“Would you work for this guy again?”

I came across articles that say surveys show the number one reason people leave their jobs is the unhappiness with their manager, not the job or position. This is more true if the company is a large sized one where your relationship to your manager matters much more than the company’s performance and culture.

When you quit your manager, his lack of reputation and credibility to you is a tribal knowledge that only you know. The next person who will be working for this manager will not have the benefit of such knowledge. Likewise, before you take on the next job the best thing you can do is to check your network to see if any of your friends knows your future manager and provide some feedback. Blindly joining, you could be walking into another bad encounter.

And LinkedIn is not helpful. LinkedIn has become a Cringefest. You can only recommend and endorse, on the request of a member. And as you would expect, everyone is getting a 5 star.

Glassdoor, while provides good insights, when a company is small, on the company culture, it is not much meaningful for a large size company where employees can have very diverse experiences, based on really their immediate manager and work environments.

It would be magical if, a “Mirror Mirror” place, existed where you could vote on the managers or colleagues with a simple question, “Would you work for him again?” It would be nice to share insights with your fellow and future employees. This could be a gratitude to someone or a fair warning to another. Human experiences should not go wasted. Abuse of power should bear consequences. We all carry financial scores in the world we live, why not there be one for the professional life?

However such a place would face insurmountable challenges and probably cannot exist. Because first, while you maybe able to collect names from LinkedIn or other sources, you cannot use someone’s name without his consent, so you cannot populate a database with a name that is not populated by the person himself. Second, as soon as someone is getting down votes and bad reviews, defamation lawsuits will threaten to bankrupt the place. Thirdly, there could be abuse by a vindictive few.

So what is the option available for the upsetting employee? Dust yourself off and move on. Hopefully luck will be on your side the next time around.

Any suggestions are welcome.