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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#291

Post by gkoberger »

trfhuhg wrote: post #154

Nothing to see here. Ammon has tried a bold move to chase big money, used a few common tricks (release on Friday night, opt-out and other dark patterns), it didn't pan out and now he's doing damage control. When the dust settles, he'll give this idea another try. This is all from a corporate playbook, but it seems Ammon hasn't read the entire book. There's a chapter there that tells how to systematically manufacture…

I don't know Ammon, but I don't think he's chasing "big money".

The best founders I know, when they make mistakes like this, aren't doing it for the money. They're doing it because they are trying to create the world they want to see exist, and that blinds them a bit. In this case, I genuinely believe Triplebyte just wanted to have a bigger impact on the hiring world, and try to fix it for engineers. Did they fuck up badly? Oh yeah. But I don't think it was for "money".

Triplebyte has 33 employees. They don't have VPs getting "fat bonuses". They don't have "golden parachutes". Look at their about page (https://triplebyte.com/about), it's all engineers and designers and CSMs. They're just a group of people doing their best to try to fix something we all hate (technical interviewing/hiring).

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#292

Post by colejohnson66 »

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

You do realize that the feature never actually launched, so no data was “public” (quotes because it’s already public to recruiters who use TB).

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#294

Post by wolfgang42 »

zebnyc wrote: post #149
gbear605 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TripleByte is literally the perfect example of a company that should be centralized. They work because they have a reputation that companies can trust. Trying to make it decentralized takes away any value that TripleByte provides.

Given that interviewing is a skill unto itself which needs to be practiced, what happens to candidates who need to take a few interviews before they start hitting their stride. For me, I can see that using Triplebyte once the candidate is "warmed up" makes sense. If TripleByte was the only game in town then a new candidate would fail their test and then it is game over. No more job search.

I agree with your concerns about a monopoly, but just wanted to respond to your point about needing to “warm up”: Triplebyte gives you a free practice interview that doesn’t count (unless you ace it), and also lets you retry in a few months if you fail the actual interview.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#295

Post by greenyoda »

jzoch wrote: post #174
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.

The explanation for how it actually would have worked (as opposed to how HN thought it worked) seems to clarify the reaction imo. I can totally see how they thought they were justified in the rollout of this feature. They believed it, while opt-out, was merely a badge and contained no sensitive data (compared to HN profiles). This reaction seems way overblown. Its fine to criticize a feature but lets not pretend this…

> merely a badge

> This reaction seems way overblown.

A badge on a user's now-public profile at a service that's used only when job hunting. Any company that noticed that one of their existing employees had a profile at Triplebyte could guess that the employee was looking for employment elsewhere. This would not be good for their career prospects, and could easily result in the job-hunting employee being chosen for a layoff or skipped for a promotion - most companies would rather keep or promote someone who's not about to leave.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#296

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

g_p wrote: post #147
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.

Kudos for owning up straight on this. I think LinkedIn is a massively privacy violating service, and alternatives are a very good and important thing to see. I would add one comment though perhaps helpful in the future: One reason people here take such a vigorous stance against startups doing these kinds of "dirty tricks" is because they want real alternatives that treat them as more than a number of a row in a datab…

> massively privacy violating service

And that's saying it gently.

Not sure if they're still doing it, but the way they were harvesting e-mails and then using them to spam the harvested contacts, they were no better than any other phishing site.

For people who use the same password on LinkedIn and their e-mail account, it was extremely easy to accidentally "consent" to this, and I've seen many an apology to the spam victims from someone who accidentally gave access. And they would spam everyone multiple times, with no way for the recipients to stop it. (They paid a $13M settlement for this; gladly, I assume).

It still boggles my mind that e-mail providers didn't both block LinkedIn's IPs from accessing contacts and spam-can everything from their mail servers.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#298

Post by treis »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #234
treis wrote: post #211

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. 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.

It's too hard to scale and protect margins. If Triplebyte proves out a business model you'll get a bunch of Triplebyte for X competitors. For example, someone will start the equivalent of Triplebyte focused on DBAs another for Erlang devs, another for embedded, etc.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#299

Post by afterburner »

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.

It's like they don't even internet.
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