Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#101

Post by conjecTech » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

I've had the good fortune of knowing the TripleByte team personally. I'm not at all surprised to see this being handled in such a sincere and agreeable way.

Ammon is a sincere and truth-seeking individual. He's willing to be convinced that his opinion is wrong, a character trait we don't do enough to praise and which I've found to be exceedingly rare these days. Situations like this highlight exactly why I've trusted them with my data in the past and will continue to recommend TripleByte to friends in the future.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#102

Post by colejohnson66 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #90

I don't think I will sign up for Triblebyte anytime soon. Having a middle-man in the interview process can result in depressed wages.

They’re not a middle man though. They just let you skip to the final interview. Passing or failing that is up to you. Also, the only advocating they do is saying: “John/Jane Doe knows this much: ...”

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#103

Post by SV_BubbleTime » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #3

> I failed to see the significance of “default public” in my head. Hmm? This just raises more questions about Triplebyte's product development process than answers, especially since privacy is a core product feature .

Exactly what I was thinking. Either they’re just not ready for this Brave New World, or they did think about the issues and did it anyway.

I’m just tickled pink that privacy is becoming a feature people care about.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#104

Post by ethanbond » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

ammon wrote: post #78

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #31

One of two things happened: 1. Triplebyte attempted a big move against LinkedIn, tried to ease the blow to users by dumping on a Friday before memorial day weekend 2. Triplebyte, the company built around helping people find jobs, truthfully didn't understand that people might have concerns about their current companies knowing they are job-hunting It's pretty obvious it's #1, and that opt-out rather than opt-in was t…

I'd say it was both. I wanted to move against LinkedIn profiles, I thought that opt-out was the way to get critical mass, and I screwed up and did not realize how large a privacy violation this was.

How about the dark patterns you employed on the opt-out?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#105

Post by willart4food » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

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…

[flagged]

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#106

Post by photonios » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #79

photonios wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The negativity towards to original announcement of making profiles public was deserved. For me, the negativity towards the CEO's apology and cancelling the feature is not. Everyone makes mistakes and if nobody would be willing to look past that, then we'd never get anywhere.

It would have gone over a lot better if he didn't spend a couple days on HN telling people they shouldn't be mad about it. And it would have gone over a lot better if he was honest about what happened. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and he's all "was that wrong? Should I not have done that?". They knew exactly what they were doing and calculated that it was worth it.

I can see how that conclusion gets drawn.

Any new feature that is announced can be met with some negativity. Sometimes it just ends up working despite that. It is not surprising to me that at first, they tried to defend their plans. It probably took a while for the backslash to sink in and their own opinions to change.

I wouldn't expect every company, even ones that target HN's primary audience to turn everything around right away because of an angry thread within a few hours. They turned around in 2-3 days. Quick enough if you ask me.

Disclaimer: I am really not in any way affiliated with Triplebyte. I am not even a user/customer. I just see a lot of negativity that I that I find unjustified.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#107

Post by zitterbewegung » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

Five years ago I tried out Triplebyte was a HN reader and I tried it out. I got to the point where they would contact me but instead the rules and criteria changed so that I wasn't eligible. I then forgot about the site.

A year or two after I think I tried Triplebyte again but then my account was in some weird state. After complaining on an HN thread about Triplebyte my account was restored. I didn't take the site really seriously at all.

While browsing reddit I used to see constant Triplebyte ads. I think I saw them dry up at this point and that seems to conform to current economic conditions.

Now fast forward to this year and I deleted my account after this public profile idea was announced on a Friday. the whole point about having public profiles is probably a way for Triplebyte to get seen by more people and get some kind of network effect going on since they are in dire straights.

The response that Triplebyte has done is quite admirable in that they aren't launching the feature. Launching on a Friday when people also think that you are trying to bury the story or people won't notice is something to regard.

The thing I don't see anything really different between these new startups attempting to disrupt existing staffing companies. My current job which I am very happy about I got from a staffing agency after going through hundreds of recruiters contacting me.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#108

Post by ximeng » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

woofie11 wrote: post #43

ammon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 preven…

Extract from guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#109

Post by tmpz22 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

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…

Even the greatest of apologies is not a time machine that will completely undue what happened. A C-level/director-level team pushed out a massively privacy violating policy with zero feedback in an effort to compete against an incumbent company (LinkedIn) on a Friday afternoon.

It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterprise customer, as if the AI/machine-learning BULLSHIT didn't already do that. They're a recruiting company that took a sucker punch with CV-19 and effectively tried to sell their user data as a get out of jail free card.

The saving grace is that LI Recruiter is a trash product (for years...) and they could probably eek out a consumer net-good by bringing more competition to the market, if only they went about it the right way.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#110

Post by samel1994 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

rebotfc wrote: post #37

ammon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You do realise that if you have any European users you have majorly contravened GDPR regulations and data protection rules. I'm talking 20 million euros in fines

Triplebyte is not for EU users. You're forgetting that Triplebyte is an American company, they're not subject to European nanny laws.