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One question that wasn’t addressed in the response: if the CEO did not realize that implementing the feature would be bad for users, then why did the company announce the feature as an email footnote at 5PM Friday before a holiday weekend, which is when bad news typically drops?
Why not just make it opt-in? Lots of people would have done it right away and others would do it as they started to want new opportunities and/or got laid off. Candidates who didn’t opt in probably wouldn’t be open to being contacted out of the blue anyway in a public manner. They burned a lot of goodwill for nothing.
I can imagine, in that scenario, not thinking about all the devs who signed up over the years and are no longer searching, or are searching but doing so quietly.
Rather than safeguarding the fact that you are or were job searching, we threatened exposure. Current employers might retaliate if they saw that you were job searching. You did not expect that any personal information you’d given us, in the context of a private, secure job search, would be used publicly without your explicit consent. I sincerely apologize. It was my failure.
How about we stop giving our data to third parties just so we can use their software.
"The Cloud" is a corporate euphemism for "extreme centralization of data in our servers".
And "Software as a Service" is even worse, because it basically says you are RENTING the software, and trusting them to do "the right thing", including and especially with your data.
This is insane. It's 2020. Why are we doing this? One reason: we don't have a good open source alternative that can be hosted on many different places. Such an alternative should actually be end-to-end encrypted, and the hosting should be just redundant dumb boxes earning cryptocurrency for storing something.
So, what happened? How did I screw this up? I’ve been asking myself this question a bunch over the past 48 hours.
What happened was the same thing that happened 17 years ago when Mark Z laughed about the "dumb f$cks* who "trusted him" with their passwords. To quote the excellent V for Vendetta speech:
How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Look, I'm biased. I have put my money where my mouth is and am building this reality (https://qbix.com/platform and https://intercoin.org). I have historically been downvoted for even mentioning that I am doing tangible things to solve this and give away the software. But I persist in doing so because it's better to actually build the alternative than talk about it endlessly. The Impossible Burger will do more for veganism than decades of talk ever could.
If you want to join this effort, email greg at the domain qbix.com . But whether you choose to support Mastodon, Matrix, IPFS, Dat, MaidSAFE or whatever, realize that we need to move towards a future where infrastructure is decoupled from power over your data. Your data should be encrypted and only enough shared for indexing. It should be provable with verified claims and zero-knowledge proofs, but only with your consent.
Why not just make it opt-in? Lots of people would have done it right away and others would do it as they started to want new opportunities and/or got laid off. Candidates who didn’t opt in probably wouldn’t be open to being contacted out of the blue anyway in a public manner. They burned a lot of goodwill for nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am still trying, and achieving, to give them the benefit of the doubt. They understood and took it back. But I am scratching my head how they could honestly miss the importance of what they were planning to do.. I guess a combination of stress, pressure and usual disregard of privacy by big players clouded their judgement.
I read their answers in the discussion here and it felt a lot like: I'm sorry that you... That might have been another bad day at work but whatever it was it really doesn't inspire confidence
Hopefully this reflection is sincere.
Yeah, no. I already deleted my account and I'm not going back. I realise the type of candidate they cater towards would find jobs at companies I wouldn't really want to work at anyway. I'm ashamed that younger me fell for this in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why was the CEO on HN arguing for the feature, implying people complaining were the ones with the problem? I don't buy it, and I'll be steering clear.
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.
I still wonder why you tried the infamous "I'm sorry that you cannot understand" line here?