zlacker

>>winsto+(OP)
Hey everyone. Happy to answer any questions about this. Basically, we think that LinkedIn profiles don't do a good job of showing engineering skill (especially for self-taught people or people from non-traditional backgrounds). I'm excited to just build better support for showing side projects and GitHub contributions. LinkedIn profiles have become the default engineering resume (despite the fact that most engineers are not particularly happy with their LinkedIn profile). But there's lock-in. I hope that we have enough scale to be able to chip away at this.

>>ammon+z4
Thanks for coming to answer questions here even though you’re likely to get dragged through the mud for this decision.

FWIW, I agree with other commenters that this is a betrayal of trust but I don’t have anything original to add.

>>yaacov+b6
Well, sorry that you feel this way. I don't agree right now (clearly). But I'll certainly take this seriously and think more about it/listen to feedback. We're talking about relatively basic profiles, to give us the canvas to launch public achievement badges (that we hope allow us to better help people who don't have traditional credentials). My view, building this, is that we're not displaying anything more private than hundreds of other companies. Stack Overflow has public profiles. Hacker Rank has public profile. AngelList has public profiles. Even HN has public profiles. We are launching public profiles for a product that has not had them in the past, and I get that that's a more sensitive thing to do. What we've focused on to keep that from harming anyone is what data we include in the profiles. I wish we'd include more details about that in the email.

>>ammon+fa
First off, thanks again for taking the time to speak with us on HN.

I think you’re missing/avoiding the issue that people might want to hide the very fact that they have a Triplebyte account at all. It implies that they have job hunted in the last 5 or so years, and someone who’s been at a single company for longer than that might not want that information to be available.

I work at Google, and I can tell you as a fact that our Privacy Working Groups would never let us launch something like this without explicit user consent.

>>yaacov+3c
Google did something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy

>>areyou+Bx1
Google did something significantly worse -- and spent ages apologizing for it and never really recovered from the reputation hit, and I suspect that negative impressions Buzz gave people were a contributing factor to G+'s total failure.

>>seebs+DA1
> and I suspect that negative impressions Buzz gave people were a contributing factor to G+'s total failure.

Absolutely.

Google+ became really nice towards the end, but HN kept hating it, and I guess partly because of Buzz.