On Company Review/Info Sites

For various reasons, I find myself once again at a point in my career where I am considering both searching out unbiased feedback about organizations, and potentially providing such myself. I perceive a considerable amount of value in the general existence of such information, in a few different ways. From the employee perspective, obviously, it can bias where you take a job, help align the working conditions with your expectations and desires, and consequently increase overall job satisfaction and potential for a good fit. From the general economy perspective, transparent information can be a powerful force in motivating companies to create better working conditions, by aligning that goal with economic incentives (vis-a-vis the ability to recruit better people). It's a general objective good thing.

It's also a hard thing, mainly because there are a lot of bad actors in the corporate space, and companies can be very punitive and litigious when it comes to negative feedback about them. Just as Yelp.

Conceptually, it would be great if there were open, pseudo-anonymous forums where this could be done, with some semblance of accountability (ie: to prevent outright falsehoods and misrepresentation, as opposed to just subjective opinions). There are some current efforts (eg: GlassDoor, Blind, etc.), but all of these include some amount of peril for contributors, and suffer from some amount of selection bias. To the former point, it can be somewhat perilous for current or future employment prospects if comments on working conditions are associated with a current or potential employees identity, and even the willingness to provide feedback on an employer might be seen as a risk for employing someone. On the latter point, the current sites tend to have a large amount of selection bias: in general, disgruntled employees are far more likely to post information to the sites, rather than content employees. Both of these tend to skew the overall data, and impede the ability to have comprehensive and unbiased information available.

Personally, I am hesitant to provide feedback on any current or former employer which could be construed as negative, because I don't want to imperil any future employment potential. This is actively bad for the market and other potential employees, though, as lacking insight and perspective can not only lead to bad choices from others, but prevents the market forces from helping to improve working conditions overall (ie: by financially impacting "bad" employers). My self-interest is unfortunately somewhat opposed to what might be considered an optimal scenario for the market in general.

Hypothesizing, I think two things would improve the current situation quite a bit here (and note that both are unlikely to transpire, but we've got our idealized world hat on):

• Government protection for expression of opinions about one's employers (in the same sense as other labor protections and rights, which are often not very protective in practice, but far better than nothing)
• A general pseudo-anonymous authentication system which could validate information (eg: uniqueness, employment, etc.), but did not expose the actual person's identity

This would allow, in theory, employees to be encouraged to provide regular information about employers (working conditions, policies, etc.), and have that data be validated and aggregated. It would really allow much better accessibility to information about employers, and leverage the market to improve working conditions overall. It would be, in short, a "good thing".

Now that just leaves the near-insurmountable hurtle of getting something done in practice which involves both the government acting for the benefit of the people, and the government respecting privacy protections. But we can dream, I suppose.