After leaving my previous employers behind, I think I'm finally ready to write negative reviews about them without getting into a rage.

The policies of glasdoor and similar platforms say to review a company, not individuals. However, as the saying goes, "employees don't quit companies, they quit managers". And that is 100% true for me. The reviews I'd write would in large parts be about how managers mistreat the people they're responsible for. In my case even to the point I needed therapy... so really really bad.

I'm not sure how to bring those two things together. Have you made similar experiences? How would you write such reviews? Thanks for any tips.

Leaving companies is like leaving relationships. By the time I do it I've already disengaged weeks/months ago so don't give a shit any more.

Remember that places like glass door are for the benefit of job seekers and not general rant sites. So your review is most helpful if you stuck to things that a new employee would likely encounter. Crap that was specific to you as an individual is fair game, but it's only useful if it's indicative of things that happened to others as well or the culture in general. Absolutely crap on them if they deserve it but don't use names and avoid specific titles if possible.

@rutee07 thanks. Good idea, I'd like to try that. I'll collect my thought and write something.

@monkeyboy well put. Thanks, I'll do it like that. In some points it's hard to not name titles though. I mean, the boss of my department did some shit. If I write "I was working for $department, my boss did suchandsuch" it's pretty obvious who I refer to. And the department is relatively important, because the company is huge, has many departments, and their individual cultures differ. Kinda weird. But that "badly fitting jigsaw puzzle" aspect is also one of my complaints actually.

It's a challenge to compress a review down to a comment or two. But still, here's what I consider objective points for company A:

* Assembly-line work is all newbies do. Following the V-Model decisions are all made beforehand, newbies only do "implementation". IOW they're basically "compilers" turning ridiculously detailed concepts into Java code. In fact, criticism or initiative is outright forbidden before you've climbed the ladder. What a waste of my education (Master's degree in CS and multiple uni projects). Plus, this way newbies learn nothing.
* Pecking order. Seniors do what they like and leave scraps for newbies. Bugfix implemented? You apply it to the other VCS branches.
* Time pressure. Management always sets unrealistic deadlines. Missed them? Your fault.
* Management: Indifferent in good times. Bad times? Evasive, pressure, scoldings, micromanagement, lies. Kiss up kick down in general.
* No training. Mgmt excuse: "What if we trained people and they leave?"

Some things I personally experienced at company A:

* Mgmt lies 1: My performance review was neutral ("Sorry we had no time to show you the ropes, but you still coped ok"). The "transcript" I got 1/2 year later was "a straight F" and blamed me for everything.
* Lies 2: The "growth opportunity"/biz travel turned out to be first level phone support. 2 months dealing with agitated customers.
* Lies 3: We were severely understaffed. Everyone knew. In an open discussion with higher mgmt, our mgmt claimed "staff-wise we're in good shape"
* After not showing me the ropes in a large project, mgmt was unhappy with my performance and moved me to a "smaller-scale project" for "stabilization". Turned out that they moved a Java dev to a DB project using only SQL. My project lead yelled at me after a month, blaming me for not performing like the seniors.
* After that I was sent to QA. I'm good at breaking things, we had ZERO automated testing. They got mad because the bug count went up.