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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#331

Post by wolfgang42 »

lmeyerov wrote: post #233

Good lesson for other founders here. Early on nobody knows you, but as soon as they do, you'll need to have chosen if you're on the trust-and-brand-building marathon or not. By default, if you do nothing, you're building up to an explosion like this that can take years to recover from. How did the CEO, the board, the sales team, the marketing team, customer support team, and the engineering team all fail to notice an…

Ammon says a postmortem is in the works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304127

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#333

Post by Non24Throw »

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 think this is an overly cynical take on things.

Consider the fact that if Ammon had fully considered this rollout, it would be very obvious to him that this would be the response. The legal ramifications would also have been obvious.

I think the only reasonable explanation is that it wasn’t fully thought through. I think his business being hit hard by the pandemic is a reasonable explanation for that. There’s no way TripleByte isn’t hit hard by this. Rushing a major feature out is exactly the kind of thing he’s supposed to be doing right now. It seems he just thought too much on making the business and tech side of the feature successful, and didn’t give enough time to the human and legal side of it.

Personally I thought his email was way more introspective and revealing than it even needed to be, and I think he’s being genuine.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#334

Post by 737min »

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…

I think what the critics are trying to say is that plenty of companies in the same space were not tempted to do this kind of stuff, despite all the pressures, and instead atayed committed to engineers’ privacy and putting candidates first.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#335

Post by lmeyerov »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #329
lmeyerov wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets into all sorts of dynamics and who controls them: -- Layoffs are happening around COVID, now who do you think a manager will feel more OK picking? -- For luckier companies, bonuses/refreshers/promotions happen at different times, a candidate may want their manager thinking about their work vs. them exploring greener pastures That's sensitive stuff! Some candidate may like being exposed (it's a threat!), som…

I didn't downvote, but I reasonably question how much energy is put into looking if employees have a TripleByte page. Performance reviews are typically backwards looking (what did this individual deliver for us in the last year) and forward looking (what trajectory does this person have in continuing to deliver value to our organization).

Imagine an HR person using Triplebyte to recruit. As part of regular self-googling, finding folks with similar skills, etc., they'd see employees looking for new opportunities. A good HR person would notify the manager etc. of flight risk.

This won't happen to everyone, but again, it's a matter of agency. Someone at a tiny startup may not care, but someone at a bigger or more political org might might feel risk differently. It's their career, not TripleByte's.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#336

Post by xenihn »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #249
xenihn wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually used Triplebyte? You're required to provide an expected salary range as part of your listing. And yes, you can technically provide an open-ended band (e.g. $0 - $999,999) -- can you guess what happens if you do that, and why Triplebyte advises not doing this, even though you have the option to do so?

Yes I have used TripleByte. I haven’t gotten any job offers (probable due to interviewing in February right before COVID-19 went big). So I’m aware of how their system works. And I stand behind my claim that they’re not a middle man. A middle man advocates for you, and sometimes even handles all the back and forth. A recruiter is a middle man. A hiring agency isn’t.

>A middle man advocates for you

Triplebyte is doing this by making you pass their assessment prior to listing you. Your presence on their platform is them selling you up.

Even if they do nothing but provide an introduction between you and a third party, and have no involvement whatsoever after that (aside from taking some sort of cut), they are still a middle man, because the connection was made through them, and they vetted your skills and qualifications.

It's not like LinkedIn, where you can just auth with a phone number and then put whatever you want on your profile. Triplebyte, as a company, is personally vouching for you by allowing you to appear on their platform.

>sometimes even handles all the back and forth

So you're saying some middle men handle all the back and forth, but not all. So is this a factor for whether they qualify as middle men or not? If so, why not just say they all do? If not, why mention it?

Hired.com is very similar to Triplebyte, and I don't see how you can argue that they are not a middle man.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#337

Post by japhyr »

RandomBacon wrote: post #225
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…

I'm in a different industry, but I read the HN thread about it a few days ago. In the CEO's comments, I saw a lot of 'I'm sorry you feel that way' type of apologies. I wrote that he should take responsibility for his own actions. Perhaps he read that and took it to heart. Perhaps he read that and realized it would sound better if it seemed like he took it to heart. Perhaps after the monumental PR screw-up, they hired…

Your comment was the first thing I thought of when reading today's email. I hav worked most of my life as a secondary math and science teacher, and one of the things we teach all students about communication is "I statements."

This email is full of sincere I statements. Whether it comes from reading your comment or just reflecting on the whole situation, this is about the best response I could have imagined a few days ago. It accepts responsibility, and shares the thinking and feeling behind getting so far from where they should be heading.

I don't have a TripleByte account at the moment, but if I did I'd be open to what they do next. A CEO who has made a major mistake and taken sincere responsibility for it in my eyes is more trustworthy than many who just haven't made their first major public mistake yet. I know we need to watch them carefully for a while, but this is about the best statement I could imagine Ammon and TripleByte putting out right now.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#339

Post by wildermuthn »

tmpz22 wrote: post #109
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…

Even the greatest of apologies is not a time machine that will completely undue what happened. A C-level/director-level team pushed out a massively privacy violating policy with zero feedback in an effort to compete against an incumbent company (LinkedIn) on a Friday afternoon. It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterpris…

Sure, Triplebyte made a dumb move here. But “massively privacy violating” is hyperbole.

It seems as if everything is considered “private” now. No, not everything is private. You interviewing for a job isn’t private unless both parties make it private with a legally binding contract. It is a mistake to wishfully label public information as private simply because we don’t want it to be public. It also makes it harder to talk about true violations of privacy and distracts from understanding the real issues at stake.

What people ought to say, and have often said here, is that it is a violation of trust. People trusted Triplebyte to find them a new job, not lose their current job. That trust was violated not by an invasion of privacy — it is their data as much as it is ours — but a violation of using that data in a harmful way.

Privacy isn’t the problem here. The problem is with whatever broken processes led to this bad product and poor decision.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#340

Post by greenyoda »

treis wrote: post #298
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applying a marginal amount of business accumen: there's other ways to get from millions to billion(s). They don't have to further monetize engineers. There's companies looking for all sorts of talent, beyond software engineers, in fact 99% of hiring is for non-software engineering roles. You can't get blood from a stone, but you can expand your total addressable market.

It's too hard to scale and protect margins. If Triplebyte proves out a business model you'll get a bunch of Triplebyte for X competitors. For example, someone will start the equivalent of Triplebyte focused on DBAs another for Erlang devs, another for embedded, etc.

Wouldn't a growing company that needed to hire for several different roles rather deal with a single service than a separate service for each specialty role?
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