In my experience, the negative ones are usually absolutely reliable! When I have left a place happy, I usually forget to write a good review. When I leave a place that was a nightmare to work at, I don't forget to spill the beans to warn people away.
It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the company will hire a firm to write them positive reviews and disparage those who have left bad reviews, and not realise that prospective employees can completely tell the difference between the level of detail in the negative reviews 'eg, there was a pm who used to try to physically intimidate the female members of the team by leaning over them when he talked, I saw this on a weekly basis for 6 months until he was promoted to the programme manager and stopped working in our office', and the BS positive ones like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.
You'll see what I mean as you read them.
Sites like glassdoor are the only safety net we have to protect ourselves from those kinds of situations.
Hold on a second there... I am primarily a Java developer, although I dabble in some functional languages like Erlang, and usually mix some Lua in here and there). I've followed Kotlin for a long time waiting for a clear sign that Kotlin is worth learning after being burned by Scala. With co-routines I feel it's worth it, although I would desperately love being able to compile to native! That for me would be a killer feature. Currently I am learning Rust after dismissing Go for the task (love the simple concurrency, don't like the basicness of the language), and Swift (what a mess, I prefer ObjC!). Although I'll probably keep with Rust anyway because it's too impressive to not, the non-GC nature of Rust isn't important to my use-case, I basically just want a native Java. A native Kotlin would be perfect, as long as I can get high quality Gnome bindings. In fact, the main thing I would want out of a native Kotlin is around the native-code-interopt, and in my case that would be the libraries needed for native Gnome desktop application development.
It's not uncommon for a company to have some sort of management shuffle, a new (worse) culture is imposed, and people start to leave and write negative reviews. Then the company will hire a firm to write them positive reviews and disparage those who have left bad reviews, and not realise that prospective employees can completely tell the difference between the level of detail in the negative reviews 'eg, there was a pm who used to try to physically intimidate the female members of the team by leaning over them when he talked, I saw this on a weekly basis for 6 months until he was promoted to the programme manager and stopped working in our office', and the BS positive ones like 'it's a challenging place to work, the people posting negative reviews are used to workplaces where they need less initiative blah blah blah.
You'll see what I mean as you read them.
Sites like glassdoor are the only safety net we have to protect ourselves from those kinds of situations.