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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#621

Post by CathedralBorrow »

bigiain wrote: post #494
CathedralBorrow wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, I thought we were talking about kindness after they pulled the plug and backtracked on everything. How am I being taken advantage of if I read that letter and think "Well, good for them to finally realize things and take the right steps"? And I hope you're not speaking for everyone when you talk about good faith.

They have not "taken the right steps", at least not yet. They've "stopped beating their wife". That's nothing to be proud of or rewarded for. Everything else so far is just empty words. (Well written and convincing words, sure. But that guarantees nothing, any of us could find somebody to write a great apology if we're prepared to pay. Means nothing.)

> They have not "taken the right steps", at least not yet.

So reversing and apologizing is still taking the wrong steps? Is this one of those situations where no positive descriptor must ever be uttered about someone?

> That's nothing to be proud of or rewarded for.

Good thing I never said that. I don't think we're speaking the same language here.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#622

Post by mehrdadn »

syshum wrote: post #620
mehrdadn wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's left me confused is one thing: if the significance of "default public" was missed, then what was the motivation for the previous warning email? It seems bizarre to suddenly email everyone "Hey folks, we're changing your default privacy settings next week" while simultaneously believing that it's... an insignificant thing?

My Guess, someone on the team understood the ramifications but others did not. They only thing they someone could get them to agree to is the email I have been in meetings where everyone in the meeting though "doing X will have no impact on anyone so there is not need to notify", where I knew 100% they were wrong but none of my arguments landed, my final statement was "well if it is not significant then the email sho…

Makes sense I guess, thanks. Going a little off-topic, but regarding what you mentioned -- how do you reply when they (inevitably, I often feel) reply to your 'why not' with "Well because we shouldn't send out needless emails to people"?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#623

Post by geoelectric »

philwelch wrote: post #588
geofft wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You can’t install business processes to prevent unethical decisions. You can only hold the people making those decisions to high ethical standards, and replace them when they fall short of those standards. Now, I suppose it may be possible that the CEO in this situation dramatically misunderstood the situation. It may even be possible that he had good faith even as he militantly defended those misunderstandings in pr…

You can install business processes that give chances for unethical decisions to be reviewed and identified, though. Committees are shit for innovation but relatively effective for squashing interestingly bad ideas along with any interestingly good ones.

I read the apology letter as essentially saying he single-handedly drove the idea, in part because he was flailing due to COVID killing their bottom line, and was tunnel-visioned enough to not recognize it was unethical. Even at face value, that’s absolutely troubling for a CEO in TB’s domain. But smarter people have done dumber things under pressure, and sometimes dumb is at someone’s (or a lot of someones) expense by mistake.

So I’d like to think this was an exceptional occurrence, and I appreciated his personal post-mortem of sorts. However, taking this as charitably as possible, a process-oriented RCA focused on how he’ll keep his runaway ideas from being a one-man show—or whatever the problem actually was that saw this conflagration actually see light of day—wouldn’t suck.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#624

Post by geoelectric »

ammon wrote: post #78
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #31

One of two things happened: 1. Triplebyte attempted a big move against LinkedIn, tried to ease the blow to users by dumping on a Friday before memorial day weekend 2. Triplebyte, the company built around helping people find jobs, truthfully didn't understand that people might have concerns about their current companies knowing they are job-hunting It's pretty obvious it's #1, and that opt-out rather than opt-in was t…

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.

I appreciate your direct honesty here and elsewhere, but I—and likely much of your core market—feel that leverage of opt-out and old customer data to get critical mass in a pivot to an unrelated business was already unethical. That you’re a recruiter made it inexcusable but it was never a idea that was respectful to your users to begin with.

Dude, you were going to use us to publicly endorse your new platform via usage and give it immediate legitimacy, without our consent. Don’t you get that’s what “critical mass through public profiles” means? People join because people are already there?

This is probably the post that disturbs me most of what I’ve read, for simply ignoring that the decision was problematic on multiple levels. Either you’re still not completely getting it or this is disingenuous, and neither option is comforting.

And trying to be charitable as possible here, it’s very easy to take your clinical recounting as being cavalier in its precision. I don’t think we’re all necessarily far enough from the situation yet that you should treat it as the distant past when discussing it. You still have my data, at least for the moment, and it’s still an ongoing concern.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#625

Post by iterati »

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…

If you are that clueless you shouldn't be running a company.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#626

Post by jki275 »

mthoms wrote: post #569
jki275 wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m pretty sure one can find a lawyer to argue any side of any point. That doesn’t make it so.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#627

Post by KingOfCoders »

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 something shady, blows in your face, write heartfelt apology, repeat. Fine with you?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#628

Post by Rudisimo »

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 created an account back in mid-2018, when I wasn't exactly happy with my employment situation. I didn't use Triplebyte to interview anywhere, but I left my personal information on the site. Fast forward to the present, I now work for a different company where I am actually happy. The post on Friday didn't sit right with me, and neither did the obtuse response by the CEO. I wouldn't like my profile to suddenly show up in a job hunting site.

But, the damage is done. I ended up deleting my account over the weekend. The process to do so wasn't as convoluted as some said it would be, it only took 1 hour.

P.S. I didn't receive the apology letter, so at least I got taken off the mailing list.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#629

Post by duxup »

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…

I think what the company wants is to recognize their mistake.

Users can still see that... and be worried about how they came to the inital decision.

None of that should influence if you do or don't apologize.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#630

Post by philwelch »

geoelectric wrote: post #623
philwelch wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t install business processes to prevent unethical decisions. You can only hold the people making those decisions to high ethical standards, and replace them when they fall short of those standards. Now, I suppose it may be possible that the CEO in this situation dramatically misunderstood the situation. It may even be possible that he had good faith even as he militantly defended those misunderstandings in pr…

You can install business processes that give chances for unethical decisions to be reviewed and identified, though. Committees are shit for innovation but relatively effective for squashing interestingly bad ideas along with any interestingly good ones. I read the apology letter as essentially saying he single-handedly drove the idea, in part because he was flailing due to COVID killing their bottom line, and was tun…

I still don’t like the idea of hamstringing the CEO’s ability to make executive decisions because the CEO can’t be trusted to make ethical executive decisions. Processes are fine for preventing operational mistakes, but when it comes to ethics and executive judgment, they’re a poor substitute for having trustworthy people making the decisions.
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