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

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#251

Post by skinkestek » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #207

skinkestek wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding [2] This is extremely bad, like Google+ forced-real-name-policies bad..! (For those who wonder: that and the Buzz incident made lots of people hate or at least distrust Google.) Why why why do companies do this? During the last 6 months I've stopped logging into Stack Overflow. It is a nice resource but for me it is read only for now because they messed up so hard - and refused to come up with a real apolog…

I think I missed the SO news. What happened there?

They kicked a mod (Monica) who dared to ask questions about the implementation of their new policy regarding gender words.

IIRC Monica asked if would be OK if she (or someone else?) wrote in a way that sidestepped the whole issue, for example by writing about "the user" instead of "he and/or she".

Again IIRC they leaked information to newspapers, misrepresented the case and issued one or more non-apologies before trying to pretend nothing had happened.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#252

Post by avip » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:11 PM UTC

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.

The pilots' case is subject of entire chapter in the book outliers.

Book is... of oscillating quality.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#253

Post by woofie11 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #97

woofie11 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it matters. TripleByte is asking for super-sensitive information. 10 years down the line, Ammon won't be CEO anymore. No matter how much of a jerk Ammon is, I'm willing to trust-and-verify, so long as they get the and-verify part right. No matter how great a guy Ammon is, I'm not willing to trust without the and-verify part. He might get fired tomorrow, and Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina might get brough…

The apology definitely sounds honest, but why are we putting all our data in one place and then trusting someone to make the "right decisions" regarding it? I believe society should stop centralizing its data, votes, money, etc. in the hands of a few. This decade we can work to change that. No matter how great a guy Ammon is, I'm not willing to trust without the and-verify part. He might get fired tomorrow, and Steve…

I like decentralized in some places, and centralized in others. I think decentralized can and should replace Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, and similar.

On the other hand, there are a lot of places where centralized, with proper checks-and-balances, allows for a larger degree of scientific research and transparency. Medical and education come to mind.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#254

Post by mentat » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #227

tikthot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are workers in a competitive industry such as tech really at risk for getting fired for possibly looking for new work? Having a TripleByte profile would say as much as having a LinkedIn profile. It doesn't necessarily mean you're looking for a job. And when it's extremely difficult and expensive to replace an engineer, it seems like a bad business decision to fire a worker for this reason.

There are what, 15000+ engineers competing for that many fewer jobs? Getting fired for looking for new work looks much more possible now than it did 3 months ago.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#255

Post by colejohnson66 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:12 PM UTC

sockr8s wrote: post #169

colejohnson66 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn’t. It means they finished a feature and were making it live in a week. Nowhere in that statement implies that there’s a limited beta.

Nowhere it implies there isn't.

You’re moving the goal posts and asking me to prove a negative. Absent any evidence that there was a limited beta, we can’t assume there was one.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#256

Post by travisjungroth » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

adnanh wrote: post #49

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.

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?

The tree of possible causes here looks really bad. Either no one spoke up, or someone did. If no one spoke up because no one knew this would be a problem, it means the team is completely unqualified. If no one spoke up but they did know this would be a problem, then it means people are afraid to speak out (my money is on this one). If people did speak out, then the right people with the right concerns aren't getting listened to.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#257

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

Too late. I deleted my account today.

Though of course it apparently takes 30 days to process an account deletion. Why? Do you guys need to recruit a DBA?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#258

Post by smt88 » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:13 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #223

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.

> 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. On the other hand, once shit hit the fan, you could argue that these people would be extra-careful about fucking it up again, as opposed to another company where everything seems silently OK. It's a bit like the story of the engineer who did a 400.000 dollar mistak…

> On the other hand, once shit hit the fan, you could argue that these people would be extra-careful about fucking it up again

In my experience with Facebook, Google, and a variety of smaller companies, this doesn't happen.

To people who think the way TripleByte apparently does, the fuck-up was getting caught, not violating trust in the first place. If they had no moral issues with betraying users, they won't have any in the future (unless executives and board are replaced).

Instead, they will pay more lip service to privacy concerns and be more secretive about violating user trust.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#259

Post by ammon » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:14 PM UTC

lisading wrote: post #94

I received the email today, then went to check my triplebyte profile. On visibility settings, I saw the default public visibility is still ON. Probably they are cancelling this feature anyway, but still showing showing ON in public visibility seems like another messed up!

PR to pull the visibility toggle from prod is under review. Much of the eng team is out for the long weekend, and we may not merge until tomorrow. However, the public profiles themselves are not in production and we are canceling the feature.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#260

Post by fma » Mon, May 25, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

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'm not a user, but making the feature opt-in for existing users...and opt-out for new users would have seemed the make the most common sense.

And this might go against the grain, but if I had to give up a bit of privacy and get an edge against a peer for job that I need...I'd likely do it. But it seems like a lot of complaints were from still employed engineers and having their employers find out.