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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#41

Post by wh-uws »

ammon wrote: post #19
GordonS wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why was the CEO on HN arguing for the feature, implying people complaining were the ones with the problem? I don't buy it, and I'll be steering clear.

My head was still in the place it was when we were developing the feature. I thought it was a communication problem (if I could only communicate how this feature could help a lot of people everyone would understand). Perhaps I'm just slow. But it took some time and repetition for the magnitude of my error to sink in and me to really hear what people were saying.

This is why you don't release on a Friday.

Best case scenario you spend the whole weekend focused on whether the release went right...

Worse you spend the whole weekend cleaning a mess up.

Its pretty much always a lose/ lose.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#42

Post by alexpetralia »

EGreg wrote: post #23

Oh boy. Where do I begin? Rather than safeguarding the fact that you are or were job searching, we threatened exposure. Current employers might retaliate if they saw that you were job searching. You did not expect that any personal information you’d given us, in the context of a private, secure job search, would be used publicly without your explicit consent. I sincerely apologize. It was my failure. How about we sto…

"Never let a good crisis go to waste"?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#43

Post by woofie11 »

ammon wrote: post #13
minimaxir wrote: post #6

One question that wasn’t addressed in the response: if the CEO did not realize that implementing the feature would be bad for users, then why did the company announce the feature as an email footnote at 5PM Friday before a holiday weekend, which is when bad news typically drops?

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Hi Ammon,

1. There is an opportunity.

2. You did lose a lot of trust.

3. You didn't have enough trust in the first place to really take advantage of this opportunity.

I would encourage you to think about how you can earn that trust. This comes back to transparency and checks-and-balances. If you want to go that route, you will need to build hard constraints: legal and technological constraints which would have prevented this in the first place which you can't later remove.

This shouldn't have been down the bad judgement by the CEO. I don't know you, but even if I did, the Board can toss you ought next month, and the next CEO might have worse judgement.

Baseline: Right now, your privacy policy is not bad. However, you can change it anytime. You can eliminate it in the case of sale. Etc. You're paying a lot in trust right now for abstract flexibility down-the-line. I would not give you a model of what I know with that privacy policy, and to get to your vision, you'd need my data.

Good: Think through how organizations engineer legal constraint (GPL, AGPL, CC-BY-SA, etc.) to build community and trust. Engage folks like Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig, and come up with robust ways where Triplebyte can be trusted to manage user data, without needing to trust the Triplebyte management team.

Your team has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. Down the line, you might become Google (which has a trillion dollars to lose if it breaks trust) or you might become Yahoo (which is now mining personal emails in really evil ways, since that's the most effective way to scrape out the last little bits of profit). I want to know that if you go the route of Yahoo, or other companies I trusted with my data which went south, you won't be able to weasel out.

You should figure problems like:

* What happens if you do have a problem? If my data leaks, will you be liable, or do I bear that cost? If you are, that sets up incentives for you to have proper security. Consider it a cost of business (you can get insurance too).

* How can I verify what happened to my data, as you send it off to partners and "trusted" affiliates?

* How do I know my data was properly de-identified (I don't believe this at all, at this point).

If you can build something really robust, it will go a long ways to making you into a Google, by ensuring you won't turn into a Yahoo. It's a trillion-dollar opportunity.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#44

Post by runawaybottle »

hitekker wrote: post #20

IIRC, TripleBye had a vision to be the recruiting division of all tech giants. Big-name companies would centralize their most important recurring, expensive, risky process into a third party to save some money and time. Even when that third party just so happened to be working for all of their direct competitors. At the time, I thought that vision was a mirage; a recruiting agency grasping for VC dollars. Now, it loo…

Well those companies exist right? Accenture, Cognizant, EPAM, etc.

If anything, I’d say Triplebyte hopes to be what those consulting companies are but to startups.

Now, if it turns out startups just have crappy budgets, then you have to lower the barrier to entry into the platform to accommodate those budgets.

Similarly, if you indoctrinate enough of new grads/bootcampers to feel like they need the Triplebyte cert (feeling left out that everyone is in Triplebyte and you’re not? Welcome to the psychological game, behold the public profile and badges), you can then also indoctrinate startups into thinking that’s the standard that they need to be looking for too.

Anyway, devs with enough experience should be out of this game mostly, this will affect the entry level tier of developers going forward. You might be stuck in the damn Triplebyte loop.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#45

Post by camjohnson26 »

ammon wrote: post #13
minimaxir wrote: post #6

One question that wasn’t addressed in the response: if the CEO did not realize that implementing the feature would be bad for users, then why did the company announce the feature as an email footnote at 5PM Friday before a holiday weekend, which is when bad news typically drops?

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Unfortunately the most vocal people are the only ones you’re hearing. I got the email and didn’t really care. My angel.co and LinkedIn are already public, why not Triplebyte too, especially if it raises my market value.

Haters gonna hate and I wouldn’t take it too seriously.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#46

Post by rebotfc »

xiphias2 wrote: post #15

I already changed all my data on my profile (including email), so I won’t be getting the apology email. It’s not just failure of ,,effects’’. I’m an EU citizen and it was a clear intent of GDPR violation.

Wow, they had European users? They are fucked.

This is about a serious and willful GDPR contravention as you can get. I hope they have good lawyers because they are gonna be hauled over the coals by multiple countries' data commissioners.

Wow just wow.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#47

Post by hagy »

jamestimmins wrote: post #22
MattGaiser wrote: post #12

Why not just make it opt-in? Lots of people would have done it right away and others would do it as they started to want new opportunities and/or got laid off. Candidates who didn’t opt in probably wouldn’t be open to being contacted out of the blue anyway in a public manner. They burned a lot of goodwill for nothing.

I suspect that this comes from tunnel vision and not interacting with enough casual users. Hypothetically, if the feedback they're seeing is that people desperately want jobs and will do whatever it takes, they may only be exposed to a subset that would have no qualms with making the info public. Especially if that subset is already out of work. I can imagine, in that scenario, not thinking about all the devs who sig…

Agreed. I could imagine how many of the most active users of their platform would be excited for any feature that improved their prospect of landing a job. Combined with the team's excitement for taking on LinkedIn and expanding their company, I could see how they'd fall into this tunnel vision.

Initially I was quite unhappy with how their CEO blindly defended the decision on the earlier HN thread, but I gotta give him credit for changing his mind and drafting this earnest apology. Everyone is human and its easy to get caught up in your own bubble, especially when you've been excitedly executing on a vision with a team that also lives in that bubble.

Still don't think I'll ever use their platform as either a member of a hiring team or as a job seeker. But at least this followup lessens my negative connotation for Triplebyte that developed over the previous few days.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#48

Post by ammon »

sys_64738 wrote: post #25

Did this company decide to do this blindly or did they try canvasing a response from a target set of users about what they planned to do? Surely if they did canvas feedback for their plan then an overwhelming No would have prevented this unmitigated disaster.

We did user research, but not about the opt-out release, just about the features of the profile. This was part of the major screw-up.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#49

Post by adnanh »

ammon wrote: post #13
minimaxir wrote: post #6

One question that wasn’t addressed in the response: if the CEO did not realize that implementing the feature would be bad for users, then why did the company announce the feature as an email footnote at 5PM Friday before a holiday weekend, which is when bad news typically drops?

The Friday announcement was a result of us pushing to get the profile toggle feature out that the email linked to, and shipping late. Not something I'm proud of (either from an eng management perspective, or, more importantly, from a not violating the trust of our users perspective). It was a rushed schedule. In hindsight I see that the timing of the Friday announcement is ALSO a problem.

Just curious, did you have any engineers/product owners telling you that you should probably not do this feature, especially not push so hard (doing stuff late on Friday that can easily wait for Monday, etc...) to get it out?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#50

Post by tikthot »

photonios wrote: post #33

I am not an active Triplebyte user, but I have an account and followed the thread(s). This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. They fucked up, realized it and turned the ship around. They listened and that's what counts for me. They listened to the negative feedback and responded to it. Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deser…

> Some comments around here are extremely negative of the whole situation. More negative than I think they deserve

People would have gotten laid-off to this. The dark patterns are just cherry on top.

The negativity is well deserved.

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