Blind - Professional Community Reviews

by UXdeisgn

I started getting automatic text messages on my phone from Blind though I had never downloaded it. It said my coworker invited me.

I started the process of downloading and setting it up like a fool when I realized it wanted to send emails to my work addy and verify me on LinkedIn. This made me uncomfortable so I emailed them several days ago asking for the account to be deleted. (Blind is stuck on asking me for personal info and I can’t do anything with it.)

Meanwhile I’m still getting these annoying text messages. I asked the ppl on my team if they sent it to me and they said no. (We are candid with each other.) I’m not sure how they even got my number. “this app” couldn’t be a better description for Blind’s developers.

by Cyrusthevirus88

Your app enables nothing but negativity and cyber-bullying, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything positive come out of any of the posts. And because it’s anonymous, people say more hurtful (and racist) things because they can. Yes you can report posts but they do nothing. If anything you hide them from the reporters feed but visible to everyone else. I don’t see how ethically you can brand Blind as anything other than “want to say mean things about your co-workers? Try this app!”

Blind is poison. Congrats on making people worse after using your product.

by Dee23dee23

The idea is a good one but being anonymous only invites trolling, rude, and harassing comments. Maybe if there’s a better way to flag/warn/or get rid of these people, Blind would be more useful. It’s suppose to be a network of working professional “adults” but it’s all a bunch of immature people talking crap about each other. No real sound advice if you are genuinely looking for that. I got Blind because they advertise it as a place to get some advise on careers/salary/work culture and even help with interviews but all you get is a bunch of ignorant comments. I guess that’s what happens when you let people hide behind close doors, they show their true colors so long as they can remain anonymous.

by Douglas_Cole

The amount of insanity on here isn’t worth it. 95% of everyone on here makes $200k or more, flaunts it without any humility, and has zero concept of the world around them if it doesn’t reinforce their way of life. Remember Martin Shkreli? Great. Now, imagine an entire app with other people just like him, trolling others with their libertarian views, and a complete disregard for anyone “beneath” them. I once made reference to working for Uber and making less than $100k and I was met with “ugh are we giving drivers Uber email addresses now?”, “dude how can you even work at Uber for less than $100k?”, and so forth. Blind is impressive in that it’s singlehandedly brings you everything wrong with the culture of San Francisco’s tech culture in one place.

by Fjalkdj

Blind has the level of polish equivalent to that of a coding bootcamp capstone project. There are so many poorly implemented features- the fact that you can’t like a comment in a thread without first visiting that thread, that notifications literally do not function correctly (I still get notifications on threads I’ve explicitly turned the off for, but I’m sure that’s totally accidental right guys ;), the fact that blocking the poster of a thread then trying to visiting that thread by notification crashes Blind , it seriously seems like they have 2 mediocre engineers developing the entire app. The quality has not changed in 6 months. They have done literally nothing to deserve my attention and user data. Blind is so frustrating to use at a base level that I recommend everyone just stop, it’ll be better for our mental health in the long run.

by Tina From The Bay Area

The concept of this app is excellent. Who wouldn’t want an insiders look into companies? Unfortunately that’s not how things actually go. First, this app is very heavy on the R&D side (eg engineers). It’s not an accurate representation of the various departments of a company. Second, majority of folks on this app are disgruntled in some way, shape, or form. Got a bad mid year review? Go to this app. Didn’t get a promo? Go to this app. Hate working from home? Go to this app. Don’t like the cafe food? Go to this app. People love to hate on this app which is already incredibly biased. The founders actually think their audience represents the true feelings of employees which is so grossly inaccurate and far fetched. this app is the new Nextdoor, except instead of annoying/angry Karen’s nit picking everything, you have spoiled/arrogant tech workers who hide between anonymity. Oh this app.

by Mewmmstar

I like the concept of Blind in bringing together people from different workplaces to ask work-related questions but often times I saw many mean and unhelpful comments to questions that were simply seeking help. Unlike reddit and other chat communities, this app doesn’t seem to have any enforced rules for trolling and harsh comments. I had Blind for about 2 weeks and decided to delete it because I was sick of seeing people post harsh comments and supporting other harsh comments that simply amounts to cyberbullying.

Although, this was not always the case, it happened regularly to the point that I saw it in almost every other post.

I think having an app that connects people together for asking work related advice anonymously is nice. However, if you were to build a good and truly helpful community, I believe having enforceable rules to prevent cyberbullying and create a supportive environment is absolutely necessary for making Blind experience better.

by Djskwowikdkfkof

Very nice app honestly, and a good conduit for fostering discussions and community.

The recent limitations on what constitutes full access have severely hamstrung Blind and the community. The result was a three day cesspool of spam/troll topics revolving around the term ‘prestige’ from the remaining full access users.

Your work email has to belong to a short list of companies, without which you can only view certain topics. And no, customer support/damage control person, your response isn’t helpful/productive. Forwarding the message to management and advocating on behalf of meaningful users is!

by Brosnan6

It’s like they somehow intentionally disabled the iOS spell checking software when you’re writing private messages. Have to go in and manually correct each misspelled word which normally autocorrect would pick up. So much time wasted. Also so many problems with responding to specific messages in a larger thread (I.e., the reply just gets attached as a new message to the thread rather than to a reply to specific message). Such a garbagely coded app - how can things so basic be overlooked? It’s one thing if these were temporary issues but I’m shocked nobody has fixed these in the 6 months I’ve been using Blind .

by MDP112

It’s a great site to get a quick view of ball park figures to help with offer negotiations. However, once you get those numbers get out fast! The site is infected with insecure, pretentious trolls who base their ENTIRE life’s value on what a corporation deems their worth, “comp” is. Everything on the site is TC with comments like “you’re only getting $165k??? That’s peanuts.” The site is full of “polls” like should I dump my girlfriend who only makes 60k. The comp obsessed culture this site has created around gauging the worth of a company on how much they pay you and nothing else is the responsibility of the creators of the site. Confirmation bias is abundant. A typical conversation OP: Why is TC at xyz company so low
Response: My comp is great! No complaints here at xyz company
OP(who by the way doesn’t work at xyz company): LIAR!!! There’s no way you make that much what’s your breakdown you including appreciation when’s your best date oh man you’ll never see that money but then there’s the cliff...and on and on and on...you get the point!

As for day in the life and what the top complaints are the site is useful. Stay away from comp discussions and the site can be a nice tool to utilize when navigating your next career move or to validate your concerns.

Also I scoped our the other reviews, many of which have similar comments about this site. The 4.5 star rating is clearly built on fake reviews.

by MoronicAppleStore

Since last year and a half the landing page on Blind is asking me to select some options about the “job groups I want to follow“ and the workflow won’t proceed without selecting some option. The problem is that I have no intention of looking at what’s happening outside of my company’s board. I am perfectly happy where I am.
I understand that this is necessary to route the “promoted” posts and job listings. But the current implementation is not very inclusive. It basically implies, if I am not curious about new jobs I should not be using Blind.
Please consider adding a “not looking for other jobs right now” option.
Until then Blind is unusable for me..

by Crimmas

I downloaded this app years ago after finishing grad school, but was working freelance or for very small studios or individuals. Only now am I in a workplace where I could genuinely get some use out of this app, but I work in the service industry which is not represented at all from what I could see in the opening prompts. I understood the purpose of asking people to use their work email, but to get into it and see that the fields represented are limited to white-collar positions was somewhere between insulting and infuriating. Particularly because of the organization that’s going on in many service industry jobs- you’d think that would be their primary demographic but instead we’re just excluded. Please hire consultants that don’t live in a white-collar bubble.

by Salseattle

Similar to what a lot of others are reporting, think of this as an anonymous mob mentality culture app. It brings out the bad side of people who think cutting down other responses is a way of life. Trolls are in every post. For those that ask genuine salary or culture questions, there may be some good and sound advice, however not without filtering dozens of sarcastic or rude comments to get to helpful info.

App features have improved, which is cool to see - 4 stars in that area with some room to improve (I still get random error messages, etc). Points are interesting feature. DM could be good to reach people who have genuine Q&A.

However, I can’t give a high rating until the team figures out a better way to reduce/remove trolling and turn this back into a community that can openly discuss items in a more respectful way (even when disagreeing).

by Girlshaken

this app should really try harder to moderate racist and sexist comments on their app. Perhaps highly paid engineers of certain races are just prone to assuming women and Black people don’t deserve to have a seat at their table, but it’s unacceptable on a professional platform. Ultimately, the this app experience erodes into a minefield of overwhelming toxicity over and over again.

Also, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of “company shaming” on this app. Depending on the company you work for, you’re either wearing a badge of honor, or a mark for others to point and laugh at. It’s not this app’s fault that these users are immature. But similar to Airbnb forcing users to post photos of themselves in order to foster transparency and security, the effort has backfired. I sincerely hope they find a way to address these issues in the future. Til then, adios. My mental health deserves better.

by _iiaaiinn_

This isn’t an app that you’d use regularly. I use it every once in a while to check what other people at my company or in my industry have to say. By default they started sending me notifications every few hours which is dumb. Maybe I’d be okay with a notification about a new post or story once every couple days or once a week. I ended up turning off notifications entirely

by Stellarguy

Very interesting idea and the thought behind it is good, but not actually very well thought through at all. Anonymity is great to spark real conversations, but it is also a breeding place for name calling and very toxic behavior. Once you’re in on your company’s board, you are there forever. this app does nothing in the way of continued (yearly?) verifications, which means your company group is a good portion of former jilted employees there just to get a rise out of others, rather than participate in constructive conversations. This is probably its biggest flaw.
It’s an easy fix, but there doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually facilitating truly constructive conversations as they state. A bunch of culture and engagement buzzwords, but really just a place to breed workplace toxicity.

by Awsedrfthyj

I love being able to talk anonymously about workplace and industry issues without fear of being fired of treated differently.

I gave 4 stars instead of 5 because the general forums are all for tech & engineer industry fields. I work in marketing and haven’t found and work-related threads that are relevant to me which is a disappointment. There is also a huge importance placed on TC and commenters will berate OPs for that info even if it’s not relevant which is a bit annoying and makes everyone sound like a douche.

by Jujudwy

If there is ever a company lay-off, this is Blind I will go to first to find out all of the information on. Would definitely recommend to anyone who is also looking for info on total compensation or other salary related topics.

by Naitoon

I think this is a 4 star app but I want the ability to mute to be fixed. It just doesn’t work and the bug has been there for a while with ppl reporting it in posts. Turning off notifications for posts won’t suffice to avoid old topics being revived by random comments.

Let me know when it’s fixed to update my rating.

by Fernanda Lobo

About Blind : I was interested on seeing the compensation. This is a great way to see how your pear are being paid in similar industries. Reviews are trustworthy . (Obviously there are some jackass around which you can easily identify them and report)

About the support: First time I downloaded Blind I tried to login using my LinkedIn account. I couldn’t move on from the authentication screen due a app bug. The support team contacted me and in a day or two they fixed the bug . Pretty fast and serious people.

by Ron1701

The concept is good, but its a clumsy buggy app. There is no way for an existing user to reset a lost password, LinkedIn verification doesn’t work and after a failed LinkedIn verification, it keeps repeating the error even when an alternate verification is tried. Also there doesn’t seem to be a companion web site that would allow one to access this app from a computer.

For another app I might be willing to overlook these inconveniences, but this app is asking us to put our trust in them to protect our anonymity. I cannot do so after seeing how immature Blind is.

by Acheron2012

This sounds like a great app. I am particularly hopeful since I read the whining children screeching that it isn’t politically correct enough for them and they want opposing speech blocked from the platform. Anything they hate must have merit.

But step 1 is register with your work email. That is a disqualification. Even if the service is anonymous today it is one hack, unscrupulous business partner, or IPO from selling every post you ever made to anyone that wants it.

Blind is a ticking time bomb that WILL eventually get you fired.

by Зззххх

Blind won't load for me anymore since the last update.

“App Support” link from the AppStore links to a doorway page with no support email or handles or anything. Their engineers clearly don’t do support. Why is Blind still on store? Isn’t it a clear violation of rules?

by Paul Rosensreinfeld

Blind is the only place to get raw, unfiltered information about what it is like to work in various companies and the orgs within those companies. Most other places where we can find this kind of information has a layer of political correctness on top that makes every company and org look rosy and hides the candid information about what it is really like to work there. Some contributions are a bit rough around the edges. If you’re a snowflake who requires all communication to be politically correct, Blind is not for you.

by Noah910000

I’ve met multiple people who have used this app to increase their salary by more than 2 to 3 times. There’s a lot of unfiltered conversation and some occasional trolling, but if you can look past those things and focus and discuss what you find important related to work, this is a great tool to help one advance their career forwards!