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Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

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Re: Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

#231
post #165

Hi there, I’m Dave and I work at AngelList on our Talent platform. Please accept our sincere apologies for what happened here. Sending an email without giving you a heads-up or control over its content was wrong. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it: * We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. * We’ve revised the project tagging email to clarify that it’s automatically generated…

Giving your email address apparently is useless. People on this thread are saying you don't ever respond to emails. Just search: > Their support is absolutely non-existent. I heard nothing back from them whatsoever, after sending several emails.

I've asked him directly why he didn't respond to my email, and given him the date (more than a year ago) for him to check on it.

I sent several more emails, because the longer I tried to get my profile the way I wanted it, the more diverse glitches I encountered.

Here is a run-down:

1) Added a company I used to work for. Went to the company's page, and looked at the Jobs section. Saw a button that said "[checkbox] Sent" in a context that meant that AngelList had sent a job application to my former employer on my behalf. In retrospect, it's even worse than I realized at the time: I now know that the email headers claimed it came directly from me, and the text was written in the first person. There was no way to delete a job application, or list all job applications that AngleList randomly decided to send on my behalf.

2) Entering jobs is very difficult and clumsy. Imported jobs from my Facebook history. Only some of them showed up.

3) The ordering of the jobs I imported was random, not sorted by date.

4) I attempted to re-order the jobs myself. I was totally baffled why some of them show up in the large sections at the top, but many others are listed below in a paragraph with just their names. How can I control which jobs appear as larger sections, instead of as a list of names?

5) I entered another job and it appeared at the top of the page, and I went into reorder mode, and I was not able to drag it up or down — it was pinned to the top of the list. And afterwards it actually disappeared from the list!

6) And the first time I was entering jobs it did not allow me to enter a description, but now it is asking for a description, and I don’t know why it suddenly changed.

7) It's impossible to enter the same company name twice. I worked for Sun Microsystems as an intern, and later I was employed full time. I worked for EA full time, and later worked as a contractor. Those should be listed as separate jobs, during separate times. LinkedIn certainly supports that.

8) How do I represent being hired by one company, that's then bought by another company (like EA bought Maxis)? Or that spins off another company (like Sun Microsystem split off SunSoft). This kind of stuff happens all the time in the industry, so it should not be impossible to describe.

9) The triangular "EXIT" corner on company description boxes renders incorrectly, with scrambled text. This is not rocket science. I included a screen dump of the error and Chrome debugger DOM tree to show what was wrong.

10) But the larger problem from a user interface design perspective is that it's terrible to use a call to action verb like "EXIT" in what looks like an orange triangular "EXIT" sign, which falsely affords clicking on it to exit the page.

11) What is so important about a company "exiting" that it deserves such a prominent raggedy orange dog-ear "EXIT" sign on the company listing? What's important is what I did at that company, not the incidental fact that it was bought by another company. That's just buzzword bingo fetishism. Do they hand out green "PIVOT" tags and red "BANKRUPT" tags too?

12) I am listed as both "Employee" and "Past Employee" of one of my former employers. I don't have any control over that, apparently.

I encountered even more problems I didn't have time to write up, but obviously after spending so much time trying to work around those problems, then writing them up, sending them into team@angel.co, then waiting more than a year for a reply, I have not wasted any more time on my AngelList profile, even though I had to leave it in an incorrect, embarrassing state.

I probably should have deleted my AngelList account a long time ago, after not receiving a reply within a week or so. Perhaps some of these problems are already solved, after more than a year since I reported them. And perhaps some of the privacy problems will finally be solved now that many other people have announced they deleted their accounts.

My partner asked me to enter the information more than a year ago, because he was raising money and he assumed investors would want to look at that site. So I put a lot of time and effort into trying to get it right, but was unsuccessful, and left it hanging for more than a year. But now he is afraid that the old boys network will be annoyed because I posted about the problems I had with the AngelList web site. So I sincerely apologize if I've inadvertently offended anyone, because all I wanted to do was to have some control over the information that AngelList was publishing about me and the email that they were sending on my behalf.

Re: Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried to determine is AngelList is a real company? Their web site certainly claims they are, but I've never heard anything back from my repeated emails to team@angel.co, and I don't see them posting anything here. Even Sourceforge has better community outreach and reputation management. How is that not irony?

Yes, of course they are. They are registered and you can look this up using California's online business search, rather than grandstanding on an online forum. It's dishonest of you to insinuate otherwise.

If it's so easy for me to tell if AngelList is a real by performing an online business search, then why doesn't AngelList determine if companies are real that way, instead of violating my privacy by sending my employers first person email with headers implying it's directly from me, on my behalf, without warning?

Do you also think I'm being dishonest to insinuate that they ignored my repeated emails to team@angel.co reporting the problems I encountered?

Re: Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

#233
Does anybody else find it strange how this unethical "growth hack" has backfired on this company?

They were steadily becoming THE place for listing your startup and get seen by investors, but then this happened.

I wonder if we will see a trickle down and this gets reported on those popular SV tech sites.

May just be a bump in the road though.

Kudos to the person recommending filling your profile with dummy data before deleting your account. Then again, every company and their dog is doing "big data", so your real info is probably trapped in an AWS server until the end of time.

Re: Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

#234
post #189

I had big problems with the "Angel List" web site, because it was extremely flakey and appeared to be a typical piece of garbage that some dime-a-dozen huckster with very little experience had just thrown together after watching the Ruby on Rails Make Your Own Trendy Dot Com Crud Web Site in 10 Minutes screencast. Major features were totally broken. Many things about the design were devoid of thought and just haphaza…

Please, no hatchet jobs here, even when a website is annoying. HN is an experiment in avoiding some of the factors that have brought down internet discussion forums in the past. We depend on users for that, so please use your formidable flamewar powers for good.

I'm sorry if I came off as doing a hatchet job on AngelList. But it pales in comparison to the self inflicted hatchet job they're doing on themselves.

My intention was to make a last ditch effort to get some much needed customer support, before giving up and deleting my account. But even though Dave from AngelList has finally replied to this discussion, he still hasn't replied to any of my email or postings, or acknowledged and addressed the problems I encountered and reported to him more than a year ago.

I've already sunk a lot of time and energy into unsuccessfully trying to get my AngelList profile into an acceptable state, and I also went the extra mile to describe and illustrate many of the numerous problems I had in detail, and report them to team@angel.co.

I have been waiting for a response before sinking any more time into it, and more than a year has passed with no reply. So I took this discussion as an opportunity to try to get an acknowledgement from somebody at AngelList, but so far to no avail.

To prove my good intentions, and give them a chance to fix the problems so I can salvage my profile instead of deleting it, I've just sunk even more time into summarizing the details of the emails I sent to team@angel.co in another message below, because apparently my emails to team@angel.co never seem to get through to anyone who's paying attention.

I've told Dave the date and time of the first message I sent, 29 January 2015 at 11:09 CET, so he can check his support email archives, and see all the problem reports with screen snapshots that I sent him more than a year ago. But so far, I've seen no response from him.

If Dave continues to ignore the issues that I and other people have raised, that just further reinforces my impression that the lights are on but nobody's home, and that I'm just the product, not the customer.

Re: Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I will apologize" and "please accept our apologies" are ways to distance the speaker from the actual act of apologizing, but are not the act itself. They lessen the pain of actually saying "I'm sorry". I think we only started to accept them as such when the phrasings became so pervasive because of business-speak. It's similar to the difference between "mistakes were made" and "I made a mistake".

> "I will apologize" and "please accept our apologies" are ways to distance the speaker from the actual act of apologizing, but are not the act itself. They lessen the pain of actually saying "I'm sorry". This is not correct. They are the same speech act, at a higher level of formality.

"I'm sorry" is me telling you what I am.

"Please accept my apologies" is me telling you what to do: take what I'm giving you.

I can easily give you my apologies without being remotely sorry. Sorrow is a feeling, but apology is a statement.

But it's still up to you to decide if you want to take the apologies I want to give to you, or disregard my polite command that you should.

Re: Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile

#236

Hi there, I’m Dave and I work at AngelList on our Talent platform. Please accept our sincere apologies for what happened here. Sending an email without giving you a heads-up or control over its content was wrong. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it: * We’ve made it clearer that tagging a company on a project may notify them by email. * We’ve revised the project tagging email to clarify that it’s automatically generated…

Why didn't you respond when I asked team@angel.co why you mistakenly sent one of my former employers an email telling them that I wanted to apply for a job with them, and ignored me when I asked you to cancel that application? I sent the message on 29 January 2015 at 11:09 CET. And then why didn't you respond to any of my subsequent emails with detailed descriptions and screen snapshots of other problems I encountere…

Dave: It's been three days since your last comment, an no response. [1]

Well, your lack of response to my and everyone else's questions certainly confirms my impression about AngelList, and says a lot more than your non-apology apology did.

I gave you more than a fair chance to respond, provided you the date and time of my unanswered message from more than a year ago, and even gave you a second chance in case you deleted my year-old email, by sinking even more of my time into summarizing the problems I originally reported to you, and posting them here for you to read again. [2]

But still: no response from you, as more and more people continue to announce they're deleting their AngelList accounts.

You're asleep at the wheel, the lights are on, but nobody's home. If your attention has wandered on to other things, and you no longer have any interest in maintaining your web site or responding to your users for over a year, then you really should shut it down gracefully, and save everyone from wasting their time and having their privacy unexpectedly violated. Old unmaintained web sites running on auto-pilot that collect sensitive private information from their users (and automatically forge first-person email pretending to be from their users in order to virally promote themselves) are a dangerous security threat, which should be shut down for the safety of the internet.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd0fBXwDBmo

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350697

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