Fortunately this email made it through my spam filter. Looks like they want to take on LinkedIn and are planning to seed it by making existing accounts public unless you opt OUT within the next week:
Hey [redacted],
I’m excited to announce that we are expanding the reach of your Triplebyte profile. Now, you can use your Triplebyte credentials on and off the platform. Just like LinkedIn, your profile will be publicly accessible with a dedicated URL that you can share anywhere (job applications, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc). When you do well on a Triplebyte assessment, your profile will showcase that achievement (we won’t show your scores publicly). Unlike LinkedIn, we aim to become your digital engineering skills resume — a credential based on actual skills, not pedigree.
The new profiles will be launching publicly in 1 week. This is a great opportunity to update your profile with your latest experience and preferences. You can edit your profile privacy settings to not appear in public search engines at any time.
Our mission is to build an open, valuable, and skills-based credential for all engineers. We believe that allowing Triplebyte engineers to publicly share their profiles and skills-based credentials will accelerate this mission.
Thanks,
Ammon Co-founder & CEO, Triplebyte
A nicely styled resume and showcase should do the trick nicely.
Were people that originally interviewed aware before their interview that their profile would become public at a later date?
Edit: I missed that there's a privacy setting to make the profiles non-searchable. So, I guess you care enough to complain on the internet, but not enough to even ask if there's a privacy violation? Seems like there's a name for that.
Because, in the "Visibility" link in the profile builder says: Your public profile will be invisible and will not appear in public search engines. This simplified version of your Triplebyte profile showcases your technical achievements based on actual skills, not pedigree (it does not contain your score details, job status, or preferences). Turn your visibility “ON” in order to share your unique Triplebyte profile URL on job applications, LinkedIn, GitHub, and other platforms.
However, "Learn More" says the URL will be inaccessible when not Public. So, which is it?
FWIW, I agree with other commenters that this is a betrayal of trust but I don’t have anything original to add.
Clearly and obviously not the part people are upset about. Cmon mate.
Asking as someone who has been on the platform for a while but has not found any success through it. I have other thoughts but would like to hear your plans before adding.
You're not taking on LinkedIn, you're just trying to get a bigger piece of that good ole dark pattern pie.
I clicked privacy center, ( https://triplebyte.com/privacy-center ), couldn't find the option, but chose 'Opt out of Personal Information Sharing' because why not?
After clicking the button I had to click a confirmation email to get this approved. Then it said it would happen within 30 days and I may be required to show govt ID.
Why? I am already verified with my login account. It is not like I am doing something sensitive like changing a password or email. And what is this about needing to show govt id? They have zero reason to need govt ID to opt out of 'Personal Information Sharing' of all things.
Honestly tempted to just delete my profile. (That may also require govt ID.)
To be fair they sent an email to everyone who had signed up; I received the same email.
I do think it's an urgent matter and something that can and will come to bite you later- HN Is how I found out myself and I don't really think right now is the moment to play silly games with people's privacy, and not everybody may keep in touch with Triplebyte after their assessments.
After this announcement, though, I’m afraid that faith has completely crumbled. Even if Ammon had showed up in this thread and immediately announced that this was a terrible idea and they were rolling it back immediately, the mere fact that they were considering doing this is a huge blow. It doesn’t help that I skimmed the email when I got it this afternoon and didn’t even realize it was an opt-out; it was only when I saw this thread that I took a closer look and realized that the email was lacking a CTA button at the bottom for a reason. That seems incredibly shady to me and instantly changed my impression of the company.
Take heed, other companies: it only takes an instant to destroy your company’s reputation, and it’s incredibly difficult to win back that confidence.
How long before we all get an apology email, "Upon careful reconsideration...", 72 hours?
Extremely foolish and really shines a bad light on your decision making capabilities. Why would I put my trust in a company that is so shady?
You will change this bad decision and apologize, but you have betrayed the trust of all the people who have used you. Even if you change your policy now, we know you will change it back in the near future. No one will use your services again, because of this betrayal. You just killed your entire company in one fell swoop.
I’m shocked that someone associated with YC could make such a demonstrably poor decision.
Email is what I use to notify my customers of a 25% sale, not to tell them that I'm going to plaster their data all over the internet in violation of the spirit of the service I'm providing. I use regular mail for that.
FWIW, I hadn't heard of TripleByte before, but this is not a good way of hearing about it, nor would it encourage me to become a user, if people's fears match what you're actually planning to do. If they're correct, it sounds like you're about to intentionally or accidentally implement a dark pattern. I hope that's not the case.
You didn’t launch anything. All you had to do was edit the “1 week” part of your email and you could have sent earlier
Also, are you genuinely surprised by this backlash? Did you really think making people’s info public was going to be a popular decision? It’s hard for me to understand how common sense doesn’t prevail in this situation.
How can we trust triplebite with our career, finance information and personal information when you pull these kinds of moves. Make a good product. If it's actually good people will sign up.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Not really. Given that nobody on here has identified the underlying problem, and are happy to blame everything on Triplebyte ... it just goes to show how nothing is going to change anytime soon.
Confidence in using this, and other services, will only grow.
It’s like saying “Your Tinder profile will NOT contain any data/details about you or your dating search that will undermine you in your current relationship.”
Q: where did these expectations of privacy come from ?
There was never any indication our involvement with the company was going to be made completely public.
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.
I have had a really positive experience with Triplebyte so far but hope your team can understand the root of what is bothering people about this decision.
I saw your email in my inbox but didn't read it. I never would've noticed with improved screenshots or not. Do you read every email you get?
You are literally taking private data and making it public without consent.
Why not just say "We think we'll make more money by sharing private information our users trusted us with, without their consent." Then at least I think you'd get points for candor and honesty. As is, no points for either and everyone reading knows what you mean.
By the way, is it true you require a government id to delete your account? If so, why?
Apparently deletion requires ID or something. Um... thats less good. I vaguely understand why if it was needed to sign up. [addendum: nope!]
Suggest you think carefully about your next step if you have an account. Maybe gibberish your account to whatever extent you see fit, update the email address somewhere less identifying (perhaps sneakemail) and go on with your life. Assume all details will be sold (you mean you didn't already?!)
I think they are out of touch with their userbase. Or they have even more plans their userbase won't like.
Addendum:
There's an option to control public visibility. Opt-out but this is only partial details. I would not rely on that "partial" aspect.
Worse still: if you want to "not be contactable for new opportunities" that only lasts for 24 months at max. You can't select a "not wanting offers at all". Minimum is 1 month.
This means you could be inadvertantly outed as "looking for opportinities" without even knowing it.
I have made a note of this singular action along with your repeated refusal in this thread to acknowledge the harm you are causing.
People don't want their current employer to know about their job searches, period. There's a difference in magnitude between this and the Ashley Madison leak, but it's the same concept. Having a profile at all is a clear sign to your current employer. It doesn't matter what you were doing with it or when you created the account.
I would suggest you step away from any scripts and turn on the company ears. Simply explaining what is going on more “clear” and repeating it more often probably won’t get you anywhere good.
Why does this make your users uncomfortable? How can you work with them to achieve your product goals without undermining your relationship with them?
Good luck!
But not this way, not forcing all of your users into a public profile by default and making them provide gvmt ids to delete their accounts. Your users gave you their data for a specific purpose, and you took it and used it totally differently. This seems like a great violation of GDPR BTW.
This is abusive and evil.
Literally just make it opt-in.
Nope! Triplebyte flew me across the country, put me up in a hotel, and otherwise arranged a job for me with nothing more than my email address and a phone number. The first time I had to provide ID in the entire process was when I filled out the I-9 form on my first day at the company that had hired me.
I wonder, what future value will you find by giving away more private information? I know by this example that you won't even wait for the consent of your users before you exploit their private information.
Anyone have ideas on how to figure that out without accidentally registering and exacerbating the problem?
Call them on the phone right now before you make more bad decisions.
We're processing your request and should be done within 30 days.
We will verify your request using the information associated with your account. Government identification may be required and we may ask you for more information in order to verify your identify.
Any questions? Email us at privacy@triplebyte.com```
We're processing your request and should be done within 30 days.
We will verify your request using the information associated with your account. Government identification may be required and we may ask you for more information in order to verify your identify.
```
Triplebyte has definitely been the worst experience I have ever had, in fact they are so bad, i would rate them below the other unprofessional recruiters we all come across!
Identifiers, third parties. “ Companies that use our services to be matched with job candidates. Candidate profiles created by our users are accessible to the public. “
I've learned this lesson personally. Trying to be "clear" about my own perspective while ignoring what the other person feels.
"You don't like what you see? Impossible, you just can't see it. Let me make you see!"
Ah yes, the classic "send us more of your PII to delete your information." I've ran into that too many times.
which means you might be able to find it there, other than that maybe try 'forgot password' usually my go to solution.
I've got around 150 messages and more within last few hours of our little group - all very unhappy. The irc server #rant channel is getting loud.
Edit: 150 and growing (growling?).
1. Triplebyte knew this would cause some outrage, especially on HN and Reddit. 2. Triplebyte did some calculations and predicted that doing this on a Friday and only giving people a week to opt-out would result in the fewest number of opt-outs. 3. Triplebyte assumed that many of those outraged online would delete their accounts. 4. Despite all of the above, Triplebyte calculated that this move would make them more money in the long run.
I’m also guessing that these profiles will serve ads. I bet Triplebyte will offer “premium” plans for both job seekers and employers so that they can directly contact you more easily.
I hope this change incorporates necessary privacy measures for job seekers. I hope that this doesn’t become a 1-to-1 LinkedIn competitor that only seeks to get clicks and ad revenue. Only time will tell. I’m very skeptical but I won’t rage yet. I’ll opt out for now and see how it goes...
Triplebyte as founded isn't working so they're trying to take a valuable asset they have (engineers looking for jobs) to compete with linkedin
The problem with bootstrapping a linkedin competitor is the same chicken-and-egg problem with networks generally. You need people on it for people to join it.
What Triplebyte wants is your identity public. That's the product goal. The problem is that opt-in won't get them that. What are the incentives for anyone to make theirs public?
How many people who were searching for a job without telling their company are going to opt-in to make that public?
Most certainly not enough to bootstrap a LinkedIn competitor.
So someone had the idea to move fast and break things, either:
a) hoping no one would notice
b) hoping the fallout wouldn't be bad
c) not caring that the fallout would be bad
d) not knowing that there would be fallout
none of the above are particularly inspiring. It does seem hard to miss this coming
Outing people who trusted you to help them find a better job in secret will go very badly for you.
I predict lawsuits.
> Welcome to Triplebyte
> As part of this exclusive network of engineers:
> - Companies reach out to you
> - You control what companies see
> - Your profile is private
> Now, let’s take a look at your new dashboard.
> [Next]
That's pretty horrible.
But I have to ask ... since my understanding is that hiring companies make you redo the technical interviews again, what is the point of doing the Triplebyte interview process at all?
Also related, there was a startup that was scraping your Linkedin status and sending that to employers who subscribed, effectively doing the same thing Triplebyte is planning to do. There was quite an uproar over that, too.
Speaking of Linkedin, your employer can view your profile if it's public, so again, similar problem to what Triplebyte is doing.
The other law I'm thinking about is the general rule that for every change in a contract all parties must agree. It is normal that I get a letter from my bank "We are changing the rules, here you have 30 days to say you don't agree. If you won't, we'll assume you agreed. If you won't agree, your account will be closed.". So, I can say I don't agree. Here, they just assumed I agree.
Any change, like the one Triplebyte made, is not legal here without my consent. Yet, they made it.
I'm wondering what else they would change. I don't want to wake one Sunday morning to notice that they I'm charged a couple of millions because they changed the rules during the previous night.
I'm not going to show then any of my IDs. Just no. Knowing all information from my ID here has a similar power to knowing SSN in US. Instead, I just devastated my profile. There is no real information anymore. I'm wondering about adding some longer description that I'm protesting against their change of rules. I'm wondering how they would react to this. Maybe it is the way to delete my account, who knows.
Article 4(b) actually states that to verify you you (for a data delete request), they must do their best to use info they already have on you, and "Avoid collecting the types of personal information identified in Civil Code section 1798.81.5, subdivision (d)"
and in 1798.81.5,(d)(1)(A)(ii) we see: "Driver’s license number"
4(c) also helps: "A business shall generally avoid requesting additional information from the consumer for purposes of verification."
So if they can verify you another way, they must, and cannot ask for the DL (likely the only ID many people have)!, if i read that correctly
So instead of jumping through their hoops, file a CCPA request and have them chew on that.
:(
The existence of the job search itself is the issue. I'm not sure what's not getting through about that.
[1] and they enforce this—they specifically ask the candidate to report any technical questions asked during the phone call.
There will be some other time in the future where you’ll have to come back to opt out again.
Deletion of your account will be a soft delete, with the account popping back up again and again like a weed.
The sooner these types run out of VC money the better.
Are we (users) perhaps partly to blame? Maybe we do let them get away and they know that? How many people are really going to delete their profile now? (instead of just opting out) Perhaps we should be more principled in our response to such things? Imagine they lose 90% of their user base because of this idiocy. May be that'd serve as a broader lesson of real ethics?
I remember well when Quora forced me to install their app on mobile (not just a reminder pop-up, they blocked the page fully) - I sweared to never use them ever again. I kept my promise for a year or so, and then somehow went back to reading it later; so I am guilty myself of not being principled. But these sort of decisions really really puzzle me.
Now if this blows up there is an even bigger target on Ammon's back and he may be panicking. That or he is a scumbag. Could be both.
Note that you are opening yourself up to major legal and financial liabilities, besides the obvious personal ramifications, ie: you're on the record as a sleaze unless you handle this with velvet gloves from here on in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
Classic non-apology apology. You should not be sorry that he thinks it is awful, you should be sorry that it is awful.
Nobody cares about how much work you put into what amounts to an illegal disclosure of personal data.
Did they purposefully go out of the way to make this email address unguessable/non-standard/multi-word
This seems like the sort of information that people would want to keep private.
This struck me as incredibly unnatural, since I frequently comment and very rarely upvote an article. I don't really see what the one metric has to do with the other.
But apparently everyone else has a different model of HN in mind.
When a user creates a profile on Stack Overflow or Hacker News, they are consenting to share whatever data they give on that particular platform.
When a user created a profile on Triplebyte, up until now, they were consenting to that data being used in a private profile for the purpose of connecting them with job opportunities, privately. Now, you've emailed all of your users on a Friday evening to say "by the way, if you don't opt-out in the next week, we will take this data that you gave to us under the assumption that it would be private, and make it public (and potentially searchable)."
By saying "we'll do it unless you say no", you are not getting consent.
If you're familiar with the tea analogy of consent, a la https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8, this would be like you saying "well, other users (not necessarily every user, or you, the user in question right now) have had tea (not necessarily the same type of tea) from other platforms. This is just like that. So, if you don't say no to our tea in the next week, we're going to drop the tea on you. We hope you enjoy!"
You are not just "launching public profiles for a product that has not had them in the past", you are launching public profiles and on them you are _sharing data that was given to you under the agreement that it was private_. You are using data that folks gave you in a very, very different way than for the purpose they gave it.
Finally, just to really drive this home, you say "What we've focused on to keep that from harming anyone is what data we include in the profiles."
And, what data is that? What personal data, given under the agreement that it would stay private, won't harm someone if made public?
Full (presumably legal, or at least professional) name, coupled with profile picture (presumably a clear photo of their face) and, I'm guessing, also the locations they said they were looking for a job in? Although, fine, in most cases sharing that data is mainly annoying and trust-breaching, that combination of information can be devastating if leaked. Consider a person who has escaped an abusive ex-partner, and has managed to keep private about what new city they've moved to, now popping up in a Google search for their name that has their picture and the fact that they're looking for a job in Los Angeles. This person probably isn't your core user-base, but stories like this are real, they happen, and if you get enough users, they will be among your real life user stories. You have to consider user stories like this when you are trusted with personal information.
This ain't it.
I hope (for your sake) that you don't have any users that can invoke their GDPR rights against you by virtue of their citizenship.
For the sake of incentivising companies to do the right thing, however, I hope you do have some EU or UK citizen users who do litigate or have their data protection authority investigate and formally punish Triplebyte, even if only to establish clear precedent here for the future.
If your new service is of true benefit, it will be used.
What this means in practice is you can't default anything containing personal info to being public by default.
I think that's the real issue: timing. The only time this can work is when someone has just resigned or joined a new company, so they can (and are actually willing to) "legitimately" pump up the volume about themselves.
So make it an easy opt-in triggered by these events. Any triplebyte candidate that "closes the deal" should get opted-in automatically. Anybody without an ongoing work relationship, should get opted-in automatically. Everyone else, you hold fire until something significant happens publicly, at which point you gently prod them. You can even ask, when someone signals they are looking for a job, "do you want your profile public at this time? It's a pretty cool thing! If not, no biggie, we'll ask again once things change."
It's not rocket science to do this respectfully and it's sad that they didn't.
> "We really appreciate you taking the time to complete our quiz and coding problems. Unfortunately we couldn't accept your application this time."
It didn't show a score or anything, so I had no idea what I should improve on or what I was good at.
Pretty sure they hide the results so people can't cheat, but the whole experience left me feeling pretty inadequate and stupid for even trying...
After reading the comments from one of the founders in these threads, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
The CEO coming in here and trying to defend that this is actually a great idea is only making things worse.
I'm guessing they don't operate in Europe, because this would be a massive violation of many European and national privacy regulations.
Maybe they should take a hint from this - the fact that they can pull it off in the US doesn't mean it's morally acceptable.
Now I absolutely would not. Dead simple.
Time frame is also very important. Example, a user has been with the company for over a decade, but the product has only been around for a few years. Or if one of the "achievements" was a test that was added recently.
Another way to look at it: either you're a replaceable cog, or you're essential to running the business. If you're essential, they're going to do whatever they can to keep you. If you're replaceable, they probably don't care that much whether you in particular stay or go, but it will certainly cost money to replace you, which they'd rather avoid spending.
Only a completely irrational company would cut someone loose just because an online profile with that person's name on it appeared somewhere.
Tripebyte is fundamentally different and dangerous there.
It make no difference whether you're sorry that people feel that way. It's the wrong thing to do - you're going to hurt people doing this.
It make no difference that it's a fantastic opportunity for you and Tripebyte. It's not what you told people when they signed up and entrusted you their names and jobseeking. It's the wrong thing to do - and only lawyers are going to end up benefiting.
Two weeks later I sent a polite email to check in. No reply. Repeat two weeks later.
About two months later I received a reply that said the positions were filled, but that they would love to offer me as a candidate to US companies. This was useless to me as I live in Europe.
I believe the interviewer position was a sham, and they were just eating people's time in order to get detailed developer data.
Have logged in to stop this from happening and currently apparently I'm "Open to discussing new opportunities", which is news to me. On trying to change it to "Not interested in any new opportunities" there's a dropdown that says "I’d be open to new opportunities in:" and most you can set it to is 2 years. These are whole new dark patterns.
UPDATE You can turn off the setting they're talking about by going to [0] and then clicking the little grey "Visibility settings" under the Profile URL section.
UPDATE There's a delete your account option on this page [1], though YMMV:
>> Government identification may be required and we may ask you for more information in order to verify your identify
1) There is no lock in - I can move on and off LI whenever I want, and have. I've exported my data and used it to create my own resume site with analytics that I send out to companies. I can see who viewed my CV, when, and whether or not they actually read through it or bounced immediately.
I've also learned to track the progression of my candidacy through the organization using this trick (recruiters tend to view my CV on their Windows desktop during work hours, hiring managers tend to check out resumes in the evening on their iPhones or Macbooks, engineers/tech leads tend to use Macbooks, desktop Macs or Android phones in the morning or during lunch time. Usually when I've hit the engineering lead I tend to get invited to interview).
It's extremely easy to create your own CV website for free (github/lab pages) that's versioned by git and deployed automatically using a CI script.
2) You're attacking the tech hiring problem from the wrong angle, like everyone else. There is no issue with discovery of candidates and employers. LI and stackoverflow, etc do a great job of approximating this O(N^2) exposure process, the filtering and sifting. The ACTUAL problem is on the hiring end - companies won't take a chance on non-traditional candidates (not talking about race and gender here, more about credentials).
You have to start by chipping away at the costs of showing competence for a candidate (the traditional way to do this is to get a three- or four-year degree that's either expensive in terms of time and money, or useless, and if you get a degree with a low score, doubly so, even though you might be a better programmer than the people who scored over 90%).
This will only happen by convincing hiring orgs to hire non-traditional candidates, and this requires establishing a very strong signal/noise ratio for candidates coming from your hiring channel. Before you start PRing me about how great TB is at this - no it isn't. Not any better than leetcode etc, and those are terrible at predicting engineering competence.
There's no doubt a lot of truth there.
What matters a lot to engineering managers are the answers to questions like "What other roles is this candidate interviewing for?" "How well did this candidate do in their Triplebyte interviews for our competitors?" "What are the salary ranges of other roles this candidate has clicked on or applied for?"
Will that also form part of every user's public profile, with the same "1 week to opt out, 30 days to enable opt out" process? Or will that data only be available to hiring managers with Triplebyte Premium accounts?
Was it Friday of a three-day weekend? That's one of the best news dump days of the year.
This works for Facebook and LinkedIn because of network effects, but not for some random staffing agency with a tech gimmick. If Adecco or MichaelPage did this it’d attract the attention of ambitious public prosecutors worldwide.
It’s almost a shame, as the idea itself doesn’t seem terrible, but the auto-enrolment and dark patterns for removal makes this whole thing feel like a New Digg moment.
None of the users care. Just because something is convenient, doesn't mean it's right.
On that note, I wish one day we'll stop letting startups get away with dishonest behavior (e.g. astroturfing) and dark patterns done for the sake of "solving the chicken-and-egg problem". Building a network is hard, tough shit. Doesn't mean you should build your company on lies and disrespectful treatment of your users from the start.
God damn corporate spin pretending nothing bad ever happens..
I've found the currently en vogue leetcode grinding and whiteboard hazings to be questionable, and I'm wondering this scandal will prompt anyone to reconsider the whole sketchy institution of software developer "tech tests".
How about an "I'm sorry I..."
Take responsibility for your own actions.
But what if you didn't have one yesterday, but you do have one today? What if you have only worked for one employer since TripleByte was founded (2015)? What if the only place you've worked is a startup of which you're a cofounder?
If you can't think of a way in which a privacy leak can have consequences, that doesn't mean there aren't any.
Source: Candidate, has a very specific marketing meaning, of you being the product.
Article 18 restriction of processing can apply here. Art. 25 "Data protection by design and by default" would seem to be relevant as well. The section I alluded to above is the latter half of 25(2), saying "In particular, such measures shall ensure that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual’s intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons."
There's also the question of whether their consent or other grounds of processing suffice, which likely wouldn't for making anything public, but Article 25 makes it clear enough anyway this is illegal.
https://www.hipaajournal.com/does-gdpr-apply-to-eu-citizens-... seems to suggest it is based on location. There would seem to be standing for anyone based in Europe that made an account when considering a move to the US, or who is based in Europe next Friday when the "data processing operation" occurs. That seems like it would give them standing, even if they weren't protected while overseas, as this is a new data processing operation.
"In particular, such measures shall ensure that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual’s intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons."
Come on now, these examples are not even remotely similar to what you are doing here.
Firstly, it's up to me whether or not I even create a profile on those sites.
Secondly, if I choose to create a profile, I have full control over what is shown publicly.
What you are doing here is making information public whether I like it or not. This is not OK, and you trying to defend it here is mind boggling, and demonstrates clearly what little regards you have for privacy. I for one will now never have anything to do with TripleByte.
- request a full copy of any information held about you (article 15)
- withdraw consent and request deletion of any information about you (article 17)
- object any further processing of your data, including making it public (article 21)
Playing with people's data like this is not okay and personally I plan to take them to court if they don't comply.
I’ve worked at 3 different companies in the hiring space across two continents and “candidate” is the internal term they all ended up using internally for people seeking jobs. “Applicant” is too vague and “job seeker” is long and hard to scan (and it’s too similar at a glance to “job”, which is also not often used).
If “candidate” has bad connotations for you, I’d love to hear a better suggestion. But I still haven’t seen a more appropriate name for my database table.
Company / candidate / role / resume / profile / interview / offer. These are the terms almost everyone uses.
... all of the biggest, highest paying tech companies
This is not lawful under both the GDPR and the CCPA. If Triplebyte follow through with their request against an EU or California resident, they'd be breaking data protection laws.
If comments here are any indication, too many people, being unaware of their rights, may fall for it though.
I actually think everyone aced it and ends up in the 80-100 percentile group. "This site says I know more than 80-100% of users" is good for word of mouth marketing.
Am I misunderstanding you? If you "get opted in automatically", then it's no longer opt-in; it's opt-out.
A European visiting the US and interacting with an American business does so under the protection of US law, not EU law. This is complicated in the case of Facebook and google because they also do business in Europe, so European courts can fine their European branch offices. But Triplebyte has no such EU presence that the European courts could pursue. And they don’t advertise European jobs. I suspect an EU citizen interacts with triplebyte legally the same way they would if they went to a cafe in SF while on vacation.
The opposite would be crazy. If triplebyte can be fined by the EU, that would also mean the government of Australia or China or Russia could arbitrarily levy fines against any US company if one of their citizens interacted with a US website one time. And everyone would put geo blocks on their websites to protect from liability.
And I know the e-mail says that results will only be shared if you did well. But, if you have a profile on TribleByte and there's no signal on your profile that you did well, the only logical conclusion is that you did not do well.
I'll be deleting my account, anyways. I didn't ask for this.
This is the reason why I ultimately like GDPR: the foundation is that the user owns their data and not the company that has it on a database server.
Are you arguing for this change? Whatever the argument is seems to be based on misinterpreting 'private' as 'known by no-one else'. Exactly the same argument could apply to e-mail: it's not private in the sense that no-one else sees it, just hidden from the majority of the world; presumably, when you sent it, you were advertising what it said to the recipient.
IANAL, but they may already be in violation of the GDPR with the 30 days processing time. While the GDPR states 30 days as the upper bound, the article about erasure also states:
The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay where one of the following grounds applies [...]
Notice the phrase undue delay. It seems that the legal interpretation of undue delay is as soon as possible [2]. Since the sign-up for Triplebyte seems to be immediate (you just create an account), they could also remove an account with a simple delete account button (remove some rows from a SQL database). So in the case of most web services as soon as possible seems to be with the click of a button to delete an account itself. Allowing a few more days for changes to propagate through storage systems and backups.
For anything longer, they should probably come up with damn good reasons when this is brought to court.
At any rate, they will have more serious problems if they make citizens public for people in the EU. They'll open up themselves to a huge liability. You are simply not allowed to use data for other purposes than what the data subject gave explicit well-informed consent for. And no, burying somethings in the terms and conditions is not explicit consent.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/term-without-undue-delay-cont...
If they are really doing remote jobs, maybe I'll have to look again, but when I aced their silly test and got interviewed originally, they only worked in the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC, and I'd rather pull out my toenails with hot pincers than relocate to any of those places.
"Under Article 12.3 of the GDPR, you have 30 days to provide information on the action your organization will decide to take on a legitimate erasure request. This timeframe can be extended up to 60 days depending on the complexity of the request"
I deleted my account today and will issue a GDPR request if It doesn't get deleted.
You may wish to consult your privacy attorneys; you'll likely be the subject of a number of GDPR complaints considering the above.
My interpretation of the above if you were to do it within the letter of the law (again, talk to your attorneys; I'm just a security director):
1. opt-in via settings page (or a modal on next login) for all people who already have accounts.
2. opt-in during registration for all people who choose to register accounts after the roll-over date.
Again, talk to your attorneys. If you successfully roll over without having taken the suggestion to talk to your attorneys, your conversation with your attorneys may change from "how to best implement this" to "how to avoid getting fined."
They are super interesting given the link, so why try and hide them?
I'm guessing it's because their corporate metrics took a dive due to covid hiring slowdowns and now they need to justify their worth to investors who have put in $50 million.
Any information provided without a clear understanding that it would be made public should not now be made public by default, even if it is just a name and some badges.
Same issue as I'm currently having with Airbnb. Though I have never ever provided any ID before, nor did I ever book anything, they asked me for an ID to prove my identity upon requesting account removal. How exactly does my ID _prove_ anything in my case (apart from the fact that I have an ID copy of a person who has the same name as I entered into the Airbnb profile page). Seems more like one more obstacle to prevent people from deleting their account.
I'm on your side as far as the "why the hell is this the case", but I think this is the world that (USA and others) live in.
INAL, but from my understanding that's exactly what GDPR itself suggests to do:
> The controller should use all reasonable measures to verify the identity of a data subject who requests access, in particular in the context of online services and online identifiers.
Thats mainly because [2]:
> There is a very real concern of fraudulent requests from bad actors, who might use a customer’s data for nefarious purposes.
While it's great to know that noone else is able to delete my account, it still feels shady af.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj#d1e1374-1-1
[2] https://konfirmi.com/blog/gdpr-personal-data-id-verification...
GDPR is very clear in wording that it doesn’t matter whether company has offices in EU or not, only thing that matters is if company is providing services to EU citizens.
Well, I was just about to go through your process, since you announced that you are opening to remotes (I'm in the EU), but now I've requested that you delete my profile. No way I want my current employer to know I'm looking, especially in the current climate where job hunting is difficult.
As other people have mentioned, you now have a deeper problem than entering a new market. You just broke your users trust.
And the sad thing is that this was a real opportunity, because linkedin sucks. Unfortunately what you failed to realise is that there is appetite to switch from linkedin to a more honourable company. Not to an equally or more dishonest one.
Most likely your staff were trying to warn you about this from the beginning, and it would be worth your time reflecting on why you didn't take note of that more deeply.
I know you are looking for actionable routes to save your company right now. In my opinion, the loss of trust is so bad that only a pretty costly signal will now cause people to reevaluate. The one that springs to mind is for you, Ammon, to announce that you are stepping down as CEO and starting a search for someone who is committed to privacy to take on the role.
Thanks for the entertainment!
Me: Thing You: I hate that thing Me: You don’t understand Thing. Here’s Thing explained. You: I understand Thing, I still hate it. Me: You don’t understand Thing. When you understand it, you’ll like it. (Repeat)
Sometimes this is stupidity thinking that understanding is missing, but I think it’s usually shady just so they have something to say to counter the objection that is visible to people outside the conversation, who are interested, and at least see some form of technical interaction.
Their whole “Fast Track” program claiming to allow you to skip technical interviews is a total fraud of a marketing ploy.
They make you take a 2 hour live coding interview with a Triplebyte engineer, with the promise that if you pass, you won’t need to do any more technical interviews with companies through Triplebyte, only “final-round personality-style on-sites”.
The reality is that any company who contacts you is STILL going to run you thru their entire interviewing process. The extra 2 hour interview with Triplebyte is literally pointless - and any company you try to discuss this “policy” with will be caught confused and off guard.
It’s no surprise to me that a company that blatantly lies about their offering would do some crap like this.
Shame on Triplebyte for their fraudulent and dishonest nature.
It’s like explaining to your spouse of 5 years why you have a profile on a dating site that started 3 years ago.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Even though headhunter fees can be high (10-30% back when I used to use them), this seems tough to scale unless their thought was they would capture all the headhunters in the world (eg, google eating classifieds).
I don’t think that’s possible with a process that requires so much manual effort. I read about their aim for using AI, but just the cost of developing a usable training model to reduce the need for in person screens requires, what, hundreds of thousands of successful placements.
I remember needing 100 phone screens for 20 phone interviews for 5 in person interviews for 2 offers.
Assuming anyone I trust to do Skype phone screens is at least $100/hour, that’s $200 x 2 hours x 20 just = $40k for screening. Even if they break even with placement fees, that’s not an amazing margin to warrant such investment.
Seemed like AI buzz overfunding.
People in this thread have carefully laid out the dark patterns you are using to trick your customers into allowing you to try and make more money. This is wildly unethical, and coming to defend it on here shows us clearly that you have not thought about this from any perspective but your own.
Good luck with your company, you’re going to need it.
Shameless plug:
If anyone would like to create a developer profile that you have full control over and that doesn't expose you to recruiter spam, please check out what I'm building at https://fizbuz.com.
It all feels like quite the specimen - something that should be preserved for study by future generations. For what not to do, but also because sometimes its nice to have a prototypical example of unethical, tone deaf, short sighted trickery and how it can destroy a company. All in one self-contained package.
So maybe that's the gift Triplebyte leaves us with.
In hindsight, it was actually a pretty good quiz for judging if a candidate knew a good bit about many different areas of development, architecture, and sysadmin.
I know I aced the test not because they told me I did, but because I knew the answers to the questions.
Perhaps my enjoyment of the quiz and the possibility of having an interviewer role set me up for greater disappointment that the whole thing turned out to be (or seem to be) a sham.
Is that OK with you?
I was never given the impression that there would be no more technical interviews after the Triplebyte one. They were always crystal clear with me that there would be 2 steps for each company: a 30 minute non-technical "pitch call", and a final all-day onsite. They never implied the onsite was non-technical, and I never took it to be.
I think the value proposition is that you skip almost all of the back and forth footsie before the onsite. In my experience it was worth it. There were some companies I interviewed with, not through Triplebyte, where I had 7 or 8 calls before they would bring me onsite. I get it, they want to make sure they're sure before they pay for a hotel and a flight, but it is a big hassle.
Also, I clicked that "visibility hidden" and got this email:
"Hey Jeff,
You’re no longer letting companies know that you’re open to discussing new opportunities. Your profile will be hidden from employers for the next 24 months. You can change your job search status and make your profile visible again, whenever you feel ready explore new opportunities." (https://imgur.com/a/OBWexgo)
So even that only will get rid of it for 24 months. Let's see if they'll just delete my account.
NightlyDev going straight for the jugular here. I cannot deny the effectiveness of this strategy lol
Of course there is a question about how you could enforce such a ruling. And if it can't be enforced, is it really a sanction? I guess if countries wanted to take this really seriously, they could get a list of company officers and put immigration flags on those individuals, and hold them temporarily upon trying to enter that country, until the matter was resolved. But that would be rather extreme, and you do raise some good points around which countries can fine the companies of other countries.
CCPA from California seems to have some cross-border implications as well - perhaps we will finally see a framework for privacy laws that works better than today's hotch-potch?
I’ve seen the kind of code competitive programming sites put up and the solutions people share. There is a complete disregard for best practices. Memory leaks are common in solutions. APIs that should be using const or references to prevent errors. In competitive coding all that matters is finding a solution. But in industry there’s much more to it than that: how do services like Triblebyte present that?
Here’s the exact email from TripleByte upon passing the quiz:
“ Here's how it works: 1. We'll show your profile to companies that are likely a good fit. 2. The companies will request interviews with you. 3. You'll be able to review the requests, and accept the ones you're interested in. After you accept an interview request, the next step is an introductory phone call where you and the company get to know one another. The companies that work with us all agree to skip technical screening, and take you right to the final interview (saving you time). To get started, complete your profile so that we can find the right companies and roles for you. After you complete your profile, you'll also gain access to our exclusive Triplebyte Alum Slack community, which can help support you throughout your career.”
> The companies that work with us all agree to skip technical screening, and take you right to the final interview (saving you time).
Define technical screening? To me this means that I’m already technically screened. They also have changed their copy. The copy on their landing site around FastTrack used to be much more explicit around skipping all technical assessments.
There isn't a spin you're going to be able to put on this that's going to change that what you're doing here is diametrically opposed to my goals. You knew that, which is why you tried to sneak it past everyone.
The problem isn't that people think what you're doing is unethical. The problem is that what you are doing actually is unethical.
>In the politician’s apology, you apologize not for the offense itself, but for the fact that what you did offended someone. “I’m sorry you’re a hypersensitive crybaby.”
I agree that the terminology could be more clear, but it seems like they borrowed existing lingo from recruiters here.
I own my own business. I'm not looking for a job. Unless something goes really horribly wrong, I won't be looking for a job in 24 months, or ever. Having my profile public doesn't add to the signal on their platform, it adds to the noise. Having my profile public is a waste of time for me, them, and employers looking for someone with my skills.
AFAIK unlike the CCPA, there's no private right of action for the GDPR. That is to say, you can't actually sue the violators yourself, you need to complain to your country's national data protection authority, and they have to take action.
This company deserves to die.
Too many people think US citizen != EU resident (and therefore not a data subject covered by GDPR)
+Continue keeping it an opt-out feature. But give a long lead time. A month or two. Regular emails warning that profile will go public and a personalized screenshot of what exactly would be included. +If users want to approve the public profile, they will stop receiving these emails. They should also be able to choose who to show in their profiles. +If users forget to approve or deny, make an extremely minimalist profile public with only initials of the name listed.
Sure, they sent out an innocuous-looking email that didn't actually describe the important details of what was happening, on a Friday, hid opting out in low contrast on a page where it would be unexpected to find it, and made deleting accounts so difficult that I would have never found it if someone hadn't posted it here, and it requires a government ID to do it.
But sure, all these dark patterns were unintentional--they didn't mean to.
I've known employers like this. I've worked for employers like this. Employers are already monitoring social media. Third party services are paid by employers to monitor for staff that might be looking at other jobs. Recruiters make it their mission to know who's looking and what employers are likely to need their services in the near future. This is much of why trust and discretion is the most important asset on both sides of hiring related activities.
Triplebyte burning down their reputation as a recruitment avenue is one thing. Locking job searchers into reputation and livelihood risks inside Triplebyte's own reputation dumpster fire, on the friday before a holiday weekend, during historic unemployment levels, in the middle of a fucking pandemic, is unforgivable. The CEO showing up in person with hamfisted gaslighting (seriously?) in the middle of this self made disaster makes me hope those comments don't get flagged out of future HN search results.
The Tinder analogy is imperfect because of that, but it's still a good illustration of how just the existence of a profile can destroy your plausible deniability.
I signed up and did a couple of test with a fake name/e-mail just to see what the company was about.
It's a pity they are starting to do stuff like this. I'm not sure if it's a PR blunder or a pattern emerging but the damage has been done.
Good thing this was on HN, because I marked TB as spam quite some time ago, and would have never seen this email.
Now it's going to take them 30 days to delete my account and I may need to provide Government ID to complete this process???? LMFAO. That is outrageous.
This is vile and disgusting. I hope TB crumbles to dust for this betrayal of its users.
Triplebyte team knew that their users were not going to like it and did their best to slip this through.
Triplebyte went from being a respectable company helping skilled hackers by-pass white-board interviews to being a prime example of unethical tech company in one stroke.
Managed to get my profile from 38 to "100% complete" in the process during my attempts to wipe out my data.
Christ.
Companies ideally want to stop fraud at both ends, but I would be more upset if, for example, my Airbnb account were fraudulently deleted than if someone fraudulently made one in my name.
Granted, deletion requires access to the account in question, so maybe that's enough of a hurdle already? In that sense it's already harder to delete than create.
Triplebyte is a YC company and HN is a YC site, so economic interests are aligned with nuking highly critical comments
If you gave me the option to make one, we could talk. But by making that decision for me, I now have to view you as a fundamentally un-trustworthy party.
I've seen some epic CEO fuckups but this one is special.
What 'nabilhat is talking about is the way the Triplebyte CEO’s comments in this thread (which are the opposite of “highly critical”) are being downvoted to very light grey.
Also, after opting out of personal data sharing:
> We're processing your request and should be done within 30 days.
Same for deleting your account.
This is theoretically true, but the fact that it's been on the home page for 12 hours and has accumulated hundreds of critical comments, none of which any mod has touched, seems to (a) eliminate that possibility and (b) demonstrate that the risk is theoretical, not actual.
(Keep in mind that YC has thousands of investments, so whatever you think of their ethics or the incentives, a filter like this would be impractical and obvious. Also see "Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company" on https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/ - it's hard to imagine YC supporting this.)
You are totally missing the point. You think the change significantly improves your product, but your users perceive the change as a massive breach of trust. Why? Because the underlying JTBD (job-to-be-done) for a lot of engineers is discreet job searching. IOW, for a lot of people, a public TB profile would be like having a private Ashley Madison profile [0] exposed to the public. Ashley Madison was a major source of embarrassment for many when they suffered a breach.
Rather than double-down, might be time to step back a bit. The aphorism "the market's perception is your reality" is especially instructive.
[0] The Ashley Madison metaphor used by this commenter is especially apt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280782
Amazing that company founded by a former YC Partner could be so tone deaf. Just because their business is failing and they want to pivot into a LinkedIn competitor does't make it my problem.
Dark opt-out patterns send on a FRIDAY before a 3 day long weekend to hide facts from us, with crazy convoluted methodology for deleting accounts, and buried opt-out...
This is shady as hell, and thinking that you can "explain" it to us here and that we are wrong and you are right, and if we had just a little more "Facts" we'd change our mind, tells me everything I need to know about the leadership and future of this company
> Socialcam's popularity on Facebook suddenly increased in the spring of 2012, via unusually aggressive actions to induce contacts to join. It was criticized as "invasive" and a "bully" by many reviewers, for sharing what users were viewing without them realizing that that would happen.
It was only after articles like "Why I Hate Socialcam Even If It Might Be the Next Instagram"[2] (spoiler alert: it was not) started appearing that Ammon and friends sold to Autodesk for $60 million. I'm sure that investment worked out swimmingly for Autodesk. Win some, lose some, eh? But hey, at least Ammon got some resources out of it, which he went on to use to make the world a better place, and some valuable life lessons about privacy and honesty and respect, right? Right, Ammon?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialcam#Criticism
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/04/30/why-i-hate...
I read the first sentence, and falsely concluded that they were just pointlessly offering some oauth service. There's too much email that it's easy to get away with something like this without users realizing it.
I had considered Triplebyte as a platform to use years ago but never got around to filling it all out. I _did_ see this email but didn't really think about it until I read this article.
No doubt, this move was made to incentivize more cash flow for Triplebyte. I've lost my trust in the company and will not be recommending them to anyone I speak to again.
Customers will use your service, if they trust you and you provide value. Pulling sneaky things like this to keep your shareholders happy are not the things I want to be apart of. If you can't make money, why not consider offering Triplebyte to be paid, instead of going behind our backs in a sneaky way trying to sell our personal data.
I got the same email and just cleaned up my profile. It took at most 15 minutes. A lot less time than however long all the haters have spent commenting on the issue.
The feedback from HN could have been better. Dogpiling is a very low form of feedback.
Remember that the premise was that they were non-adversarial, anti-gotcha interviews, whiteboards, nit-picky algo implementations from memory, etc. They purported to do some qualitative analysis instead.
We schedule a session and I get the confirmation: "This is a chance for you to go into more depth, and show us something that you've built. This will not be a high-pressure interview." I get at email the day before our scheduled session that says, "Remember that we're going to talk to you about a project that you've worked on," as agreed.
The following day, just a few hours before our appointment, a founder emails me saying, "Just wanted to give you a quick heads up that rather than walking through a project today, you'll be doing some programming together with an engineer."
They duped me into an adversarial interview. That kinda thing grinds my gears, but I went along with it anyway. I get the response: "We really enjoyed it and thought you did great. We'd love to talk more with you and invite you to a second technical interview."
I opted out as this continued. They acknowledged that they were changing things around without telling people, but it was just so antithetical to the mission that it became disingenuous.
When you pair that attitude of disregard with fact that they're playing sociologists, it's a bad look.
*Don't actually do this unless you want a visit from a 3 letter agency.
Are the triplebyte guys calling it hackerscore as well or is it triplerank or some such? I personally think the underlying motivation is sound but first you need to earn the trust of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280120
Piggybacking on this comment and linking here so people can more easily see how completely tone-deaf it was.
More from his comment history here:
Brilliant launch strategy, coming out of stealth and dragging all of its users out of stealth along with it. /s
Looking at their privacy page: https://triplebyte.com/privacy
It mentions these options for deleting:
https://triplebyte.com/privacy-center
privacy@triplebyte.com
By CCPA law, they must acknowledge and comply with a deletion request within a time limit. The fines can add up very quickly per user request if they don't comply.
EDIT: Updating my post since I looked at the deletion request forms for some other sites and it seems similar. Probably try the form first and if it doesn't work, then the email.
To my surprise, it was back up near the top this morning with almost a thousand votes and hundreds of comments. TripleByte may have chosen to burn their reputation irreparably, but I have gained a lot of faith in YC and the mods here.
CCPA actually has way more teeth than GDPR, because California's Unfair Competition Law allows residents to enforce laws that do not otherwise provide a private right of actions. (though this still needs to be proved out in the courts)
I assumed they were doing this already tbh. They sent an email back saying my account was deleted and I haven't gotten this email. I guess now I'll get to see if they really did delete it.
This news does make me consider re applying for triplebyte. Showcasing skill is a pain point when I've applied for positions (sure a github & some links but who knows who really did any of that).
I can't think of a worse way to handle this though.
But it really is a shame that from this incident, myself and many others will no longer be willing to trust you and your team with the data needed to execute on these ideas.
At the end of the day, we entrusted you with extremely sensitive data in order to use your service that could threaten our very livelihoods if exposed. Your choosing to expose this data without explicit opt-in shows an alarming lack of empathy for your users and that you were never deserving of this trust.
This seems so obviously disingenuous to me. You know why Triplebyte is different, right? You understand why employees would want to keep the fact that they have a Triplebyte account secret instead of public, right?
If you do know that answer, then you should recognize that you're betraying the trust you created with the user. If you do know why Triplebyte is different, then you're lying to us here.
If you do not know why Triplebyte is different why on earth are you the CEO of a recruiting company. That's absolutely unforgivable.
This one sentence gives away that you're either lying to us or willfully ignorant and careless about your users. Either way, I'll never trust you again.
Is there another big use case that I'm missing from their product? Interested in hearing your interpretation of a person that has a profile on an interviewing service. My assumption would be the main objective of a user signing up for a service would be using the main product the service provides.
They have definitely been kind of spammy for a long time...I usually ignore their emails but I actually read the first paragraph of this one and it sounded like it was an opt-in feature, so I closed it, but the important line was further down: “You can edit your profile privacy settings to not appear in public search engines at any time.”
When I've gone to FAANG companies, I've gone through a lot more per company to receive an offer. Multiple visits to each campus, lunches, technical sessions, spanning potentially weeks or months. Overall I think TB saved a lot of time and I really enjoyed the process.
Of course, now they've really shot themselves in the foot.
https://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free...
HaD wasn't hidden.. Thalmic was.
Dang has usually responded with noncommital responses like they never do that. But further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears.
edit: and -1'ed. Is this because "my content sucks"? Is it because of 'offtopic'? Or is it a mod?
Considering karma here determines rights, rate limiting, mod-down, flagging, and more - these points do matter here. And of course the larger issue here is lack of transparency. In fact, with removal of mod scores, the site has gone down in transparency.
No government ID required.
You are Tinder/Ashley Madison stating you want to tackle Facebook and become a social network overnight by making all profiles made in private public.
And your tone deaf response is to keep repeating "WE ARE NOT PUTTING DETAILS JUST YOUR NAME".
Well, what should people that have been married for 15 years do?
While this is so disappointing is that you could have easily executed this by making it opt it. Possibly with a new name.
Email everyone and say we are starting byte.com - LinkedIn for Engineers. A load of people would have signed up and you take it from there.
But you wanted to take the lazy way out and think about today only.
Be smart and retreat.
> making a profile public meant making public that people were job searching
was repeatedly met with this response:
> we're not making any profile details public.
Which avoided what people were upset about. It's talking past the issue and I'm not sure what the expected outcome was, either from this original screw-up or the response.
You are making a huge mistake and going to drive your company to ruins. Change it now.
What I do not understand how this is legal? We have all these new laws ("California Consumer Privacy Act" of 2020, GDPR, etc.) and it seems like this kinda of actions are legal. The goal of these laws is to protect us against companies which have nothing to lose and they are force to do things which are considered non-ethical.
If they made the initial launch opt-in then that signals that the user deliberately chose to advertise that to the world. The message a current employer gets out of something that's opt-in instead of opt-out is notably different. This is just like the whole opt-out fiasco with the Do Not Track header. If it's opt-out, the signal is largely meaningless. In this case that's a benefit.
From TripleByte’s perspective it is a PR disaster, or at least we should treat it as such. Appealing to TripleByte’s internal moral compass is unlikely to succeed since they’ve demonstrated that they don’t have one. So we resort to appealing to their self-interest, since that is something they care about.
Subject: Triplebyte explained, from coding quiz to job offers
"Hey there, I'm Tyler, one of the engineers here at Triplebyte!"
This hours after opting out, setting privacy options, and deleting account.
Crushing it guys...
YC's economic interest in HN is having it be a happy, thriving community. That dominates all other considerations put together. A fast way to ruin that would be to destroy the community's good faith by suppressing negative posts about YC or YC startups. In addition to being wrong (we wouldn't want to belong to such a community ourselves), it would be dumb. If anyone wants more explanation there are posts about HN vis-à-vis YC's business interests going back years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., which describes the simple way we try to optimize this (simple in principle, though not in execution). And see https://blog.ycombinator.com/two-hn-announcements/ from 2015 about HN's editorial independence.
(Edit—because I've been wanting to write about this for some time and this may as well be the place:)
The above is the answer I always give to questions of how HN serves YC's business, because it's true and it's solid economics. It's the right answer to give to anyone who's looking at the question through a cynical economic lens (as we all have been trained to do) since it basically says "we can be even more cynically self-interested by not doing that".
However, I also always feel a little bad after giving that answer because it's not the deeper truth. The deeper truth is that we just feel this way. HN and YC grew up together. In a way they are siblings, and one doesn't exploit one's sibling. Or, to switch metaphors: because HN and YC grew together, the connections between them are complex and organic, like the connections between brain hemispheres. If you get in there and start snipping and moving things around, you'll probably lobotomize yourself.
If you want a hard-nosed business reason for how HN makes money for YC, one is: it leads to people starting startups that wouldn't otherwise exist, and it leads to YC funding startups that it wouldn't otherwise get to fund. That's how HN adds to YC's core business (edit: but see [1] below). I use that reasoning to explain to people why we don't need to sell ads on HN or do other things to monetize it or drive growth. Again, though, it doesn't capture how I (and I think most at YC) really think and feel about HN. The deeper truth is the two have always been together and we can't imagine them otherwise.
In other words, the value of HN to YC is intangible. That affects how we operate HN. If the value were tangible, then snipping things and moving them around and generally being bustling and managerial would be the way to go, or at least the most likely thing that people inside a business would do. But since it's intangible, all that kind of thing gets supplanted by a general feeling of "this is good, don't fuck it up". Since the main indicator of whether we're fucking it up or not is the community, the way HN can most add value to YC is by keeping the community happy. Happiness means interest (HN is supposed to be interesting) and trust (a community can't exist without trust).
This is not a paradise that will last forever—it's a historical accident that an internet forum ended up in a sweet spot vis-à-vis the company that owns it, where the business is better off optimizing for the forum being good and happy than by banner ads or growth hacking. But we all know that it's an honor to get to be stewards of a community in that way, and while nothing lasts forever, we want to keep it going as long as possible, and maybe longer than one could reasonably have thought possible.
[1] edit: for some reason I forgot to mention the three formal things that HN also gives to YC: job ads for YC startups, Launch HNs for YC startups, and displaying YC founder usernames in orange to other YC founders. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23293437 for more.
Their contract with Triplebyte stipulates that companies that use their service aren't to incur additional technical interviews, and according to the Triplebyte representative I talked to, apparently the company has legs to enforce the contract if a candidate informed TB of a breach.
When companies try this, and pretend to be confused when there is push back, it's because they got caught with their pants down trying to breach an expensive contract.
It was my experience that every company, big and small, that I interviewed with through TB did on-site technical interviews anyway. In the end, the value-add of TB was that you could filter out many of the companies on the platform because of how cavalier they were to dance around their contractual agreements with their recruiting agency.
That raises the obvious question of why we have such software if it causes such problems, but the answer is simply that it helps more than it hurts, overall.
Keep in mind that Triplebyte profiles have no reason to exist except people looking for work, and that most people have a reason to want to be sure that a current employer does not have an easy way to find out that they're looking for work. I can have a HN account and it doesn't make anyone think I'm looking for work, but if an employer sees my profile on Triplebyte, it tells them at the very least that I was at some point looking for work. If they see it on Triplebyte after having previously not seen it, it tells them that something changed recently.
I would definitely think this should be an opt-in thing.
"I'm sorry you're an idiot."
Not an apology, an insult, and feigning to be apologizing about you (which is doubly insulting).
Nonetheless, I don’t find very much wrong with what they do, in general, or what they’ve done here. Do you think because I have a dissenting opinion, I must necessarily be some kind of shill. Come out and say it, if so.
(Of course, the candidate also receives value because presumably they are looking for a job and get one in this transaction. But the whole "you are the product" trope always ignores the fact that the "product" person is receiving value in the transaction).
I looked at that hackaday.com page. It says this: "Quick aside, but if you want to see how nearly every form of media is crooked, try submitting this to Hacker News and look at the Thalmic investors. Edit: don’t bother, we’re blacklisted or something."...but is also linkless. Usually when people make dudgeonly claims but conspicuously omit links, it's because what actually happened doesn't match what they say.
Re "dang has usually responded with noncommital responses": I try to be commital. There is little to be gained by not, since we try not to do things that aren't defensible to the community in the first place. If you have any tips to offer for increased commitalness, I'd like to hear them.
Edit: I just noticed this bit: "further requests for being transparent has fallen on deaf ears". When? That doesn't sound like us.
Not if you request account deletion under CCPA. Or at least not if they're smart.
In the sense of a likely reason for someone to draw an inference: Most people do not specifically seek out excuses to take tests, and do so only because they want something that the test provides them with, such as access to a job-hunting platform. Most people who want access to a job-hunting platform want it because they are job-hunting or plan to be soon.
> Google Buzz publicly disclosed (on the user's Google profile) a list of the names of Gmail contacts that the user has most frequently emailed or chatted with.
Google Buzz is something you definitely don't want to be similar to.
So that's your bar, a growth-hacking dumpster fire?
>"LinkedIn profiles have become the default engineering resume (despite the fact that most engineers are not particularly happy with their LinkedIn profile)."
No they haven't. You know what the default engineering resume is? The one you have on your hard drive that you share at your discretion.
I'm quite surprised at how oblivious you seem to be of the issue of user trust.
The roll out of this needs to be handled better, with extra care given to privacy settings, and verbiage on the profiles.
For example, Triplebyte has the following language - ‘I am currently open to new opportunities’, heh, yeah, please, show that on my public profile while I have an existing job.
A robust technical assessment site focused on tech is good, especially if it is nuanced in assessing people (not hard cut offs, finding strengths and weaknesses on a spectrum, etc), but please, take good care of privacy and clear communication.
I'm pretty sure they'll leave. Might not even file any paperwork on that.
This just jumped out at me. Doesn't every agreement/TOS document these days say they can unilaterally change the terms at any time and your only recourse is to stop using the service?
I mean, I guess my point is not that it's ok, but that it emphasizes how "agreements" in our society don't seem to be actual agreements and we go around with the certainty that most will never be enforced, but then people don't always agree.
I think it's a really, really great response. YC community is indeed very special, and I am often surprised that over these years, it keep attracting high caliber people and has a high signal/noise ratio, while at the same time remains a pleasant community that favors civilized discussion.
Moderating is a thankless job, but please rest assured that many people here value your efforts, even if we don't verbalize this gratitude often.
I disagree. HR reports to the CEO, just like everyone else. If the CEO tolerates HR (or any department of the company) being dishonorable, the entire company is dishonorable.
Edit: For anyone else struggling to find it, look for the box with the heading "Profile URL". There's a link in the upper right corner of the box that says "Visibility Settings". It's light grey text and kinda hard to notice that's a link.
Just for anyone else, if you're forcing users to opt out of something like this it should be a BIG BUTTON AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE.
Meta threads and discussions tend to invite objections from the litigious type of user. Such users are rarely satisfied, but have a ton of energy for meta argument, so it's easy to get into a situation where any answer you give leads to two or three fresh objections. Such objections have to be answered with great care, because if you slip up and say the wrong thing, people will use it to drum up a scandal (edit: and will quote it against you for years to come!). This consumes a lot of mental and emotional energy. (Edit: btw, this is asymmetrical: the people raising objections and making accusations are under no such restriction. They can say anything without downside, no matter how false it is or what they accuse you of. They can make things up with impunity and people will believe them by default, because on the internet you are guilty until proven innocent, plus everyone loves the underdog. These are additional reasons why it's easy to end up in a situation where every comment you spend an hour painstakingly composing earns you a bunch more counterarguments and demands.) These arguments tend to be repetitive, so you find yourself having to say the same things and defend against the same attacks and false accusations over and over. This is discouraging, and there's a high risk of burnout. Disgruntled users are a tiny minority, but there are more than enough of them to overwhelm our limited resources—it ends up being something like a DoS attack.
I fear this outcome, so we've always shied away from adding such a system. We want to be transparent, and we answer whatever questions people ask, but it feels safer to do it ad hoc as questions come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to, other than a few special cases like how HN's anti-abuse software works.
There's an opportunity cost issue too. The vast majority of the community is pretty happy with how we do things—I know that because if they weren't, we'd never hear the end of it, and then we'd say sorry and readjust until they were. I think it makes more sense to do things to keep the bulk of the community happy, or make them happier, than to pour potentially all our resources into placating a small minority—especially since, once you've done this job for a while (say, a week) you know that nothing you do will ever be completely right or please everyone.
On the other hand, if I could ever be persuaded that a full moderation log would satisfy everyone's curiosity and reduce the overhead of misinterpretation, complaints, imagined malfeasance, etc., then we'd be happy to do it.
This question has come up repeatedly, so if you're curious to read previous answers, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I tend to agree that that is enough of an additional hurdle, but note that it conflicts with
> I agree that it should be just as easy to suspend your account as it was to sign up, but irretrievable deletion should be harder.
It's definitely not appropriate for any unauthenticated person to be allowed to suspend an account. You need the same hurdle on suspension.
I think it would be reasonable to have a grace period between the deletion request and the actual deletion, during which the account was retrievable.
(The account deletion page is buried in a link to a link to a faq page on privacy and is blocked by a captcha, which is also bullshit).
It definitely is.
In order for this to hold, there would have to be objective ethical claims which were independent of what people thought about ethics.
Here is that problem: people gave you their data because you told them that you would make it available to companies that were NOT our current employers or the general public. None of us agreed to let you post the fact that we were actively seeking employment.
You betrayed our trust and are using data none of us agreed you could use in the way you are using it.
Use your downvotes to hide irrelevant posts, not to display your disagreement. (It won’t really display anything)
I agree with you that any community faces the problem of a vocal, critical, and nearly insurgent minority. They seek to identify contradictions in your logic with the predominantly self-interested goal of demonstrating intellectual superiority rather than finding genuine solutions. I can understand the emotional burden of continually sparring with such individuals. You can't please everyone.
In contrast, there is the silent majority. By virtue of their silence, it would appear they condone current management of the site. I am not sure this can be assumed.
First, it is generally the "first movers" of a given activity who are both the first to try it, but also the first to defect. For example, there are people who are passionate about Microsoft or Apple products and review them publicly. When they stop reviewing these products, it is indicative of a lack of passion; they have moved on. The majority soon follows, just like they did when the first movers initially promoted the activity. In this way, the first mover is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Are HN's vocal critics really first movers? The ones who are thoughtful, at least, are certainly among the most passionate and engaged; losing them would be the canary. (Admittedly, you must be able to discern those who are vocal and thoughtful from those who are vocal and thoughtless, but I am confident you have that capacity.)
Second, there is the issue of the 90-9-1 rule. The vast majority of users of HN never comment nor express their opinion; they simply observe. This will be true whether or not they are satisfied with the service. If they are dissatisfied, they don't comment, they simply leave. On the other hand, composing only 10%, the vocal minority must necessarily be the minority. Can we uniformly dismiss this vocal minority as unrepresentative of the silent majority? No, because there is no other proxy for surveying the majority. (Again, you must discern the productive from the unproductive critics.)
Finally, there is the burden of simply engaging. I am amazed by the amount of time and effort you must invest into moderating HN and in writing your responses (among, I'm sure, numerous other activities such as actually writing code). It appears that recapitulating your justifications over and over again is not particularly efficient.
That, however, does not imply that failing to justify your actions is suddenly an adequate substitute. It simply means that the current method is inefficient.
There are a few conclusions I think we can draw from this. We can't dismiss the vocal minority because it's all we have; rather, we must discern those who are constructive from those who are destructive. Further, like blowing onto a flame to put it out, ignoring or suppressing them will likely instigate even more frenzied conspiracizing. Finally, responding to each of them individually is inefficient and burdensome.
I think a basic ledger of "moderator actions" would solve many of these issues. To start, it would probably not be an exhaustive log, but simply actions performed at the thread-level rather than the comment-level. It is transparent, just like your comments and the HN community guidelines already are. It would broaden understanding of your actions, rather than rely on users to dig through your recent comments (the only ledger thus far, without which they undoubtedly draw their own conclusions). Finally, it would reduce the burden on you.
Would it, however, pacify the vocal minority? Would they conspiracize further? Would they levy more demands to change the site?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
But it seems clear that those who are worth listening to, vocal as they may be, are in fact worth listening to. They are the canaries. And if they increasingly demand more transparency (which you would know, not I), that is likely worth making some steps toward satisfying. If they make more demands, so be it.
Communities change over time, especially as a function of scale, and I think HN is no different. The only thing that generally must be kept constant is prudent stewardship, and I am fairly confident your track record satisfies that. There may be mistakes along the way, but as long as you make a transparent, genuine effort to serve the community (as you clearly have done historically), that will go along way in retaining the trust of the community.
Open your console on their site and paste this in:
window._linkedin_data_partner_id
Is there something else at play here?
The privacy issue is overdone: your profiles must be as good as public already. That said, the company should have educated its users first, so they understand this.
Absolutely.
Google+ became really nice towards the end, but HN kept hating it, and I guess partly because of Buzz.
> Your public profile includes any badges you've earned, your basic info (current job title and company, current location, and years of experience), and the tech experience & resume section.
This information can very easily be used to identify a person, especially at smaller companies.
> ... to provide us the canvas to release badges. That’s it.
So before you were taking on LinkedIn, but now it’s just a place to release badges?
[0] https://triplebyte.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004382061...
Edit: To be fair in their survey i think i said something like this sounded good, but it was phrased as "be part of an exclusive club of competent engineers" rather than "show current employer you're interviewing because you clicked on a banner add. And my whiteboard code had a bug.
Maybe such a device would satisfy everyone's curiosity and make the community as happy as a gently tickled baby. Users would raise questions, other users would helpfully look up what happened in the moderation log, and still other helpful users would chime in with past examples of how we do things that way, and why. Enormous pressure would lift from our shoulders and we could sit back and eat potato chips (or carrot sticks), or even better, work on the code. No longer would we be under attack from all sides. The war would be over and transparency would rule the land. Huzzah! (In case that sounds sarcastic, I do have that fantasy sometimes.)
On the other hand, maybe it would be the apocalypse. I fear the apocalypse. There isn't a lot of room for more pressure of the kind I described upthread. We operate on the edge of being maxed out.
Also...I have a feeling that it might not be good in the long run. Moderators here are in a super complex dance with the community. I think it's important for them (us) to have the degrees of freedom that non-public moderation provides. It allows you to do things, try things, take chances, make mistakes, etc., that you wouldn't do if you were under floodlights all the time. It's for the same reason that you wouldn't want your boss standing behind you, breathing down your neck all day—even though you're not doing anything the boss would object to, except perhaps checking Hacker News too much—except that it's actually in the boss's interest for you to be checking HN that much, because it's complicated, besides which sometimes something comes up on HN that actually makes a big difference, plus...never mind, the boss wouldn't understand. It's just best if the boss lets you do your job.
I like this analogy, because the community really is the boss here...if by boss you mean a ten-headed dragon who likes to bite your head off once a day or so, but you know how to reattach your head so it's ok, except it still feels bad to have your head bitten off, plus it takes hours to reattach it. It could be that allowing moderators that degree of opacity turns out to be an essential aspect of operating the site.
But the truth is I don't know. sama suggested we do this 6 years ago and I said no way, for the same reason. Maybe in another 6 years I'll have worked through the fear.
One last thing. If anyone is reading this and thinking of replying "Aha, moderator guy, I've got you! If you're so afraid...what are you hiding from the community? tell us that, you self-contradictor, you!"...I've already planted an effective rebuttal to that precise objection in this thread. So tread carefully, objector guy! Or maybe I haven't, and I'm just saying that, because it's complicated.
I would agree that you shouldn't, but all too often we see companies do.
Transparency is great in public institutions that spend our tax money. In communities like this, we just need a chieftain to handle our disputes fairly and keep us all from going nuts every so often. Those of us who have been coming back for years already know that you do that, or at least try your best to be fair and open and neutral.
I doubt you could keep everyone happy by releasing a log of moderator actions. People complain now, but look at ArbCom on Wikipedia, which makes all the decisions in public, and there are websites devoted to trashing the process there. And if you're not making people happier, nor making their interactions here more pleasant or informative, what is the goal again?
Plus, it's not just moderators getting a chance to make mistakes, it's also the users. I don't want to end up in a log somewhere for my terrible posts. You've told me to improve before, and I did. At least I've tried to. Admittedly my posts haven't been high quality lately. Anyway, the more formalized the process becomes, the less human we're all allowed to be. That can be good or bad, but I think in this case it's been good. Most of the reactions to OP tend to think that privacy is valuable sometimes.
I could be wrong, of course. Do what you think is best for us. That's why we keep coming back.
Here's what it said when I did:
> We will verify your request using the information associated with your account. Government identification may be required and we may ask you for more information in order to verify your identify.
So I can change my profile name to Seymour Butts, but deleting my account that I have credentials for may require government ID that you never asked me for? WTF
Obfuscate your information before you hit the delete button!
Change your name, change your address, change the email to a throwaway, etc.
Yes, they -might- delete your information when you ask, but do they deserve your trust that they will get this right? If you are deleting your account you implicitly are saying you don’t trust their ability to manage this situation the way you would.
Keep in mind one likely outcome of this event is that they go out of business. Whoever buys their assets may well end up with a trove of data that includes your details.
>> We're processing your request and should be done within 30 days.
30 days to delete an account? I guess they have a lot of account deletion requests to process all of the sudden!
The technique seems super common now, and I’ve been expecting to run into it in some communications training, but haven’t yet.
I feel like there’s some crisis PR tactics this fits into that involves “Never disagree, redirect and ignore.” It diffuses criticism and makes it hard to argue.
It seems related to when I see a complaint on a review site that’s been responded to with “I’m the manager, please call me.” It doesn’t resolve the issue, but it shows that someone is doing something, so it diffuses pile on because it stops complaints of ignoring customers.
1) YC company friendly marketing channel. Reasonably good posts from YC companies get upvotes here, which means eyeballs and potential customers or users.
2) YC company recruiting channel. Related to above, since many posts end in “we’re hiring”, but there’s also the explicit time-decaying recruiting posts that show up on the front page.
Are these not concerns? Or just secondary to increasing startup formation generally?
At least for internal/statistical purposes.
I expect a fully anonymous service like interviewing.io to get a lot more signups after this fiasco.
I'd be super interested to learn more about how you did that.
Here’s an old article about it: https://money.cnn.com/2012/01/26/technology/google_privacy/i...
I suspect TripleByte is about to learn some similar lessons.
I'm sure that over the years there have been countless opportunities to ruin the community for short term gain, and because the right decisions were made, the community will in most cases never know or appreciate the choice. The only evidence is that HN is still here, and hasn't been trampled down by the armies of mammon even when so many other internet communities have been.
Sometimes you have to protect a goose, even at cost, just because it's a happy goose and it's alive.
It's rare in a place where so many think they are being hard-nosed little economists (though actually merely joining the chorus of short-sighted armchair bean-counters) to admit that you did something without needing any economic justification.
Hmmm think they're going to need to change up their homepage. This doesn't seem very accurate at all anymore.
Actually, keeping this on now even after they've made this decision seems pretty disingenuous.
I completely agree about wanting to stay on the human side of formal vs. human.
More interestingly: do you have examples in mind?
Definitely #2. The job ads that appear on the front page are only for YC startups, and that's one of three formal ways that HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it. The other two are that YC startups get to do Launch HNs, which get placed on the front page (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), and YC alumni usernames are displayed in orange to other YC alumni. For some reason I always forget to mention these things when writing on the above topic, I guess because I don't think they add up to the biggest thing, even though they're significant. In my mind the big thing is the connection to startups forming and applying to YC. However, no one has ever tried to measure these things, and I'd feel a bit queasy about doing so. It would feel like stepping out of the magic circle in a fairy tale. One should not step out of the magic circle.
Corporations don't get to choose, either laws apply or they don't apply internationally.
Google Legal will until 2031 or so.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2011/10/ftc-g...
Guess who'll be counting to 2040 if everything goes according to plan next week?!
The whole proposition was to:
* charge $500/onsite to the employers (that's often way below what it costs to bring an out-of-state candidate to Cali for an onsite — Triplebyte intentionally low-balled the cost for the travel arrangements of an onsite to waste everyone's time on pointless onsites), and,
* bring candidates for a whole week of onsites to a given physical location (you were limited and encouraged to have up to 5 onsites in SF Bay and up to 5 in NYC, e.g., you'd spend a whole week (5 nights) at each location if you were to get and accept enough offers for the onsites, where both you and the employer have to make a decision after a single 30 minute phone call).
They did this by booking really bad flights out of far-away airports (unless you push back); really bad hotels in the most shady areas (unless you push back); not covering the hotel on the final day at the location (decent SF Bay always cover both nights) and requiring red-eye flights; and not covering per-diem, even though it's the industry's standard practice to cover per-diem; and also not covering airport parking or mileage to the airport — all of these items are always covered by all other companies hiring directly.
Because no employed candidate could simply spend two weeks interviewing all over the place, they've obviously prayed on the unemployed people, by misrepresenting the opportunity, and doing a bait-and-switch at the final minute in regards to the travel arrangements, once everything else is already in place.
---
I think the biggest proposition and the selling point was for the startups to cheaply access out-of-state candidates for $500/onsite, and then offer a lower salary because it's been scientifically proven that salary expectations are lower for people moving to SF Bay Area from out-of-state (e.g., look at the study that Hired did a few years ago).
I was determined by Triplebyte to be in the top-3% of folk — I was accepted by Triplebyte after passing the 2h technical interview with one of their engineers; but my onsites weren't particularly aligned; and Triplebyte did several misrepresentations and dragged their feet throughout the whole process as well.
I would not recommend Triplebyte to anyone until they raise the price of an onsite to maybe 750 to 1k per onsite for the employers and cover travel in full for the candidates (including parking, mileage and per-diem). Low-balling the cost of the onsite results in employers giving these left and right without much thought; the candidates aren't even informed that standard travel costs won't be covered, in fact, Triplebyte does the opposite, and claims that it covers all travel expenses, which is a big lie.
---
However, do I think it's a good idea for Triplebyte to pivot to tackle LinkedIn? Yes, most definitely. Triplebyte introduced candidate certificates a while ago, but I don't think these were particularly marketable the way they've been implemented in the past; it's also not particularly clear how it'll work from the financial perspective, because it costs real money to do all those 2h interviews.
Is it a good idea to require an opt-out instead of an opt-in? Yeah, if you could not follow such a sleazy business practice and make yourself available to potential FTC oversight for 20 years, that'd be great. I won't be logging in to toggle any settings, because I'd rather not disqualify myself from the extra fun of being a part of the class!
Thankfully I felt "odd" when I signed up for your "interview" test and never fully finished it.
Also, you single handedly brought me out of hiatus from commenting on HN.
What you have done with this decision is a friggin stab in the gut. If you think your foolish "it's only X we are making public! Not Y!" means something other than "oops, we got caught, how do we cover this up?!" then you are deluding yourself.
From today onward Triplebyte has established its place in the lexicon as a ghetto self-serving linkedin wannabe. Good job.
You think it's actually gone while they still have your data. You should do the GDPR request no matter what and hope they're honest in responding to that...
I have absolutely no interest in helping companies who pull shit like this recover from their PR disasters. If you do something like this, you deserve all the bad press you get.
But whether these particular business people have a moral compass or not is irrelevant to whether we should be discussing this as a moral or strategic mistake:
1. If they have a moral compass, then the strategic mistake pales in comparison to the ethical mistake, and they'll get that. We should be encouraging people to listen to their conscience, not teaching them to equate their conscience with selfishness.
2. If they don't have a moral compass, then we shouldn't even be talking to them, we should be talking to each other about how we dis-empower them and remove them from positions where they can do harm. Even if we persuade a narcissist or sociopath that it's in their best interest to do the right thing in one situation, they'll just be presented with a new situation where they think it's not in their best interest to do the right thing. If they really are just bad people, they should be treated as the blight on society that they are.
This is the company in question, I'm not sure if there's an online repository for all the ridiculous drama and bad decisions though.
I’m not going to pronounce any absolute judgment or certainty about this, but I think it’s a serious possibility for us to consider.
> If they don't have a moral compass, then we shouldn't even be talking to them, we should be talking to each other about how we dis-empower them and remove them from positions where they can do harm.
I won’t ever use TripleByte again; will you?
> Even if we persuade a narcissist or sociopath that it's in their best interest to do the right thing in one situation, they'll just be presented with a new situation where they think it's not in their best interest to do the right thing.
I never accused anyone of being a narcissist or sociopath. Those are relatively extreme conditions. I’m simply describing people who have bad intrinsic moral character. And the world is filled with these people. As a society, we elicit good behavior out of these people by creating and applying incentives. It turns out that PR is one such incentive. Laws are another.
I saw a post on Hacker News that Triplebyte is going to be
posting to the interenet [sic] the profiles of people who
have interviewed with you. I do not give you permission
to post any information about me and explicitly request
that you do not. Please acknowledge this request.
I could explain more but honestly James Clear has done a far better job here: https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds