Criticat is a really useful website for the lakhs of software developers that work in this country. It is a job/career oriented community, where people can rate their employer and share their own workplace experiences. Employees can write reviews, as also give out advise to their employer anonymously. People looking to find out about specific organisations can ask their own questions, or conduct a poll to seek the majority view about some issue. Organisations, on their part can post job openings. Criticat stated aim is to bridge the communication gap between the employer, employee, prospective employees etc.

Criticat has been started by Shweta Gupta, who was previously working at Yahoo (in Silicon Valley) as a developer.

Presently, most of the companies reviewed on the site are IT companies, though there is no restriction. Check out this poll about the Yahoo V/s Microsoft acquisition debate – the question being asked is whether joining Yahoo at this juncture would be a wise move or not? Here is somebody seeking advise about Infosys’s famed training program. I quickly browsed through the community ratings for some of the big Indian software employers (screengrabs are below, though beware- I haven’t checked out the sample sizes for the ratings)

Overall Criticat looks like a great idea. In a country like India with a huge working class, a platform for exchange of info about diff employers can surely prove to be useful. I only hope this platform does not get used for malicious reasons like leaking senstive company info, negative publicity etc.