The almost anonymous social network for corporate careers, controversies

Instagram and Facebook are for holiday and food pictures; and Quora and Medium for help and information on any topic under the sun. Where do you discuss work and career then? Sign up at Blind.

Blind is gaining traction in India, promising credible conversations on workplace topics like salaries, careers, corporate culture and controversies. 

Blind, according to the company page, is a community “where verified professionals connect to discuss what matters most.” It has Quora-like threads on various aforementioned subjects but with a difference: the user is anonymous, almost.

Blind asks users to reveal the name of their company, which is mentioned alongside their screen-names. It encourages users to register through their corporate email IDs—people opting for personal IDs can only read and not post on the threads. Users identities are kept secret.

The platform, in total, has 58,000 registered professionals from Microsoft, 45,000 from Amazon, 19,000 from Google, 15,000 from Facebook, 14,000 from Uber, and so on.

Blind was founded in 2013 by Sunguk Moon as a South Korean company and gained prominence in 2016-17, when it became a discussion forum for corporate controversies, especially alleged sexual harassment at Uber. The forum buzzed with individual accounts following software engineer Susan Fowler’s blog alleging sexism and harassment at Uber. It ticked Uber so much that the company blocked Blind in its offices at the time.

Blind allows ananymous users but they have to use their corporate email addresses to log in.

Blind was also buzzing when Amazon warehouse employees protested against harsh work conditions and at the time of Google engineer James Damore’s controversial memo that said women are inferior workers because of biological reasons.

Blind serves the purpose to “share advice, provide honest feedback, improve company culture and discover relevant career information.”

Conversations on the India forum, are picking up, For now, these are mostly about compensation at tech giants like Google and Amazon, which shed fresh light on fat cheques executives earn at these companies earn.

For instance, a Facebook employee in the US (12 years of experience, earning Rs 1 crore per annum) is contemplating move to India and ask whether a salary package of Rs 2 crore is possible.

In another thread, a Microsoft senior product manager (earning Rs 65 lakhs an annum) has asked what a senior director at Flipkart makes.“With 65-70L base, the stocks will around Rs 1 cr over 4 years. More or less depending on L6 or L7,” replied a user.

Another thread lays bare salaries at big MNCs in India for a tier-I college graduate: starting packages at Amazon- Rs 16 lakh, Linkedin- 18 lakh, Microsoft- Rs 12 lakh, and so on.

Beyond just salaries, some popular threads include whether working at start-ups is better than working at FAANG (acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google).

In the backdrop of companies increasingly tightening the noose on internal workings, which sometimes includes hiding unscrupulous behaviour, Blind fills the position of a forum for genuine first-hand discourse.