and how many of these "best places to work" 5-star reviews ...
... come directly from the company's HR drones?
As the world struggles to free itself from the clutches of a global pandemic, maybe it's possible to look on the bright side — at least if you work for a gang of global tech companies. Research from anonymous employee review site Glassdoor shows that dominant software giants Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and SAP are the only …
It's worse than that. If you read the book "Disrupted" you'll understand why "...sales platform Hubspot is number two..." they have a cult like mentality and actively encourage their employees to leave positive reviews. It's not HR drones, they are ALL drones.
A company that took over the one I worked for forced us to write a positive review on Glassdoor. A HR person actually sat next to me and dictated the review. This was their standard policy for new hires or those like me that joined them through acquisitions.
Checking their current reviews, those glowing testimonials are offset by far more negative ones. Not surprised, as they were horrible to work for - within three months of bring acquired everyone from the company I originally joined had quit.
"Research from anonymous employee review site Glassdoor shows that dominant software giants Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and SAP are the only companies — from any sector — to appear in all the top 50 best places to works lists in the UK, France, Germany, the US, and Canada."
But a company that operates in only four of those countries wouldn't even be able to appear on all the lists. That means the only candidates that could appear there need to employ a lot of people and have operations in several countries. Given the number of largish employers that don't operate everywhere, it's possible the sample size was smaller than it sounds.
That tech rates highly doesn't surprise me much. It's a field with a distinctive culture because it's relatively new and because individual employees usually have more ability to change things. That certainly doesn't mean it's the best way to operate, but there are many things about the tech culture that don't seem common in other types of company.
Like maybe a "post a good review whilst I watch or you're fired" policy?
The only good use for this site I've ever found is to just read the negative reviews by ex-employees. If there's lots of them and they're especially scathing it's a good indicator to avoid having anything to do with that company.
It wouldn't be the first time companies, especially those with deep pockets have paid a review site to proactively remove bad reviews even if they have to violate them for petty rule infractions. On top of that I bet there are a lot of shill reviews since there is an incentive to do it and minimal verification somebody actually works for the company they purport to.
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....passively monitored people logging onto the site and cross referenced negative posts with time stamps. Posting bad comments is part of a disciplinary action (check your contract, chances are you have the same clause), so be prepared to get roasted.
I Know this happens in other companies as well.
Of course, the flip side, you can let it slip that you know fake reviews from HR / Marketing have been posted to GD and watch them get annoyed at them being flagged.
Which is a practice that seems like a waste of time to me.
At this point, social media has been around long enough that almost everyone will have posted something that can be taken out of context at this point.
Also, for a lot of techies (including myself), any HR drone crawling through my social media history will find a huge, HUGE amount of experimental bot traffic or automated posts. If they wish to trawl through my 218,693 posts over almost a decade, they better have a good supply of coffee.
That maybe the case however there is now an industry that provides services doing just that.
Look at the people who have been discredited due to some post on social media when they were a student or something.
Equally there are plenty of people out there with reams of social media content that align exactly with their views (Katy Hopkins is an excellent example). The big difference is that the latter is current active & valid whereas trawling through posts that are long forgotten from years ago is simply destructive and is usually for malicious purposes.
That these companies exist is part of the problem and equally that there are people prepared to pay for the services they offer.
"At this point, social media has been around long enough that almost everyone will have posted something that can be taken out of context at this point."
Which is why I never use my real name on forums or the likes of Facebook when I briefly had an account on there. So in case you were wondering, I'm not really Fat Freddy's Cat.
Frankly, it seems a bit stupid to me to go and post bad things about your company on the company network. The company has the right, and the power, to log everything you do.
You can access the Internet from your phone. Or from your home PC. In either case, you are secure from the prying eyes of your company.
That is why I don’t connect personal devices to company WiFi networks. Or use a personal account on a company issued device.
My work is one set, my personal stuff is another set and the two don’t meet.
I will occasionally email from personal to company but that is usually because I have found a fix for a problem whilst out of work hours.
I don’t have social media (apart from a LinkedIn account where I haven’t posted anything for a year or more) so good luck on searching for that. Unless you want to go through my 1500 hundred posts on autopuzzles.com or all the comments made on the register…
That may be but it doesn't excuse some shitty company trying to find out who might be posting bad reviews about itself. I wouldn't be surprised if some large companies with a poor reputation (*cough* Amazon) even have internal security departments whose purpose includes finding people posting or saying negative things about the company in the press or online.
But yeah, it would make sense to do this at a time and location that the company can't pin on a person.
"I wouldn't be surprised if some large companies with a poor reputation (*cough* Amazon) even have internal security departments whose purpose includes finding people posting or saying negative things about the company in the press or online."
eBay say they don't normally do this https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/28/ebay_security_prison/
Meh. Used to work for a major backup vendor as a pre sales person. As part of a whitewashing initiative we staff had to post positive reviews in a team meeting. Of course everyone gave cr@p reviews as soon as they got home, even the ones who would t usually have bothered!
I'm on the fence with Glassdoor, but......
It is inevitable the bad reviews outnumbervthe good, like any review site really.
You also have to weigh up the 'bitterness' of an (ex) employee with reality.
That said, I've looked at a few of my ex-employers, and the bad reviews (vast majority) have been spot on
The "Innovation Management"/software company I work for, has seen an exodus of staff since the new CEO arrived.
Those who left wrote a lot of accurate reviews on Glassdoor, but all of a sudden many 5 star reviews have been placed which are all very similar. Looks like the work of the CEO as he can't take criticism, so Glassdoor has some work to do if it's to remain neutral.
Alright, maybe not quite that but how many of us have worked with those handful of lazy bastards who contribute nothing, expect all the glory and then moan when the company won't increase their pay, pay them a 20% bonus for coming up with one reasonable idea?
I've worked at a couple of places that got slaughtered on Glassdoor and they weren't that bad, maybe not amazing but certainly not the employee hellholes some people seem to suggest. You're never going to get an honest answer about how good a place is, workplaces polarize opinion, some love it and some hate it. All you can do is look at staff turnover numbers if available and make your own assumptions.
A few years back my missus used to run a program at a consultancy firm, the objective was to do well in these surveys.
A lot of effort went into ensuring that only the right types of people were selected to complete the surveys, a population of about 100. Those individuals weren’t coached, coerced, or otherwise encouraged to answer in a particular way, however they were pretty safe bets.
As an employee of one of the top 5 with over 20 years in the industry, I can honestly say it's by far the best place I've ever worked. You're genuinely treated well, fairly, and given opportunities to develop your career. There's never been any suggestion that anyone write fake positive reviews. I can understand the cynicism, but it really doesn't have to be the norm that people should be treated like shit by management.
This is a breakdown of the population by percentile points of income, along with what that income is from the HMRC.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax
Summarily for those who can't be bothered to look:-
The 1% percentile makes 12k p/a
The 25% percentile makes 17.8k p/a
The 50% percentile makes 25k p/a
The 75% percentile makes 37.8k p/a
The 90th percentile makes £56.2k p/a
The 99th percentile makes £175k p/a
*This typically excludes people who are "contractors" instead of "employees", which can people working at McDonalds or Uber at the low end, and at least 800 BBC presenters in the top 1%, which suggests that ways of avoiding paying tax is prevalent enough to skew these figures. Still, they should be reasonably accurate.
Out of IT jobs, first line service desk jobs are about all that can reasonably be expected to make less than the top 50% of the population, and even then not by that much.
A stark reality is that tech companies are staffed with reasonably sought after employees with transferable skills, who other companies would be reasonably happy with recruiting and who's employers would be somewhat put out at losing. As a result, most jobs come with much better conditions than employees in lower wage brackets who are often treated as disposable and easily replaceable.
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