Archive for October, 2008

Glassdoor Secures $6.5 Million in Series B Funding

Posted by • October 28th, 2008 • 9 Comments

As you may have seen already, we announced today that we have secured $6.5 million in Series B funding, led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from our existing investor Benchmark Capital.

The past few months have been a whirlwind, and Glassdoor.com has experienced significant growth. Our new investors share our vision of providing greater transparency to the employment space and helping people make better decisions about their work.

With this round, I’m happy to announce that Jim White, managing director, Sutter Hill Ventures, will join the Glassdoor board of directors. Jim has a proven track record of successful collaborations with leading business and consumer-facing companies, including Shutterfly.com, Fix.com, Farecast and Infinera, and his experience will be a valued asset to our board. He’s also great guy and I’m looking forward to working with him.

Since we launched our public beta in June, the site’s “employee generated content,” has grown nearly 40-fold to more than 115,000 contributions for 14,000 companies across a wide section of global industries. Immediately following the public debut, we received contributions from employees around the globe, prompting us to accelerate the community’s international capabilities in August. As result, Glassdoor ...

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Make Millions, Get Fired!

Posted by • October 23rd, 2008 • Leave a comment
You

While it remains to be seen whether or not the bailout bill will curb top executive salaries and payouts, the topic of CEO compensation has always been the subject of controversy and gossip. In particular, the debate over severance packages circulates around what is fair and whether the executive should really be paid for a job that was not well done. One of the most memorable in recent history was the $210 million exit package awarded to Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli in 2007.

With all the moving and shaking in the job market, we started thinking: What is the going-rate to fire a CEO executive these days anyway? Is there any correlation between a CEOs approval rating and the quality of their severance package?

Thanks to SEC requirements, various public records and Glassdoor’s CEO approval ratings system, we wanted to see if there is any consistency in how severance packages have been awarded to CEOs that have recently been asked to see themselves out the door.

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Glassdoor Takes Its Own Medicine

Posted by • October 22nd, 2008 • 2 Comments

We spend a lot of time here at Glassdoor thinking about transparency – how do we use it to help everyone make better career decisions?

We’ve been working on solving that fundamental question for awhile now, and to be honest – before we launched we weren’t really sure how our hard work would be received. Now that we’ve launched however, things have changed – we’re no longer just making “good guesses” – we’re fortunate to have an engaged community that will tell us what we’re doing well, and in some cases not so well.

Thankfully the feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive, but in the spirit of practicing what we preach we wanted to share some of the feedback we’ve received from members of the Glassdoor community – the good, the bad and the ugly. So here it is for all to see:

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Yahoo! – Ménage à Mess

Posted by • October 16th, 2008 • 3,227 Comments

Rumors are swirling around Yahoo! – is it going to be an AOL merger or a Microsoft buyout? It’s not surprising – rumors and speculation have become a favorite past-time when it comes to Yahoo! Everyone loves to pile on, but as a former Yahoo! employee – it’s getting harder and harder to watch.

Yahoo! Reviews

Overall Rating – 3.4

CEO Approval Rating (Jerry Yang) –

34% Approve (42% Disapprove)

AOL Reviews

Overall Rating – 2.8

CEO Approval Rating (Randy Falco) –

14% Approve (65% Disapprove)

Microsoft

Overall Rating – 3.7

CEO Approval Rating (Steve Ballmer) –

45% Approve (30% Disapprove)

I practically bled purple and yellow when I joined Yahoo!, but in the years that followed you could almost see the company lose it’s “mojo” (right along with their most talented employees). And as the race out of those purple and yellow doors began, I remember a conversation with one of my career mentors in which he said, “we’re going to become the next AOL, so get out while Yahoo! still means something.”

In the end it was great advice – I took it earlier this year and left shortly after Microsoft had given my Yahoo! stock a well-timed bump. But I didn’t think we’d still ...

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No Escaping Politics…

Posted by • October 15th, 2008 • 10 Comments

It goes without saying that there is a lot riding on the upcoming presidential election, so for a little while longer, there will be no escaping the endless barrage of politics. But what about escaping politics of a different kind, the kind that are not tied to the election cycle but affect you just the same? I’m talking about “office politics”, and if you have ever worked for a company that suffers from it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

We decided to uncover the companies on Glassdoor.com that seem to be suffering the most from office politics. We searched more than 100,000 company reviews and counted the number of times employees used the words “politics” or “political” when describing their workplace, and then sorted by the companies where those words appeared the most. So we present to you the top 5 companies that received the most mentions of the “P” words.

5 Worst Companies for Office Politics

Rank
Company
% of reviews mentioning ‘politics’ or ‘political’

1
Salesforce.com
29%

2
Fidelity Investments
22%

3
Yahoo!
16%

4
Johnson & Johnson
15%

5
Procter & Gamble
15%

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Better Late Than Never – September’s Review of the Month Winner

Posted by • October 14th, 2008 • 1 Comment
Amazon.com Office in Seattle

We’ve been very busy at Glassdoor. Between adding new features, updating our CEO watch list, and reaching a Glassdoor milestone of 100k approved reviews and salaries – we have finally selected our “Review of the Month” winner for September. In case you aren’t familiar, each month we spotlight one Glassdoor employee review and award that user $500 (in this economy everyone could use the extra cash). This month’s winner is a former Product Manager at Amazon.com.

Amazon.com Office in Seattle

Balanced, thorough, and honest. That’s the best way to describe this month’s winning review. Though not the most positive, this Amazon.com review almost feels like advice from one friend to another. That’s what the Glassdoor community is all about. Take a look and we think you’ll agree why this review stands out:

The culture has a sense of fun to it but it masks disrespect for the people working for management. There is a clear assumption that management knows best in every way, and so they have to watch over every detail to ensure that the dumb workers do not screw something up. This will just suck your soul – there is no presumption that you know ...

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Glassdoor Breaks 100K and Keeps Getting Better

Posted by • October 9th, 2008 • 1 Comment

It’s been awhile since we’ve done a product update (we’ve been caught up blogging about some of the economic news), but this week we pushed out a few product updates and I wanted to take this opportunity to give everyone the latest from the team.

About a week ago we achieved a major Glassdoor milestone – we crossed the 100,000 mark for total approved reviews and salaries. That’s a BIG number to hit in just over 100 days since launch – and we have users in over 90 countries to thank for this success. It’s become more and more obvious that the need for transparency in the workplace knows no boundaries, so we will continue working hard for you.

Thankfully with our “give-to-get” model, it should get easier and easier. It may not be obvious, but this big number is just the beginning. With our “give-to-get” model, the more we have to offer new users, the more likely they are to post their own review or salary (and join our community). And so it goes – it’s a model that supports itself – so thanks everyone for helping us get that ball rolling.

But that’s not the only ...

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eBay Layoffs – Will Donahoe Be Next?

Posted by • October 7th, 2008 • 7 Comments
John Donahoe / CEO of eBay

So the economy is tanking and there’s no shortage of bad news out there, but for today we thought we’d take a break from talking about financial services to talk about a local high-tech favorite – eBay. 

Yesterday, John Donahoe, the new CEO of eBay, announced he would be “streamlining” – otherwise known as laying off 10% of their workforce and letting go of several hundred temporary positions (1,600 jobs in total). Layoffs by themselves are not surprising in this economy, but if you’ve been reading any of the eBay reviews from the last month you’d know that that employees themselves will be looking for John himself to be included in this round of cuts.

Company
CEO
Approval Rating

Motorola
Greg Brown
10.6%

Rain Bird
Anthony LaFetra
11.4%

AOL
Randy Falco
13.4%

EDS
Ron Rittenmeyer
13.5%

Computer Sciences
Mike Laphen
19.3%

Wal-Mart
H. Lee Scott Jr.
23.5%

eBay
John Donahoe
25.2%

Nortel Networks
Mike S. Zafirovski
25.5%

UBS
Marcel Rohner
27.0%

Sun Microsystems
Jonathan Schwartz
28.9%

With a dismal 25.2% CEO approval rating (among the 10 worst with 50 or more reviews), employees haven’t been holding back. Whether its managements need for yet another re-org, change upon change that shows a lack of understanding and appreciation for the eBay ecosystem, or concerns about management killing the “cash cow” or “golden goose” (take your pick) – eBay employees have been especially active on Glassdoor lately.

eBay is ...

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Apple, a Fortress of Secrecy?

Posted by • October 5th, 2008 • 9 Comments

Apple Headquarters

Apple recently took a bruising in the blogosphere over its policy of requiring all iPhone developers to agree to a strict NDA (non-disclosure agreement).  Developers were forbidden from talking about their development of iPhone applications and even from saying publicly that their application had been rejected from the iPhone App Store.

Now, we developers (I’m a Lead Web Developer at Glassdoor) , are fairly gregarious. We love to brag, show off our code, critique other developers’ code, and generally show our mad skillz.  Apple’s iPhone NDA effectively shut iPhone developers off from their community, and they weren’t happy.  So Apple developers blogged -  They blogged a lot.  One developer even created the web site #@*% NDA.com (the real URL doesn’t use grawlixes — not the kind of homage you want from your developers).

The culture of secrecy at Apple is highly apparent when you read the 250 Apple Reviews contributed by Apple Employees on Glassdoor.  Apple employees are 15 times more likely to use the word “secrecy” or “secret” when describing their company compared to employees at other companies. 15.9% of the Apple Reviews use these words compared to just 1% at other companies.  Here are some examples:

Secrecy hurts ...

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