Silicon Valley Workers Are Using This App to Share Their Layoff Speculations and Woes in Secret
Blind's anonymity means verified employees can be more honest than ever before.
By Amanda Breen •
There's an increasingly popular professional networking site on the scene — and it's not LinkedIn.
Silicon Valley employees have signed up for Blind, an anonymous community app for the workplace, by the thousands amid recent layoffs, using the service to speculate about job cuts and offer words of comfort, CNN reported.
Related: Tech CEO Apologizes After 'Tone Deaf' Layoff Email Quoting MLK Jr.
Roughly 6,000 Microsoft employees signed up for the app in the week before the company publicly announced it would slash 10,000 jobs, and Meta and Google each have tens of thousands of verified workers on the app, per internal data shared with the outlet by Blind.
As of April 2022, Blind, which launched in the U.S. in 2014, already had more than 5 million verified employees discussing their employers and policies, according to CNBC. Paul Wolfe, former CHRO of Indeed, told the outlet Blind was "more conversational" than Indeed or Glassdoor — which can result in more "bashing of companies."
"We just all realized that there's a need for communication that is kind of independent of company control," Kyum Kim, Blind's co-founder and chief business officer, told CNN. "Because when employees talk to each other in a work setting, they can't be honest – and they have to always kind of be self conscious about what the boss is going to think, or what other people are going to think."
Related: Layoffs Affecting 1,600 Tech Workers A Day on Average In 2023
A recent post on the app from someone claiming to be a current Amazon employee delves into the lessons learned when they were laid off from Uber at the onset of the pandemic — and how they overcame feelings of failure. It has nearly 100,000 views.
