>2) People grow and improve. I don't want to be judged for my work or my behavior from my early days in the field. How are you going to be sure this isn't unfairly capturing the worst moments of someone's career just because they are new at it and haven't learned any better yet?

Or are currently in a bad company which forces/encourages this kind of behavior. I wouldn't mind recruiting company reviews though. Because there would be a few on my blacklist.

Only one on my blacklist is Cyber Coders. They just sent me a listing for a Davenport Machine Operator four states away, based on my skills. My skills are all in software development. No idea why this recruiter thinks I'd be a good fit for operating a giant piece of machinery.

They're just spamming heavily and hoping you maybe know someone who knows someone :)

Ah yes, the tried and true "you do my job for me" method.

I thought Cyber Coders hire directly?

We actually asked ourselves the same questions. The natural evolution of this tool would be to allow for reviews of recruiters/agencies.

Regarding point 1) there are ways to fight unjustified negative reviews (e.g. "I didn't get a job, this agency sucks!"), similarly to how they do on websites like Yelp. This is more of a community guided effort (unless we start actively moderating reviews, which is an option).

For now we're focusing more on building a sort of index of "horror stories" involving recruiters but before releasing the data we'll make a big effort not to publish biased content or blatant lies.

For point 2) We absolutely agree and we are still discussing how to release the data so that "nobody gets hurt", at least individually. You can keep in touch with us by adding your email address to the form (even if you don't want to share any story, although it would be much appreciated). Feel free to use a temporary email address or an alias.

I was working on a similar system for more general reviews and found that compared to fraudulent positive reviews negative reviews have a lot less incentives except against public figures and tend to be more honest as a result. With that said, protecting both the submitter and the accused of defamation can be accomplished partially with community moderation and aggressive redaction of as many identifying names as possible - companies are, however, not exempt (in fact, the primary key that I used for complaints). And to avoid unfair hive mind viral hits on characters, any review beyond a certain community reputation needs to be reviewed for validity and made clear to the community that the story is an allegation. Furthermore, I wanted to encourage more of a dialogue and similar to Yelp reviews, so if you are given a negative reputation you must be provided a means to defend yourself - and the status of defense must be made clear as well. For example, a statement can be made public, private (only to the person that originally wrote the review), “no comment,” or no response. If someone didn’t originally provide their contact info out of fears, the community should be made clear that it’s anonymous and will always remain so. However, protecting the information at your discretion until a certain reputation has been reached should provide more credibility as well. The hard part was trying to figure out how to contact the accused at a corporation for low-touch interactions because we tend to not have the same person repeatedly (hence why normally I just used the company, not individuals).

All great points! I think we will have to face similar challenges.

We're working on different options. One is along the lines of Glassdoor which allows companies to respond to reviews.

If you have any references regarding the first paragraph I would be very interested, thanks!

I completely agree. Public shaming lists aren't advisable.

Don't worry, it won't turn into a public shaming list, we already thought about that. We will update the form to make this clear.

How can you release the all the data about bad recruiters publicly without making it a public shaming list?

We will only release data about companies, not individual recruiters. We will then use their name to (try to) get their contact details and send them a link to the data so that they can be more aware of how their actions affected (and how many) people. What we're doing should ideally benefit both sides, not just us.

Hence why I said we should make this more clear, as in: we're not going to publish the names of the individual recruiters.

You're currently collecting this data under false pretenses. If you care about unprofessional behavior and giving people bad experiences, you should remove the line about releasing all the data to the public from the start of your survey.

No we are not. We are clearly stating that the data will be publicly available EXCEPT for those fields where the opposite is explicitly indicated. I really don't see how this could be more clear.

EDIT: by the way we updated the related field so that it's clear that the recruiter's name might be shared with the agency (but without releasing anything else about the entry to avoid tracing it back to the candidate). If you have any suggestions on how to communicate this better we would really appreciate it. Thanks!

Your front page still says

> We are collecting stories from devs all over the world and plan to release all data to the public (for free!) so that no more fellow devs will have to suffer

If I filled your form out, I would expect that all the data I entered would be released to the public. You then turn around and contradict that in the form, making it less clear about what I should expect. You need to be consistent in both places, and link to a more detailed explanation on how this data will be anonymized and shared.

This also makes it less clear whether other fields will be shared publicly. Is field 7 going to be public or is it just something I'm sharing with you? I'm honestly not sure about that now.

What's more clear than being explicit about which fields will be published and which not? IMHO adding that to the main page is redundant and a waste of time and space.

Specifically about field 7 are you suggesting we rephrase the description? If so how?

We can definitely work on a page that explains the process in more detail once we decide exactly how to proceed.

You're not being explicit about which fields will be shared. The main page says all fields will be made public. Then field 5 says it won't be made public. When I read field 5, I know you've lied to me at least once about how much of the data is going to be made public. I'm just asking you to not lie about that on the main page.

For field 7, I'd take the "us" out or be more explicit that this is a confidential field. If I'm telling something just to you, it doesn't sound like it'll be made public. The main page says field 7 will be made public, but then you told me it isn't true for field 5.

If you haven't yet figured out how to anonymize personal data you're asking people to share with you before distributing it, you have no business asking for it. There are almost certainly going to be people who disagree about what identifies them in this form. This is something that's very easy to mess up and you should give people a fair chance to self-censor by being clear about what you're going to do for them.