I once worked at a company that managed to pull off all four conditions with one brilliant but devious hack: The warehouse uniform was a t-shirt imprinted with, "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
Perceived Threat
This implied that problems were the workers' fault, not the boss's. Subtle, but effective.
Small Kindness
Believe it or not, many people were actually glad to be given their own t-shirt by the boss.
Isolation from Other Perspectives
Everyone had the same t-shirt. Eventually, what started out as a joke became the accepted condition.
Perceived Inability to Escape
There was never any doubt who was in control. Resistance was futile.
Oh yes, I recently escaped from a company like this. I'm not afraid to name names: ClickBooth.com, a Sarasota company in the affiliate marketing space.
Myself and other programmers that once worked there all feel so grateful, we all get together on a regular basis and feel so lucky to have gotten out.
Here's a funny anecodote. They were having a hard time finding new developers. About 9 months ago, if you look through my HN posts, I posted to a "Who Is Hiring" thread. I mentioned a few of the cool things about working at Clickbooth and put my work email address in my post.
The next day I was called into my managers office. The HR woman saw my HN post. She was upset. For some reason. Still don't understand why, exactly. But it's not "my place" to post these things, I was told. And I should go delete my post. And my manager, he played the "good cop" routine... "I talked to the CEO and I'm not going to pursue this further." Oh, really? How lucky of me. You won't discipline me for, ya know, going above and beyond and trying to attract good developers to the team. Oh, gee, thank you sir, so much, for your kindness.
I didn't mean to rant for so long, but boy, it feels good.
Protecting turf is standard big company BS. By posting that you were hiring you threatened HRs turf. Most programmers by nature are pretty pragmatic so we don't see turf wars and often only see efficient solutions. Other people don't operate that way.
I see this type of thing all the time in the bigco I work for in my day job. I hate it because all it does in get in the way of solving problems while people jockey for control and credit. I recently had to take 'HR' out of the title of an application I wrote last year that did a bunch of HR functions. The reason? HR didn't like that 'HR' was in the title because they didn't control the application. Talk about wasted cycles that could be used for something actually productive.
That wasn't a long rant at all, and in fact, quite insightful. Truth be told, I'm actually rather happy that you managed to get out of your predicament and hope I can do the same soon.
Good question. There are a handful of employer review sites out there that have real review content, but on the ones I've seen it is often hard to discern the angry rants from the legitimate grievances.
Glassdoor weirds me out a bit from the other side.
It's a little unsettling going there the day after a round of interviews and basically reading a description of what it was like to be interviewed by me. No names, but I can definitely identify myself and some other co-workers by the questions we asked candidates.
A little weird, but getting good feedback on your performance sounds like it would be pretty nice to me. I mean, it might not feel great, but at least you'd know what needs improvement.
It wasn't feedback so much as it felt...disconnected and impersonal. The candidates didn't offer opinions, just descriptions of the interview flow (number of interviewers, how it was structured) and the types of questions asked. It felt like I was reading a transcript of a wiretap or something.
I'm not allowed to post job openings for my department. That's HR's job! And they don't post on third party sites. I asked about placing some notices up on various sites and was turned down for no communicated reason.
Perceived Threat
This implied that problems were the workers' fault, not the boss's. Subtle, but effective.
Small Kindness
Believe it or not, many people were actually glad to be given their own t-shirt by the boss.
Isolation from Other Perspectives
Everyone had the same t-shirt. Eventually, what started out as a joke became the accepted condition.
Perceived Inability to Escape
There was never any doubt who was in control. Resistance was futile.