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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Outing people who trusted you to help them find a better job in secret will go very badly for you.
I predict lawsuits.
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.
Now I absolutely would not. Dead simple.
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.
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?
God damn corporate spin pretending nothing bad ever happens..
How about an "I'm sorry I..."
Take responsibility for your own actions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are making a huge mistake and going to drive your company to ruins. Change it now.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
Absolutely.
Google+ became really nice towards the end, but HN kept hating it, and I guess partly because of Buzz.
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.
Corporations don't get to choose, either laws apply or they don't apply internationally.
From today onward Triplebyte has established its place in the lexicon as a ghetto self-serving linkedin wannabe. Good job.
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.