Blind[1] is a decent community to get a glimpse into what employees truly feel about employers, get referrals and overall tech career advice. It can get rather toxic and troll-ey at times, but you can filter that out to focus on the useful stuff.
I made the mistake of downloading it once big players started layoffs in hopes of getting in on the news before it hit. But that forum is toxic sludge for anyone’s mental health.
I don’t use it anymore. The only time I download the app is like glassdoor when figuring out if a company is ok or not.
Partial archive: https://archive.ph/npoh6
As you would expect, it's horrible. The moderation is quite bad too. They'll ban you for just saying you disagree with someone depending on the topic.
What moderation? There's been a picture of feces inside a toilet bowl on that Blind thread for the past 3 hours.
Bragging about their workplace.
Most coworkers I know refuse to fill out any "how happy are you at work?" surveys or fill out max scores because they think (and I don't doubt them) that any and all information could be used by management to jeopardize their career -- basically they see their work an totalitarian information state...
We claim to live in democracies, while in fact we spend good part of our adult life in parallel societies where we can't even express dissent in private.
Cold application is fairly useless in today's age and time. A referral puts your application much ahead in the pool so that a human actually reads it.
Blind used to be a tolerable place until they made it exclusively US-centric. Importantly, I really loved their side product - Rooftop Slushie - where you could have resume reviews, interview prep, and get trusted referrals for a small sum. They seem to have closed that though.
Really? 95% of the people I've been involved in hiring have been cold applicants or via a recruiter (where normally those connections aren't made by referrals either).