Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 28, 2008 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

When I was in college, one website I always checked before a new semester started was “RateMyProfessors.com.” It’s a site dedicated to rating professors. Students can create an account, and then rate the teachers they had for all to see which helps out future students so that they know what they’re getting into before school starts. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were something similar for the workplace, somewhere that you could go to rate your boss or a company and get information on a future boss? There is such a site and it’s called Glassdoor.com. There you can get ratings and reviews about employers and companies, but you can also get salary information as well. Today we’ll be taking a look at all they offer and how you can contribute to the site anonymously.

What is Glassdoor.com?

Glassdoor.com is a fairly new site that collects company reviews from employees of large companies. They call themselves a “career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers.” The nice part about all of this is the fact that it’s anonymous. Most people don’t want to go and complain about their boss if there’s a chance that they would get caught. All of the information available is free, the only thing they ask is that you contribute by sharing a review or salary of your own.

If you ever wanted to know what actual employees really think of a particular company, this is a good resource for you. The only downside we can see is that someone could easily write a review for a company they really don’t work for and submit a fake salary which could goof things up.

Of course Glassdoor.com had to start somewhere, and so they decided to start out by focusing on tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, but they intend to (and have already) included companies from other regions. With time, they’ll expand and it just might become the go-to place to get employer information.

Ratings & Reviews

The ratings and reviews section is only partially useful to you unless you post your own review. This is how they’re going to help the site grow. Once you do submit your own review, you’ll have access to all of the reviews that they have available for various companies.

Once you click on the name of a company, for example, Microsoft, you’ll be able to see all of the reviews that people have submitted. There are three main components to each review – Pros, Cons, and Advice to Senior Management. You’ll be able to see the employee’s overall satisfaction rating on a scale of 1-5, and then you’ll also see their CEO Approval rating.

On each company page, in the right sidebar you’ll also see a column that lists more employers like the company you’re viewing. For Microsoft, it showed me that their top competitors are IBM, Oracle, and Google. If you’re looking for a job, this can help give you ideas of where you should apply.

Browsing for Reviews

In the right side-bar of the Ratings and Reviews section, there are different browsing options. You can browse reviews by industry, or by job. Example of reviews by industry include computer software, computer hardware, media, financial service reviews, retail reviews, etc. Example of reviews by job include software engineer, senior consultant, product manager, program manager, etc.

What I learned from the ratings and reviews section about Microsoft is that employees (including those from the past) give Microsoft a 3.9 satisfaction rating (on a 5.0 scale) and 52% approve of their CEO, Steve Ballmer. They’ fit in the 5000+ employees category and have over $51 billion in revenue. You can get this kind of information for many, many companies out there.

Salaries

If you switch to the “Salaries” tab, you’ll be able to see the types of salaries people are earning for various positions within companies. They graph out the range of salaries that people receive for a specific position, and then provide the average salary. You can either view salaried employee information, those earning hourly pay, as well as bonus information.

Continuing with our Microsoft example, we found that the average salary for a software development engineer is $94,397 but that the salary for that particular position ranges from $65,000 to $145,000 (from the people that have contributed so far). As of writing this post, 665 people had contributed their salaries for Microsoft.

Below is a graph which shows the range of salaries for various positions at Microsoft.

Contributing to the site

It’s almost necessary to contribute to the site if you want to get the most out of it. As mentioned, if you post a review or a salary for a position you hold or held at one point, you’ll get access to their whole collection of ratings and reviews. Remember, it’s anonymous which means your employer won’t ever know if you wrote it. They’re trying to promote contributing to the site, so each month they pick someone who wrote a detailed and helpful review and give them $500 bucks! Nice!

Wrapping it up

If you’re looking for a job, or you’re just curious how under-paid you may be in your current position, you’ll want to checkout Glassdoor.com. They’ve got a lot of helpful information that can give you some insight on whether you’d be a good fit with a company and how well you’d get paid.

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