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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#511

Post by gliese1337 »

tcbasche wrote: post #429

Imagine being on the dev team and hearing this. I'd probably quit. Good grief ... Having said that, it's weird that no-one raised this as dodgy while working on it.

What, just because a feature got cancelled?

Heck, that's every single day at my last job. North of 50% of the code I ever worked on because a C-O insisted it was top priority got thrown in the trash. C-O screwed up, feature won't o to production, hurry up and work on this other thing instead? Oh, I guess it's Tuesday. Paychecks keep coming, I keep workin'....

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#512

Post by prawn »

kragen wrote: post #465
TomVDB wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the original HN topic. It would be one thing if he apologized immediately after people pointed out the flaws in their plan. But he didn’t. He ignored all the objections, and defended his decision over and over again. He clearly didn’t care. There is huge difference between “whoops, we didn’t think things through, sorry about that” and “after seeing tons of people cancel their account, let’s pretend that I’m…

Link?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#513

Post by geofft »

akerl_ wrote: post #306
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.

Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction. As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out. They’re going to get bad press regardless of whether they retract, whether they apologize, and whether they say they’re taking actions to avoid the sequence that led to the actio…

> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.

Correct. I don't want apologies or retractions from companies. I want postmortems.

This is really no different from a technical outage, e.g., "As a result of a bad deploy to prod on Friday, all Triplebyte profiles became public." Why was it not noticed in testing? What is the testing process? Is profile privacy part of the testing process or part of code reviews? What are the practices around making changes that affect user privacy - is there a culture of asking questions about it up front, etc.?

Most importantly, what changes are being made to prevent a similar outage from reoccurring in the future? I really couldn't care less about how bad the CEO feels about it - sure, the CEO probably should feel bad, but feeling bad is not a reliable mechanism. If the CEO said "Bwahaha, I wish to profit and I learned over the weekend that my profits were in danger, so I changed course" but then says that in order to maintain his profits in the future he added an external privacy council that reviewed all major new initiatives (or whatever), that would actually be a lot more useful than contrition.

Now, yes, it's true that basically no company does public postmortems of decisions that they needed to walk back (at best you get blameful postmortems that end with a key executive resigning, but most of the time that doesn't help anyway - either the executive wasn't the problem, or they were the problem and they already spread the bad culture to others). But I think it was pretty rare until a couple of years ago for tech companies to do detailed public postmortems of internal outages, and that expectation has slowly changed. I think we should push for the same change for non-technical incidents like this.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#514

Post by bigiain »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #82
GordonS wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My angel.co and LinkedIn are already public, why not Triplebyte too Because you opted in to creating those profiles and the information they contain, and made them public. You opted in .

It was wrong not to make it opt in but not deserving of the level of hate they’re getting for the decision. The big tech companies do things every day that are much more damaging to your privacy and they don’t send you an email telling you. LinkedIn’s spam marketing in the early days was downright scandalous. I’ve always found Triplebyte open and insightful and their response shows they’re receptive to feedback, whic…

> I’ve always found Triplebyte open and insightful

Even in the midst of a shitstorm where the CEO/Founder is publicly admitting to a complete lack of insight?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#515

Post by dang »

lisper wrote: post #409

How did you manage to submit this? I tried to submit it myself about the same time you did but got an error that the text could not be more than 2000 characters. How did you get past this limit?

They originally put a prefix in the root text and the rest here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303045. I inlined it. You can get around the limit by using 'edit' after a post is up.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#516

Post by dang »

Mandatum wrote: post #470
dang wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but it's not ok to look up people based on their employer and drag them into a thread like that. That's a trope of the online callout/shaming culture, and we don't want HN to go that route. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Sorry Dang, I did check the guidelines on this. If I remove the names and only kept the titles, would that be acceptable for HN?

I'm really not sure. If the spirit is still to shame them or demand that they account for themselves, maybe not. If it's to make a more general point about organizations, maybe. If you had just included the titles and not the names or the links, I wouldn't have replied, so I guess the line is thereabouts.

It's true that the guidelines don't spell everything out, partly because that would be impossible, partly because beyond a certain length no one would read them, and partly because if they were written in a more legalistic or formalistic way, people would take them as sort of a bitmask, everything in the inverse of which must be ok. That's definitely not how things work here. We want a spirit of the law, not a letter of the law kind of place. I guess I've been saying this for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606756.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#518

Post by jki275 »

mthoms wrote: post #407
jki275 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt this. If a company would lay you off because you have a profile on a jobs network, they’re really a shit company you wouldn’t want to work for anyway. Not that I agree with their actions - anything like this ought to be opt in only, but I can’t see people getting laid off. I have a profile on linked in with my boss and multiple people from my company as contacts, I’ve got profiles on multiple additiona…

Scenario: You're the boss. Your company needs to layoff one of two people in a specific role. The two employees up for termination are more or less equal in terms of performance, wages, experience, etc. You have strong evidence Employee A is unsatisfied and looking to move on. Employee B has given no indication of such. Which one do you lay off? Keep in mind that unsatisfied employees often have a detrimental effect…

we can make up hypotheticals all day long. Firing someone because they have a profile on triplebyte is just silly. I ge that you all need to justify your rage over this, but this really makes no sense. The world doesn't work the way you want to believe it does. I don't know, maybe you work somewhere that's normal, but if you want to call something toxic, that's toxic. No boss I've ever had would care less about my online profiles.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#519

Post by arkades »

akerl_ wrote: post #306
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.

Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction. As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out. They’re going to get bad press regardless of whether they retract, whether they apologize, and whether they say they’re taking actions to avoid the sequence that led to the actio…

> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.

I wonder why anyone would ever place a non-zero value on an apology from an organization acting in its own interests. A company isn't a single person acting in isolation and ignorance. It's a profit-seeking entity organizing a whole number of people of various levels of conscientiousness and intelligence, and pointing them at a single profit-seeking goal.

When that many-limbed organism grabs at a profitable course of action, it's not an impulsive accident of blind flailing. If that turns out to be a problem and they have to reverse course, it's not because of remorse.

They did what was in their interest then; they did what's in their interest now. People confusing corporations for actual, you know, people absolutely baffles me. Their apologies mean absolutely nothing, good or bad, but how bad a hit their business appeared to take and how good their copy writer was. That is all.

As another poster said, and I agree wholeheartedly, I don't care for apologies, I care for post-mortems. The only thing that matters is what operations led to this action, and what change in those operations will prevent it happening again - if any such change can prevent it. A public mea culpa with an executive's signature on it means... well, nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's the cheapest possible way of reclaiming good will, and worth the paper it's written on.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#520

Post by arkades »

Aeolun wrote: post #432
mrmr1993 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current position is "sorry for breaking your trust, please trust us". It's hard to find it compelling. > Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction. To project my own opinion onto others: these comments are warranted because an apology has no actual value. The fact remains that Triplebytes can still do this if they wish to, and they are…

> The current position is "sorry for breaking your trust, please trust us". It's hard to find it compelling. Why is this a hard thing to do? It’s literally what everyone who ever messes something up is asking you to do. Just because someone once committed a broken build, doesn’t mean I’ll never again trust them with access. It’s argubly more like “sorry for being a moron, but I hear you. Please give us another chance…

> Why is this a hard thing to do? It’s literally what everyone who ever messes something up is asking you to do.

Because you're treating a service-client relationship as an interpersonal relationship. They are not, and the same norms do not apply. That apology, and its implicit premise(s) and promise, is rooted in the norms of intimate, interpersonal relationships. Those do not apply.

When you screw up and ask your spouse's forgiveness, the psychosocial interaction is quite different from when a CEO fucks up, writes a mea culpa to the faceless masses, gets his draft looked over by a PR flack and a couple board members, and then sends it out to the highest-impact social media circles for his service and waits to see what his KPIs do.

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