I’m a non-technical lurker of Hacker News - a community builder who comes here for credible, thought-provoking news with intelligent comments. First time commenter.
My biggest takeaway from the reaction to this letter is that people seemingly would have rather had this CEO’s sincere and heartfelt words filtered through a PR agency, who would have mangled the genuine sentiments to create sterile and thoroughly-filtered corporate bullshit. People would rather be spoon fed crap from a campaign team than listen to the earnest, well-intentioned, real voice of the person who wrote them. What kind of a world are you creating when you reward an honest, but imperfect, apology with derision and judgement?
I have no stakes in this game. I’ve never used TripleByte’s services to seek employment. I don’t know how to code. But I believe in merit-based hiring, and I would not be so eager to burn to the ground this company that I think is performing a valuable service (to individuals, but also in shifting trends of hiring practices as a whole) over an oversight that they owned up to after a night’s sleep to reprocess.
The world I want to live in is one in which people are hired based on their capabilities, and where people are willing to extend trust and forgiveness to people when they are being honest and owning up to their oversights. The flaws in this letter that commenters are tearing apart make it clear to me that this CEO is a rare example of someone not lying through the teeth of a campaign team. I value that much more than the facade of perfection.