We'll have a more complete answer shortly.
EDIT: This does not appear to be a widespread issue. Continuing to investigate.
EDIT2: Full response from Ammon, our CEO, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31771836
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At this point, if you (Triplebyte) haven’t set private the profiles of everyone who didn’t explicitly consent, then you are irredeemable. You’ve had, what, two years to work this out?
I would love to understand what the goals and numbers here are, and what the revenue implications of public profiles are? It seems to me that you’re trying to build a social network of some sort with verified-skill capability.
I went to your site, and your about me page, to see what your business model was. What you stated, the mission and the copy, does not align with a public profile and social network style feature.
If you truly are trying to make hiring better, how does public profiles achieve that?
If you truly are trying to make hiring better, people on all sides of process should be benefiting. And there should be nothing to be afraid of in terms of mission.
Your /manifesto document falls short. What, exactly, is your business model? You should have no shame in it. Unless you think it’s shameful, in which case, please stop.
Like your manifesto claims, transparency is good!
But I hope you can understand why I'm skeptical: not just because of Triplebyte's track record, but also because the customer support representative who responded to me seemed to be under the impression that this hadn't been fixed retroactively. If I'd instead gotten a response that said "hang on, that shouldn't have happened, give us some time to figure out what's going on", I would have found it a lot less concerning.
You can get a shareable link to share on e.g. your personal website if you want to, but you have to manually enable it.
Anyway, tl;dr - see Ammon's top-level reply.
But to reply to your questions:
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> I would love to understand what the goals and numbers here are
Well, zero, since nothing was broken in this case. The issue last year had affected a couple hundred people (out of a total pool in the hundreds of thousands) before it was caught and reverted; the worst-affected person was erroneously visible (to Triplebyte companies only) for about a week and a half (and was hidden again within hours of us knowing about it).
> It seems to me that you’re trying to build a social network of some sort with verified-skill capability.
More or less. Not a social network, necessarily, but a platform of engineers with skill data from our assessments.
In brief, our goal is to make the job search process lower-grind, higher-signal, and more fair for candidates by exposing more information about companies, targeting messages more intelligently, and relying on skills over resumes. And on the company side, our goal is to provide them better and more reliable information than they can get when trying to hire elsewhere.
Everyone hates the status quo of a thousand applicants or a thousand outbound messages per conversation started, it's just a hard status quo to disrupt as an individual candidate or recruiter.
> If you truly are trying to make hiring better, how does public profiles achieve that?
To be clear, we do *not* have public profiles in the sense of "visible to the internet as a whole". We have profiles that are or aren't visible to our (company-side) subscribers, according to each engineers' settings; a "visible" profile is visible to those subscribers and an invisible one is not. The only way a profile can currently be exposed to the world at large is if an engineer on Triplebyte explicitly enables a public link and posts it elsewhere. (Even then, I don't think they're indexable? I'm not 100% sure about that bit; this is an old feature I haven't touched during my tenure.)
> What, exactly, is your business model?
"Be a place where the best engineers want to look for jobs, because it's a better and fairer experience, and charge companies for access to those job seekers and for the tools we give them to surface the best matches for the role they're hiring for."
In a literal financial sense, we charge a subscription fee to employers for access to our candidate database ("visible" profiles in the previous section's sense only).
I have amended my post to refer to yours, for clarity.
You're welcome to state your side of the story, but I take exception to you calling this a "fact". It's a theory that you've asserted, but not shown any evidence of (publicly or privately). And I've already explained why I think this theory doesn't make sense.