Glassdoor reviews are useful only if you manually read them individually and critically judge each one for what it's worth.
A lot of negative reviews for my current employer are incredibly spot-on.
I had a very negative experience with my former employer, which currently has 11 reviews with a 4.9 star average, which led them to be rated the #10 best employer in a very large tech market.
They were constantly explicitly threatened to fire people. Ran off 2 out of their 3 founders, some of them very abruptly, jeopardizing the staff's pay and benefits (and this was just a couple of months before winning that "best in town" award). They either cynically produced horrible quality code for their clients, or farmed you out as a body shop to local software teams that couldn't attract their own talent directly, and for good reason.
Exactly 1 year later I now recognize exactly 1/3 of the bio/profiles listed on their website, the other 2/3 being totally unrecognized and new.
When I left the place I had a negative sick time balance, which they offered to write off, and also kept my health care running for an extra month after the month that I departed. And during the same conversation they offered that "we should not talk bad about each other," and of course they had the one really nice guy have this conversation with me.
So now, I look for individual negative reviews which seem reasonably articulate and unemotional, and if a place looks interesting enough, try to queue these issues up for questions during a prospective interview.
A lot of negative reviews for my current employer are incredibly spot-on.
I had a very negative experience with my former employer, which currently has 11 reviews with a 4.9 star average, which led them to be rated the #10 best employer in a very large tech market.
They were constantly explicitly threatened to fire people. Ran off 2 out of their 3 founders, some of them very abruptly, jeopardizing the staff's pay and benefits (and this was just a couple of months before winning that "best in town" award). They either cynically produced horrible quality code for their clients, or farmed you out as a body shop to local software teams that couldn't attract their own talent directly, and for good reason.
Exactly 1 year later I now recognize exactly 1/3 of the bio/profiles listed on their website, the other 2/3 being totally unrecognized and new.
When I left the place I had a negative sick time balance, which they offered to write off, and also kept my health care running for an extra month after the month that I departed. And during the same conversation they offered that "we should not talk bad about each other," and of course they had the one really nice guy have this conversation with me.
So now, I look for individual negative reviews which seem reasonably articulate and unemotional, and if a place looks interesting enough, try to queue these issues up for questions during a prospective interview.