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Comment by Reedx | Hacker News Reader

Why cherry pick 1 review? You could've copied the more representative aggregation of reviews:

Pros:

"Riot is a great place for gamers" (in 79 reviews)

"Cares about Rioters: Riot has fantastic perks because they want to keep the talent (that's us) happy" (in 67 reviews)

"Best free food I’ve eaten, benefits are great, and there is a lot of opportunity if you are willing to work for it" (in 40 reviews)

"people that play League of Legends each month" (in 38 reviews)

"The company is obsessively player-focused" (in 32 reviews)

Cons:

"work/life balance can be an issue if you don't know how to handle it" (in 66 reviews)

"Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation" (in 59 reviews)

"Growing pains: Flat organizational structure doesn't work well when you start to hit 3k people" (in 32 reviews)

"Tends to over-value pedigree from ivy league and mbas" (in 28 reviews)

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> "Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation" (in 59 reviews)

This phrasing immediately struck me as odd so I went looking for an actual review:

'Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation. Some Rioters, particularly those who have never worked a "real job," do not seem to appreciate what Riot offers them.'

Smells like astroturfing.

The parent comment smells like outrage mongering. How could I know that you didn’t post it yourself? All the reviews are equally unreliable, you can’t just pick out the ones that you like.

> How could I know that you didn’t post it yourself?

You can't? How could anyone else know that I didn't write "smells like outrage mongering", maybe I enjoy arguing with myself. The only people who know for sure are you and I ... if we are even two different people, maybe you are my sock puppet, maybe I am yours. Who can prove that we are or aren't?

Assuming that I did write every comment in the entire tree - what difference does that make to any of the arguments?

All perfectly reasonably points. Which is why anecdata should generally not be taken very seriously. Especially when the author of it has some seriously questionable motives, which is the case with Glassdoor. The two groups of people who have the strongest motive to post something on Glassdoor are disgruntled employees (and an employee can become disgruntled in any work place, no matter how good or how terrible it might be), and astroturfers (and perhaps also competitors, but I have no idea how good they are at policing that). It has exactly the same set of problems that any review site has. Perhaps it’s aggregate data can reveal some truths, perhaps not. But a single review (especially one that is either strongly negative or strongly positive) reveals nothing.

Upvoted.

> But a single review reveals nothing.

Agreed. The top comment presents a single review. Anecdata, little informational value - outrage mongering, fair point. That was responded to by Reedx who disputed the value of a single review (ok) and presented what was implied to be a broader cross-section of reviews. One of those felt peculiar, not phrasing I would expect in 59 independent reviews. I dug up the only sample I could find and smelled astroturf.

Although my comment was negative I didn't address the point: "Why cherry pick 1 review?". Perhaps I should have opened by agreeing with Reedx that ancedata != data.

Perhaps we can both agree to:

Is Glassdoor a reliable and unbiased (including selection bias) source of information? Hell no.

Did I contribute in some part to the outrage mongering by not affirming Reedx's good point and writing a wholly negative reply? Yes.

I don’t disagree with anything here at all.

Sounds like really weird phrasing to me maybe some one from a different culture or its some really bizarre HR Buzzspeak invented term.

All those cons actually seem like disguisedd pros:

> Some Rioters lack a sense of appreciation

So what riot offers is amazing, but some employees don't know how to appreciate it (but you, you will of course)

> Growing pains: They talk of the flat organization which is a selling point to some people

> Tends to over-value ivy league and mbas

That's what ivy league and mbas (people they're trying to recruit) want to hear..

That's the point when astroturfing. Make the cons attractive.

Review volume is not a useful indicator. HR departments actively lobby employees to write positive reviews. These will always outnumber the honest reviews.

Cherry picking 1 review is a much less useful indicator. And there's no way to know if it's an honest one. Nor is there a way to know which ones were solicited or not.

So the closest you're going to get to usefulness is seeing what the common pros and cons are.

The cherry picked review is consistent with the numerous horror stories from the industry.

But I’m not sure that fact makes it any more credible. Wouldn’t a fake reviewer naturally draw from the known horror stories?

Having been at several companies where management and/or HR actively 'encouraged' people to post 5star Glassdoor reviews I now dismiss every single 5star review (and look at 4stars critically).

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