frequently asked questions
Wow, this is a great idea! What can I do to contribute?
First of all, consider posting some employer ratings. This site is only useful insofar as it's populated with the kind of insightful, well-balanced employer ratings that I'm sure you're itching to write. Also, please encourage your friends and coworkers to rate their employers on Coderific.
How are the employer ratings determined?
Anyone who is a current or former employee of a particular organization and actually wrote software there can write a rating for that organization. Part of that rating is an overall score for the employer from one to four stars. All of the ratings for a given employer are averaged together to produce a final score.
In addition to the overall score for an employer, there are also individual scores for the various aspects of that employer. For instance, there are individual scores for "quality assurance" and "hiring process". These are also averaged from all of the available ratings of that employer.
How independent are the ratings?
All ratings posted are provided by Coderific's users. We don't alter ratings at the request of employers, or anyone else for that matter. Our users however will remove ratings that they deem in violation of our terms of service or otherwise objectionable.
Aren't you afraid of getting sued?
Coderific operates as a user-moderated commons rather than as a publisher, so it would be an uphill battle for anyone to hold us legally responsible for any user-submitted content on this site. To familiarize yourself with the specific legalese involved, we recommend the thorougly engrossing read that is our terms of service document.
How do you handle ratings of varying quality?
On any site with product ratings provided by users, the reviews are of varying quality. Some are extraordinarily detailed and well-written. Others are not much more than, "I liked it!" And the worst involve outright deception designed to make the product look better or worse than it really is.
With an employer rating site such as Coderific, the varying quality of ratings is also an issue. The first tactic to deal with this is just to hope that any poor quality ratings will be balanced out by decent ones. For instance, if one employer posts a fake rating saying how great their company is, five outraged developers who know how things really are at that workplace might post their own ratings in response. That way, poor quality ratings won't have much of an impact.
Another approach is to actually implement some mechanism for users to rate ratings themselves. This might be as simple as allowing users to up-moderate or down-moderate individual employer ratings. However, this feature isn't yet implemented.
At some point you've just got to read through the ratings for a particular employer and decide for yourself which ones to trust.
What if I find something on Coderific that violates the terms of service?
Simply log in and flag the rating or forum post in question as "prohibited". Once enough distinct users flag the offending content as such, it will be removed automatically.
How do you verify that rating authors actually work at the organization they're rating?
We don't. That wouldn't be practical to do while preserving anonymity. And in fact, we welcome ratings from both current and former employees of an organization. We do however state in our terms of service that you must be a current or former employee of any employer you rate, and you must have written software there. If you have a strong reason to believe that a particular employer rating was not written by a current or former employee of the organization, or was not written by someone who developed software there, then simply log in and flag the rating as "prohibited".
My organization has a low rating. What can I do to increase it?
Look at the specific areas in which you are rated poorly, and then come up with ideas on how to improve each of those aspects of your organization. Start by listening to your employees and taking action on their ideas for improvement.
My organization has a high rating. What can I do to maintain it?
First of all, congratulations! What you're doing seems to be working now, but you should continue to look for areas of improvement to make sure you remain a leader.
What does Coderific run on?
| programming language | Python |
| unit test framework | nose |
| operating system | Debian GNU/Linux |
| database | PostgreSQL |
| ORM | SQLObject |
| mail server | Postfix |
| web server | Apache |
| web framework | CherryPy |
| javascript library | MochiKit |
| graphics | Inkscape and The Gimp |
| US ZIP codes | CivicSpace |