

And sometimes it’s not just corporate suck. I’ve literally had the CIO of a construction contractor berate me on the phone before I had started. Needless to say I didn’t take their offer

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42 points
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There’s the normal suck, then there’s “I (been there 12 years) got passed up for promotion to replace my boss who retired because the owner’s nephew who worked with us for a few years (sucked and “volentarely” left 6 years ago) decided their cyptoscheme wasn’t working out and needed a job, and that was the highest one paying one avalible.”

Or the "Sally got verably harassed dailiy and they did nothing because the harrasser has been there 30 years. ‘He’s just an old man in his early 50s, older gentlemen call ladies nicknames like sweetcakes, honey, or cutie all the time. They also like to rub peoples shoulders to show affec to help relive the tension and promote a healthier work environment’ "

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28 points

Ok, but if your expectations are permanent nerfed you’re gonna be a much easier mark… Plus tacit acceptance of a shitty status quo is pretty self-defeating.

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13 points

Ok, but if your expectations are permanent nerfed you’re gonna be a much easier mark… Plus tacit acceptance of a shitty status quo is pretty self-defeating.

Thank you for saying this.

I don’t get how so many people are so willing to just pull down their pants and bend over, instead of pushing back.

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25 points

I’ve had a couple of good jobs where I was treated well and compensated well all around. Companies like that would be glad to have reviews from happy employees visible to the public on a trustworthy review site.

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21 points

Some are much more capable of disguising it during the interview process.

In the tech industry around the pandemic there was the great resignation and companies were tripping over themselves to employ as many people as possible. It was great then because you had so many options and they were all seemingly similar job descriptions.

Now the site is shitty and getting a job is terrible. Woo capitalism!

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12 points

Frankly I never trusted Glassdoor. I assume most reviews are made by the companies HR department to lie about how great it is. I just need to look at the reviews of the companies I’ve worked for to see that it’s 99% bullshit.

Don’t trust employers. They lie to you and underpay you.

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6 points

It has its uses. And one bad employer can really mess you up for a while. It takes a lot of effort to have a low score on that site.

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4 points

Because it’s worth knowing beforehand what a company is really like behind closed doors.

Some companies are great, some suck in standard corporate fashion, but there are some out there that are exceptional in sucking…

I’ll use myself an example… the last company I worked for, our team was constantly given deadlines that were impossible to meet within work hours. The company basically refused to pay for what was essentially mandatory overtime required to catch up - wage theft by a different name.

Fortunately my role allowed me to push back, but most of peers didn’t - we were all straight out of university, some needed the money/job, but most just didn’t know how to fight in the corporate environment.

Not to mention that a few folks who did try to complain against the company conveniently found themselves fired for some miscellaneous breaches of contract. From what I heard, one was even fired based on their reaction to being told they were being dismissed - quite literally entrapment.

If you’re wondering why we didn’t sue or anything like that, again we were all straight out of uni, we barely knew what our working rights were…

Which is why Glassdoor was important - it was how most of these folks got word out about the company and tried to warn other potential candidates of what they were walking into.

The company knew about it too because they posted multiple fake reviews to try to drown out the real ones. I know for a fact that if they were able to find out who posted these, they would have retaliated, likely in the form of litigation.

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208 points

Glassdoor “may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties”

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178 points

Imagine Reddit does this next lmao one day you open up and all your real life social media are linked to your u/Lick_My_Fuckhole profile, your coworkers see you as “people you may know” on their profiles. Neat

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39 points

Didn’t Google+ do that?

It’s been so long since that debacle I honestly don’t remember.

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71 points

YouTube did it when Google bought them and changed everyone’s unique username to their Google account (real) name

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28 points

Worse, StarCraft tried it lol. Major blizzard fuckup

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11 points

Facebook did it as well, maybe a couple years after opening up to the non university crowd. Neither FB at the time or G+ years later gave any thought that their no pseudonym policies put someone’s safety at risk.

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2 points

Google+ was a Facebook-like social media. It was only ever supposed to be real names, so no issue.

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5 points

I mainly use reddit now for porn. Maybe a good way to get into a freak fetish ring…

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3 points

The only fetish subreddit I followed was banned. There was not even any nudity.

Fuck Reddit.

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2 points

At least my coworkers will know how I really feel.

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56 points

Oh wow, that’s dangerous.

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17 points

Yikes

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149 points

This is one of the most obvious potential cases of purposeful sabatoge. They were probably bribed by other big businesses to destroy their reputation so people would stop using the site.

There’s nothing businesses hate more than their workers having negotiating power, and wage transparency gives them more power than they had before. There’s a reason why it’s considered “rude” in the US to discuss wages with co-workers; I always make a point to discuss my wage with all of my co-workers, since it’s illegal for businesses to prevent that discussion.

In most other countries, it’s the norm to openly discuss your wages; unions are also more common in other countries. It’s just standard toxic workplace cultures trying to prevent people from getting paid what they’re worth, or god forbid, forming a union.

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25 points
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In what countries is it custom to openly discuss salary? In Germany and most if not all countries I’ve been to professionally it is not the norm. This is of course bad for transparency/employees and good for employers.

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19 points

Germany has a principle of equal treatment. The only way to ensure this is respected is to discuss wages. There is a legal precedent that makes it completely unambiguous that discussing wages is protected. It may be uncomfortable, but that’s just social pressure, encouraged by companies.

https://www.hensche.de/Rechtsanwalt_Arbeitsrecht_Urteile_AGB_LAG_Mecklenburg-Vorpommern_2Sa237-09.html

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4 points

Not denying that it’s legal and beneficial to discuss that. It’s unfortunately not common (yet?).

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17 points

All of scandinavia. There are public registers where you can look up the salary of everyone for norway, sweden and finland. When these registers were introduced, the salaries were normalized across the whole population

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7 points

In Denmark, I’m part of a union which publishes salary stats for every possible job title, management responsibility, education, in a fairly convoluted matrix. Still, this allows me to easily negotiate with companies and see how well they pay. There might be something organised by the government, but I’ve never had a need for it.

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1 point

I like the idea of a register a lot.

Do you also talk about it though? I was in Denmark on business for a couple of weeks and I don’t recall there being a discussion about it.

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17 points

Where I live we don’t really discuss salaries and I think that mostly comes down to society being tricked into believing it’s a bad thing. However our national statistics agency has made salary statistics public, which means anyone easily check their salary range and see if they’re being underpaid. I actually prefer that to discussing with co-workers because you end up getting a much better picture of your industry.

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2 points
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In my country I’m only aware of statistics published by a newspaper (source may be statista, some agency or a job portal). I find the values weird however as I earn way above the stated value for my general description. I’m in a bit of a niche however so that might work to my benefit. The statistics still feel like ‘expectation management’ to me though.

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15 points
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In China, “How much do you make?” Is right up there with “What’s your name?”.

Pretty disarming for unsuspecting foreigners.

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3 points

Pretty disarming for unsuspecting foreigners.

That would indeed be a WTF moment for me.

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11 points

From the article that they acquired a professional social networking app so their intention is clearly to be like LinkedIn - real names, links, career history, “social”. They want to monetize that information to sell to recruiters and salesmen.

So basically they’re nakedly greedy and they continue to suck. I thought LinkedIn was awful but Glassdoor is a whole new level of awful.

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11 points

Do you know when it became illegal to ban salary discussions in the US? All the companies I have worked for recently have mentioned it not being allowed at some point.

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44 points

You cannot prevent your employees from discussing wages. It is literally illegal to do so, and you cannot reprimand people for doing so.

Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or the Act), employees have the right to communicate with their coworkers about their wages, as well as with labor organizations, worker centers, the media, and the public. Wages are a vital term and condition of employment, and discussions of wages are often preliminary to organizing or other actions for mutual aid or protection.

If you are an employee covered by the Act, you may discuss wages in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, and in written messages. Policies that specifically prohibit the discussion of wages are unlawful as are policies that chill employees from discussing their wages.

You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-rights/your-rights-to-discuss-wages

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10 points
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Deleted by creator
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3 points

It’s not illegal. It’s frown upon both socially and at the work culture. It makes people uncomfortable.

Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. Ripping farts is frowned upon/makes people uncomfortable too.

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5 points

Man, people love to make up conspiracy theories.

The article explains the motivation, which is also bad and plausible. There’s no need to pull stuff out of your ass to explain it too.

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3 points

While I see what you are seeing, I think people will just move to the next startup.

Also by Occam’s razor, don’t explain with malice what you can explain with stupidity

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9 points

Hanlon’s razor.

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6 points

Fair point, but I’m wondering which part you were applying Occam’s razor to - what Glassdoor did is clearly malicious!

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2 points

That would be Hanlons razor. I have no idea whether it applies here.

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2 points

To the part that they were bribed.

I think they are simply in the pipe dream that they will become the new LinkedIn

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3 points

There is also the growing difficulty of disseminating real information from false information, but that should have been more the reviewed company’s problem than Glassdoor.

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-1 points

Or

Think about it for more than 1 second.

They’ve been sued for liable.

Or

They’re being shit and creating a new revenue stream because constant growth and bonuses

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0 points

Or

Read the article

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