Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 678 posts

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#561

Post by tass »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #528
ibejoeb wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He dropped it on the Friday before the biggest holiday weekend of the year. He knows what he's doing. He's done it before, and he's still doing it. Just pulling power moves. Move fast and fuck shit up. The dude has personally tried to pull fast ones on me. This is a fucked company since day one. I brushed it off, but when you keep up these patterns for years...jog on.

> biggest holiday weekend of the year. What holiday was that? I wasn't aware of any. In any case, I'd say Christmas is probably the biggest holiday, although it doesn't always fall on a weekend.

In the USA it’s a long weekend with nice weather. (Nicer than typical Christmas winter, anyway)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#562

Post by toodles1628 »

The true part is that the business is in crisis and they were trying to move quickly to save it.

I don't believe that he did not know the impact of the default public option - that is not credible. It certainly sounds better in an apology than "I knew it was bad but decided to try it anyway." The privacy problem is obvious to anyone thinking about it for 10 seconds, and the fact that he would try shows a lack of respect for his users.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#563

Post by toodles1628 »

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…

Do you believe the part where he said he didn't realize the consequences of being default public? That part is inconceivable to me. I believe he did know the issues and decided to proceed anyway to see how bad the public reaction would be.

His actions and response are consistent with behavior. It sounds much better to say "I didn't think through it" than "I knew it was bad and wanted to try it anyway."

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#564

Post by toodles1628 »

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…

An apology is not a "get out of jail free card," it is a good first step on the road to repairing users' trust. They still screwed up and have a long way to go in my mind.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#565

Post by danieltillett »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #387
danieltillett wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is sad that you felt you had to use a throwaway account to post this totally reasonable opinion.

It’s a three year old account. Not everyone wants a HN account in their real name.

This kind of missed my point. I know this is not something we are supposed to talk about, but I miss the old HN. The sad thing is these days I get more value reading the new post raw feed than the conversations on the front page.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#566

Post by toodles1628 »

ammon wrote: post #539
sbergot wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I can accept an apology when I can somehow understand the initial intention. In the thread the CEO was answering "but stackoverflow also has public accounts!" to people explaining why this was a very bad move. The guy seemed completely clueless. It was like trying to explain that hurting people is bad to someone who has just punched you in the face. And this guy justifies his move saying that he has watched a…

I was clueless. The posts I made Friday night were what I thought at the time (which was badly wrong). I was still focused on what I'd been thinking while we were developing the feature (still trying to make it "work"). What it took was a bunch of friends and mentors reaching out Saturday morning (and basically telling me I'd made a big mistake and betrayed the trust of our users). I wish I'd been able to understand…

It seems convenient to be clueless. Certainly makes for a better apology than "Of course I knew the issue but wanted to try to push it through."

To me it doesn't seem credible that you as the CEO of a recruiting company didn't realize the issue of "default public" profiles. You literally have a section about confidentiality on the front page of your website so you must have known it was important to users.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#567

Post by eru »

geofft wrote: post #513
akerl_ wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds like an excellent idea.

And I absolutely agree that the feelings of the CEO matter less than putting in place some proper procedures.

Profit ain't bad.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#568

Post by ryukoposting »

tersers wrote: post #471
dllthomas wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what type of company you're looking for that you'd expect to be underrepresented.

Basing your worth around a quiz only further enables whiteboard and leetcode style interviews. I've never seen why these interviews are useful or an indicator of anything beyond someone's ability to sit at home for hours on end doing the same things over and over. A company I would want to work for would be doing something for sustainability/climate change or another social good and would focus more on behaviour and…

I did the quiz, then a practice interview. Never did the real interview since I found a fantastic opportunity elsewhere. The interviewer was respectful of the fact that my niche isn't really what the interview was designed for (embedded systems, FPGA work, etc), and provided opportunities for me to display problem-solving skills. Of course, the quiz was purely technical, but it's hard to expect anything more from an automated quiz you can do in 30 minutes. As far as I can tell, the quiz only serves as a filter for basic competency, then the interview is an evaluation of the traits you describe.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#569

Post by mthoms »

jki275 wrote: post #557
mthoms wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we can make up hypotheticals all day long. So you're not going to point out any logical flaws in the scenario? You're not going to tell me why it's not a useful exercise? You're just going to avoid answering it because.... reasons. > Firing someone because they have a profile on triplebyte is just silly. Neither of the examples I gave were about firing. >I ge that you all need to justify your rage over this, but thi…

It's a silly hypothetical, and not worth addressing any further than I already did. You've now admitted you're not even in the situation, so why debate for it other than internet gotcha points?

>It's a silly hypothetical, and not worth addressing any further than I already did.

You haven't given a _reason_ why it's "silly" and "not worth addressing", you just declared it so. That's not how civilized debate works and not how intelligent, honest, people disagree.

>You've now admitted you're not even in the situation, so why debate for it other than internet gotcha points?

Because I believe in privacy, ethics and get some enjoyment out of vigorous and fair debate. Sometimes my mind gets changed, sometimes I change other peoples minds. Other times, there are people who just aren't up to it intellectually and cover their ears and spew childish nonsense.

So let's cite some sources shall we?

1) According to a specialist in employment law at Dilworth Paxson LLP and author of the online law blog “The Employer Handbook” it is sometimes advisable for employers to terminate an employee looking for other work.[0]

2) According to hundreds of professionally employed developers on HN. "We feel at risk of this happening to us."

3) According to internet user jkl275. "That's silly because it doesn't match my experience. And if it is true, the company you work for is shit. Therefore your concerns are unfounded because.. well... I'm not sure. Why are you even arguing with me!?"

[0] https://blog.shrm.org/workforce/caught-in-the-act-employees-...

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#570

Post by __m »

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…

You make it sound like an innocent mistake, but they must have discussed this issue and decided that violating their user‘s privacy is acceptable. It’s not like they made a typo, it shows malintent.
Post reply on HN