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by adventured 3953 days ago
And yet Amazon (3.4) rates comparable on Glassdoor to many other important technology companies, including: Oracle (3.3), Yahoo (3.5), HP (3.3), IBM (3.1), eBay (3.5), Tesla (3.4), Dell (3.4), Cisco (3.7).

That's with 5,800+ reviews. Something doesn't add up.

3 comments

Yeah, one thing is, negative reviews on Glassdoor seem to get killed.

I reviewed Amazon negatively, and of course it's no longer there.

I don't know if Glassdoor is doing like Yelp is alleged to be doing, but I've seen this with other companies as well, where the negative reviews get spiked.

How reliable is glassdoor as a metric? Personally, I would never, ever post anything negative there due to the fear of retaliation. I suspect truly bad companies never get their comeuppance because at the end of the day, you need some kind of reference and positive job history from your previous employer. It may not be that hard to trace a review to a specific employee due to timing, title, salary, etc information.
According to the dozen seasoned job-hunters and recruiters that I know, Glassdoor is absolutely rotten in my industry (biotech). The selection bias is heavy-handed at best. Even Amazon's 5,000+ reviews represent a very small fraction of it's employees globally. These are futher selected as the kind who would review a job online pseudoanomyously.

Furthermore, one doesn't know the age of a review -- is this a current employee, a previous one who left last week or a review of a the job from 10 years ago? It's entirely possible that every problem addressed in a negative review has been since addressed. You just don't know.

I've seen plenty of instances where the Glassdor listings were really a red flag. In these cases, there are several negative reviews focusing on similar cons, then several other glowing (and obviously planted) reviews to combat it.
It depends on the team and department in every company.

You can always find one or two terrible anecdotes.

Does 300 people count as more than "one or two" terrible anecdotes? Cause thats how many were in the group that were having a miserable time when I was at Amazon... it was a significant proportion of the engineers at HQ at that time, possibly %60.
That's quite worrying. I wonder why they haven't made a bigger hit in the glassdoor rating.