I am listing down all the ways companies deceive or shortchange us, and what we should do to keep them in check.
I am pointing these out, not just to rant or vent, as I believe we can do something about it. However it would need all of us to bring about a systemic change.
If enough people agree about the issues, and the proposed solution seems like it could work, It would be awesome opportunity to collaborate together to make an open and impartial Company Review site.
Deceptions
Here are some of the deceptive practices by companies, which I experienced first hand, that goes unpunished:
- Use of shadow resources to leech money off of clients.
- Crunch culture and poor work life balance.
- Long notice period to keep employees in shackles.
- Unfair wages to essential workers.
- Treating remote worker like cheap labour.
- Lapdog of corporates & countries.
- Environment damaging practices.
- Treating 3rd world employees like 2nd class citizen.
- Most companies have gold hoarding dragons at the top.
- Having forced activities we can't opt out of.
- Unfair interview for a job that isn't Rocket Science.
- Subpar workplace, especially in 3rd world countries.
- Poor response to Covid.
- Insisting we are family till its convenient.
- Using tax havens, to avoid paying taxes while making sure we do!
And on and on it goes.
The fact that we can see sites with terrible ratings on Glassdoor, is a testament that giving reviews there has no impact on companies whatsoever. Because if companies are allowed to hire or keep functioning after being rated so low then what's the point of having rating system?
Only by having a rating system that goes well beyond just 3 or 4 dimensions of measuring a company, and not allowing the companies that rate lower to hire, can those companies be kept in check.
Measuring how the companies have improved or deteriorated over time, can tell us if the the reviews are having any impact on the companies or they continue to function blithely.
LPT: Employers put "entry level" in job titles to trick applicants into accepting less pay. If the "entry level" job requires you to have significant experience, demand more than starting pay. - Reddit Life Pro Tip.
Proposal
We build a site that will list all the, curated companies, across the world.
And we would judge them based on the following:
Criterias
Off the top of my head, these are the criterias we should measure each company on:
- Criminal records of companies, i.e. All the open lawsuits.
- Environment response.
- Covid response.
- Ad spend.
- Integrity.
- Diversity.
- Clothing flexibility.
- Salary discrepancy.
- Perks that goes beyond the superficial.
- Casual, Paid, Parental, Sick and Vacation Leaves.
- Days per week.
- Work hours.
- Inflation & Salary correlation.
- Workplace quality.
- Privacy orientation.
- How people perceive the company. (Aggregated from Social Networks)
- Notice period or forced slavery period.
Job Board
As a reward for checking all the boxes, that makes a company great, they get to post jobs on the site.
The Job Board will be the source of income, with variable & flexible payment options.
For instance:
- Open Source Startups can pay once a year.
- Non Profit can pay once a year, at significant discount.
- Small Companies can pay per month for all job posts.
- Big organizations have to pay recurring amount every month per job post.
I am sure if we put our minds together, we can come up with better pricing model!
Badge of Approval
Like offenders need to let the community know about the crime(s) they have committed.
Similarly companies need to display a badge prominently on their site, showing different criterias they succeed and fail at!
So as to keep the oblivious clients off of the companies that are a detriment to humans, society & nature.
Penalties
Job posts can be flagged, and based on infractions, punishment will be levied.
- Keeping job posted, even if positions are filled will be penalized.
- Taking more candidates than possible to ingest will incur charges.
- Lying on the job post will incur ban for weeks for the company.
Job posts by companies with low score won't be allowed at all.
We'll pay you in experience - Recruiting Hell Subreddit.
Custom Voting System
Voting system currently in use, by most of the platform, seems flawed. I would like to suggest an alternative.
Instead of 1 - 5, the rating needs to be something like credit score and can drop down to negative, at which point the company can't post jobs.
Companies, unlike movies, may improve over time. So unlike movies where having fixed ratings makes sense, the ratings for Companies needs to be much more dynamic.
Online voting, unlike the democratic voting that takes place in our countries, can be done at any time and doesn't really affect the voter. So people tend to vote for companies only when they are dissatisfied or are reminded or are coerced.
The problem arises when people downvote a company and no positive upvotes are given by anyone and then people downvote the company again.
So I would like to propose a system, where the company starts with a certain positive amount of votes to begin with, based on initial assessments of current state of things at the company. (Like which criterias they fulfill)
The rating keeps on increasing little by little, based on how many positive traits they have, even if no one votes positively. If people working for those companies are dissatisfied, they can downvote the company.
Instead of following a yearly voting cadence, a semester or quarterly or monthly voting can be chosen. And based on influence of people, their votes will be weighted and applied:
- People working within the company get higher influence.
- People in lower levels get more influence.
- People outside the company get lesser influence.
Tech Stack
This may seem pretty opinionated, which it is, however given new evidence I can change my mind.
These are few things I prefer:
- Functional Programming over OOP & Related Design Patterns.
- Let it Crash or Better Error Handling.
- GraphQL & GraphDB.
- Privacy Focused Solutions.
- Open Source.
- Ease of Development, Performance & Less Boilerplate.
Which means:
- Frameworks: Svelte, Tailwind CSS.
- API: Apollo GraphQL.
- Build Tool: Snowpack, Rollup.
- Analytics: Plausible Analytics.
- Auth: Firebase Auth.
- Dashboard: Chart.js.
- Database: Dgraph, TimeScaleDB.
- Server: Phoenix Framework.
- Languages: JavaScript, Elixir.
- Payment: Stripe.
What about Glassdoor?
Just because something exists, doesn't mean we can't have a better version of it.
- It's UI leaves lot to be desired.
- Too many reviews to shift through to form a consensus, which leads to decision fatigue.
- It's not open sourced, so reviews can be deleted to appease big players.
- Doesn't even have a Warrant Canary, so company can receive a secret subpoena asking them to reveal secrets.
- Companies can game the rating system, by coercing employees for positive reviews.
- People don't always post on Glassdoor, as it goes unnoticed. People vent in social media, and anonymously on Reddit. (See: r/Antiwork)
- Glassdoor just judges based on 3 or 4 criterias, and not every dimension. It just looks at how employee is feeling and not how the whole world feels about the company.
- Lawsuits are not mentioned.
- Jobs get to stay on the site, even though the company's rating drops down.
- There is too much data & too much clutter, it just doesn't point out if the company underpays everyone in every level. It's like reading a 10 page terms & conditions to understand that your private info is being sold on page 8 line 13.
- Doesn't stay up to date, people who left reviews, might have left the company already and the issue might have gotten bigger or solved entirely.
Conclusion
Above listed things are no way exhaustive, there is still scope for improvements. I have a site & a GitHub Organization ready to attack.
If you believe an open source, publicly vetted, site would have an impact on the companies, then let me know in the comments down below:
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