Glassdoor

Glassdoor promised to be Yelp for jobs—a place where workers could anonymously review their employers and shine a light on the salary ranges and toxic cultures that companies preferred to keep hidden. For a while, it worked beautifully. Finally, workers had leverage. You could find out that a startup's "competitive salary" was actually 30% below market rate before wasting time on their five-round interview process. You could read that the CEO screamed at people in meetings before accepting an offer. The information asymmetry that companies had exploited for decades was starting to crack, and Glassdoor was holding the hammer.

Then Glassdoor got bought by Recruit Holdings in 2018 for $1.2 billion, and the incentives shifted. The site now makes money from employer branding services—companies paying to make their profiles look better. That's not inherently corrupt, but it creates obvious tensions. When your revenue depends on keeping employers happy, how aggressively do you protect negative reviews? How transparent are you about which companies are paying for premium features? The reviews are still useful, but you have to read them with the understanding that the platform has become, at least partially, a tool for corporate reputation management.

The UX has degraded significantly over the years. Want to read salary information? You'll need to contribute your own first, or create an account, or jump through some other hoop designed to increase engagement metrics. The dark patterns are subtle but persistent: notification defaults that opt you in, interstitials that interrupt your browsing, increasingly aggressive prompts to download the app. It's not the worst offender in tech, but Glassdoor used to feel like it was on the workers' side. Now it feels like it's on its own side, which happens to sometimes align with workers' interests when convenient.

The recent controversy about Glassdoor potentially deanonymizing users is deeply troubling. Reports emerged that the platform was collecting users' real names and connecting them to accounts that were supposed to be anonymous. For a site that depends entirely on workers feeling safe enough to tell the truth about their employers, this is an existential threat. Anonymity isn't a feature on Glassdoor—it's the entire value proposition. Workers who feared retaliation for honest reviews have reason to wonder if their trust was misplaced. The company has responded with PR statements, but trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild.

Despite all this, Glassdoor remains useful enough that I still check it before interviews. The salary data, even if imperfect, provides a baseline for negotiation. The reviews, even if you discount the obviously planted positive ones and the vindictive negative ones, paint a picture of company culture that you can't get anywhere else. The interview questions and experiences are genuinely helpful. But I use Glassdoor the way I'd use any corporate-owned platform that claims to serve users: carefully, skeptically, aware that the incentives may not align with my interests. It's a tool, not an ally.