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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#211

Post by treis »

momokoko wrote: post #136
ammon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let’s be honest. This was out of desperation. Without this pivot Triplebyte was dead. And now it probably is anyway. Ammon, the big money is going to be chasing cost savings as more remote workforces can now take advantage of overseas labor. The perfect storm of cost reduction pressure and remote workplace growth gives Triplebyte a great position to be the front runner in helping companies find less expensive oversea…

> Let’s be honest. This was out of desperation. Without this pivot Triplebyte was dead. And now it probably is anyway.

IMHO, that's the saddest thing about this. Triplebyte has a niche where they can provide value to companies and job seekers. But producing an objective analysis of someone's coding skills is expensive and doesn't scale well. They could make millions every year but it's not and never would be a billion dollar company. And it's too bad that millions is not good enough.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#212

Post by wolfgang42 »

iajrz wrote: post #92
rammy1234 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point in time it doesn't matter if there is an apology or not. Like above mentioned, some would have got laid-off or for some their intentions of job search is revealed. This is much worst of an effect that an apology would do any good. He apologized so what. It is good but damage is done. Can anything be about it ?

Since they reversed before making the information pubilc, was damage really done?

Yes, massively, to Triplebyte’s reputation.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#213

Post by vezycash »

Judgmentality wrote: post #196
paulcole wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a study about surgical fuckups. In almost every case, multiple people in the OR admitted they recognized the problem but were too scared to speak up because the surgeon said things were going fine.

Do you have a link to the study? I certainly believe it. Projecting my own anecdotal bias, most surgeons I've met have been a special kind of arrogant.

Same happened for pilots

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140217220032-266437464-asia...

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#214

Post by aaanotherhnfolk »

GordonS wrote: post #145
ammon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... we made this better yesterday (removed the delay and the request for ID). It was totally a dark pattern. We built the initial deletion process right after GDPR passed. We were thinking about it mostly from a legal perspective then, and had not reviewed it since.

But this makes no sense. Why would you legally need someone's ID to delete their account, but not to create it?

GDPR devalued PII-stores, and companies tried really hard to only let the value drop on the European portion of their data. Requiring ID is a way to discourage and even deny deletion requests in other countries.

These constraints are walked back almost immediately in practice, once companies learn that requiring a human touch for a deletion flow is not worth the hassle.

I think "legal" here meant what's the bare minimum to respect the letter of GDPR law, while not actually implementing a useful delete flow.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#216

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

mosselman wrote: post #140
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…

> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. Even if it is heartfelt, I'd argue that if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.

I'm surprised they didn't consider beta testing the feature with a subset of users to see how it'd go first.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#217

Post by everybodyknows »

weaksauce wrote: post #40
ammon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... that's a much better idea. I can tell you what was going through my head on Friday (I'm not at all trying to defend this now). Basically, it was that for a credential to carry weight with recruiters, it needs scale. There's a bootstrapping problem. But that's not an excuse for violating people's privacy. Opt-in would have been a far better idea.

In the future it’s worth noting that it’s a terrible idea to take something away from someone when you promised them something else. This is privacy in this case. On others it’s offering something for free and then charging for it. Even if you wanted to make this an opt out feature the only sensible way to go about it is grandfathering in the old accounts into an opt in feature. Just like many companies grandfather i…

> take something away

Quite true. T-Mobile is now forever to me the weasels that silently broke free Google Visual Voicemail in order to force me into their own, judging by the reviews quite crappy, paid app.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#218

Post by my_usernam3 »

momokoko wrote: post #136
ammon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let’s be honest. This was out of desperation. Without this pivot Triplebyte was dead. And now it probably is anyway. Ammon, the big money is going to be chasing cost savings as more remote workforces can now take advantage of overseas labor. The perfect storm of cost reduction pressure and remote workplace growth gives Triplebyte a great position to be the front runner in helping companies find less expensive oversea…

He was honest and completely addresses this

> The floor has fallen out on parts of our business, and other parts are under unprecedented growth. We've been in a state of churn as we quickly try various things to adapt. But I let myself get caught in this rush and did not look critically enough at the features we were shipping.

In fact that paragraph is what made me accept his apology. The reflection and honest answer of how he decided to ship this feature was more than any company apology I've heard in the past.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#219

Post by greenyoda »

paulcole wrote: post #184
mosselman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. Even if it is heartfelt, I'd argue that if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.

There was a study about surgical fuckups. In almost every case, multiple people in the OR admitted they recognized the problem but were too scared to speak up because the surgeon said things were going fine.

The same issue was found to be the cause of plane crashes: the crew knew that something was going wrong, but did not feel that they could contradict the captain (or the captain just wouldn't listen). This gave rise to the practice called Crew Resource Management (CRM):

> Crew resource management formally began with a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendation made during their investigation of the 1978 United Airlines Flight 173 crash. The issues surrounding that crash included a DC-8 crew running out of fuel over Portland, Oregon while troubleshooting a landing gear problem.

> The term "cockpit resource management" (later generalized to "crew resource management") was coined in 1979 by NASA psychologist John Lauber who had studied communication processes in cockpits for several years. While retaining a command hierarchy, the concept was intended to foster a less authoritarian cockpit culture, where co-pilots were encouraged to question captains if they observed them making mistakes.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_resource_management

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#220

Post by cryptonector »

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.

Your reputation is shot.
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