Mr. Tact wrote on Jun 9, 2013, 10:59:
I'm sorry, is someone surprised by these allegations? I just assumed everyone realized this was being done on a regular basis by many companies.
Have you ever met someone that does this, or seen a job posting about it, or tried to think about what the job posting would look like, what the daily responsibilities would be, and how it would be kept quiet?
Yes, restaurants spam on Yelp sometimes. Authors spam on Amazon sometime. But the bigger something is the less likely they are to do it. Why? Because they can't keep it quiet, and because it would blow up in their face and not be worthwhile. And, frankly, paying people to do that is pretty damn expensive. It's happened a few times that a foreign subsidiary, which is a small operation, has someone do it, or an ad agency goes rogue and does it, but a company like Apple or Microsoft or Google doesn't want their employees doing this.
Thought it's certainly possible that this is such a big deal that they're panicking.
Those one-posters we get here? I'd say very, very few are paid to be here. The vast majority are super fanboys (and we all know they exist) or over excited employees.