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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#231

Post by MintelIE »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #193
MintelIE wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to look too kindly at somebody? I think so. Clearly the CEO is backpedaling now that there's been a public outcry. He's not sorry about what he did. He's sad he got caught.

What's the penalty for looking too kindly at somebody in this context?

One continues to be taken advantage of, over and over again.

Assuming good faith is not prudent when dealing with people who want your money or data. We have enough collective experience at this stage to say this conclusively.

Edit: Being cynical is the new normal when dealing with companies. Especially if they have your data, or want it.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#232

Post by jki275 »

tikthot wrote: post #157
photonios wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they didn't. They cancelled the feature in time. So no real harm was done.

They cancelled because someone caught it and posted it here on HN. It would have been a different story if it's given no publicity

They emailed their entire user base and notified them of their intentions.

You make it sound like they tried to hide this and got caught - that’s absurd given the facts.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#233

Post by lmeyerov »

Good lesson for other founders here. Early on nobody knows you, but as soon as they do, you'll need to have chosen if you're on the trust-and-brand-building marathon or not. By default, if you do nothing, you're building up to an explosion like this that can take years to recover from.

How did the CEO, the board, the sales team, the marketing team, customer support team, and the engineering team all fail to notice and act on a gross privacy breach? How will that change?

It's good the CEO is starting to take responsibility, but an apology letter is roughly, apology, acknowledgement, explanation, and plan to fix / prevent repeat. I see a lot of "I...", but no post-mortem on how the internal culture they've built encouraged breach of trust & privacy in favor of growth numbers, and if/how that'll change top-to-bottom. For now, it remains, "I'm sorry you caught me and made me feel like the bad person I don't think of myself as." Once you think of systems and culture, and start tracing through the dark patterns around the launch and the scope of the initiative, things get uncomfortable. Hiring, on-boarding, feature planning, feature reviews, personal responsibility, feature ownership, management prioritization, trust & safety oversight... .

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#234

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

treis wrote: post #211
momokoko wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 billio…

Applying a marginal amount of business accumen: there's other ways to get from millions to billion(s). They don't have to further monetize engineers. There's companies looking for all sorts of talent, beyond software engineers, in fact 99% of hiring is for non-software engineering roles. You can't get blood from a stone, but you can expand your total addressable market.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#235

Post by fma »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #64
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.

If you don't already have one, have you considered having a collection of users who you can privately ask about potential features (or run email wording by) to figure out how it would go over? A user of the product could easily have told you, in advance, "some people are looking for a job secretly and this would be a problem". You could also come up with incentives to encourage job seekers to opt in; for instance, yo…

I woulda thought they have enough engineers in the company that the engineers would have raised a red flag...

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#236

Post by ceocoder »

dang wrote: post #62
trianx wrote: post #2

... (continuation of Triplebyte email) 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. So,…

I'm going to inline this text into the top post so that everyone can read it. (Edit: that's done, and I deleted "continued in comments" - normally I'd ask for permission first, but in this case it seemed better not to wait.) You probably split the post up this way because the software told you the text was too long. Tip for the future: you can get around that by clicking 'edit' and adding the rest later. Don't tell a…

Thanks for the tip! I won’t tell anyone either :)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#237

Post by moreaccountspls »

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 is 100% a PR firm doing damage control. Go look at the other thread and tell me if this sounds like someone who's actually sorry, or sorry they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

edit: A lot of people in this thread are naive to the nature of sociapaths....

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#238

Post by xenihn »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #102
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: ...”

Have you actually used Triplebyte? You're required to provide an expected salary range as part of your listing. And yes, you can technically provide an open-ended band (e.g. $0 - $999,999) -- can you guess what happens if you do that, and why Triplebyte advises not doing this, even though you have the option to do so?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#239

Post by colejohnson66 »

treis wrote: post #133
photonios wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aro…

Nobody is mad about a "feature". They're mad because Triplebyte made sensitive private data public.

Except they didn’t make any data public. Yes, they were going to, but they hadn’t yet.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#240

Post by capableweb »

ponker wrote: post #202
adnanh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, we don’t even do any kind of code deploy on Friday after 10am. Not even bug fixes unless they are for site reliability.

It's one thing to do regular code deploys and there is no harm in doing it on fridays, if the code happens to be ready. If something goes bad, you rollback, which hopefully is automatic.

But, pushing features out the door is different than just deploying, so seems this is what happened. Then it doesn't matter what day you release your unfinished feature, it's gonna cause bad times.

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