[HN Gopher] Triplebyte now showing profiles by default without c...
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Triplebyte now showing profiles by default without consent
I just got this email from Triplebyte: Hey [name], It's been 12
months since you found the opportunity that's right for for you on
our platform. We hope things are going great! We wanted to let you
know that your profile is no longer hidden from companies on
Triplebyte. Companies will be able to view your profile and reach
out with opportunities through the platform. If you'd like to
maximize requests on Triplebyte, make sure your profile is up to
date. We'll use this information to match you with the best
opportunities.
Author : aerovistae
Score : 200 points
Date : 2021-05-23 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago)
| ausbah wrote:
| anyone forget that triplebyte even existed?
| tessierashpool wrote:
| I just checked and my (unfinished) profile is still not visible.
| Weirdly, it says that it's not visible for the next 12 months,
| but I'm pretty sure it's been more than 12 months since I last
| logged in.
|
| It also says my profile is not shareable yet, so maybe I just got
| lucky in that I bailed early. I did one quiz out of curiosity,
| and then locked down my account as much as possible after I found
| out a little more about the company's reputation and track
| record.
|
| So I think that "next 12 months" thing is just a bug, and a user
| not finishing their profile is somehow an edge case that they
| didn't plan for. That's some pretty bad product work, but it fits
| the rest of the vibe the company gives off.
| legerdemain wrote:
| This is what happens after you "snooze" your profile visibility
| for a set length of time. This is not a new feature.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| you can request delete here https://triplebyte.com/privacy-center
|
| hopefully that sends a clear message
| maurys wrote:
| I'm hoping this is just a stale mail? It'd be weird to have the
| same discussion here all over again.
|
| Everything the CEO mentioned last time is still applicable.
|
| What's worse is I'm not sure we'll be able to collectively drum
| up enough outrage to get it reversed this time.
| oriel wrote:
| If this is true, I'm just going to delete Triplebyte and all
| things associated with it. If the practice becomes, "wait until
| theyve forgotten about it then try again." I dont trust them,
| and wont again.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| The TLDR here is that one of last year's dark patterns was that
| you could only hide your profile for up to a year. We changed
| that immediately after last year's thread, and you can now hide
| it indefinitely, but we didn't retroactively apply that fix
| (which we'll do now). See top-level comment for more details.
| tfehring wrote:
| Glad I deleted my account at the first sign of this sort of user-
| hostile behavior. Really a shame such a great and needed concept
| was ruined by poor execution.
| llaolleh wrote:
| I am deleting my account also. Why do they insist on doing this
| crap that really hurts their reputation?
|
| Cmon. It's your users that helped you get the recruiting fees
| and put you on the map. Don't go around backstabbing us and
| disrespecting our privacy.
| andreareina wrote:
| Previously:
|
| Tell HN: Interviewed with Triplebyte? Your profile is about to
| become public (12 months ago):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837
|
| Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology (12 months ago):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23303037
|
| (How does one get the actual date and not just "12 months ago"?)
| alfu wrote:
| The HN api includes the timestamp (unix time). For instance:
| https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/23279837.json?pri...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I wish all sites that do the "x units ago" thing would put
| the time stamp in a title attribute.
| nitrogen wrote:
| If any accessibility experts are reading, is there a best
| way to do this? E.g. title attribute is best for mouse
| users to hover on desktop, but is there a way that works
| for all users on devices? Maybe the abbr tag?
|
| So far I haven't seen an html-only solution that works on
| mobile.
| joombaga wrote:
| Not an accessibility or html expert, but in the AWS
| console you can switch between "x days ago" and exact
| timestamp by clicking/tapping the timestamp.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Yep, they're at it again. Did they learn nothing?
| dheera wrote:
| Probably their VCs wanted more MRR rather than more respect
| of privacy, and it translated to this.
|
| Ultimately they are optimizing for profit, not
| (profit*ethics), and all of their actions will be guided by
| that optimization.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| This was the echo of old bad decisions, not a new one. It
| wasn't intentional on our part, and we're working on a fix.
| (See my top level comment for more detail on what happened.)
| aerovistae wrote:
| Appreciate the response :)
| stmw wrote:
| In my experience, companies with poor security or privacy culture
| will tend to continue to make these kinds of missteps, again and
| again. Because it's not just one PM or engineer or executive,
| it's the company environment.
|
| Companies with good culture will still make mistakes -- be it
| violating users' trust or suffering a breach -- we are all human.
| But there won't be a pattern of them.
|
| In this case, it seems like a pattern for Triplebyte.
| weaksauce wrote:
| It is insane that they are going to do this again after all the
| outrage from the last time this leaked. What a shame that they
| are going down the dark patterns rabbithole. the service they
| offer on first brush looks useful from a developer's standpoint
| but these kinds of posts i've seen sour me on trying their
| service. a shame really.
| kwdc wrote:
| Triplebyte are about interviewing and being middleman. This
| requires a certain churn rate.
|
| So imagine that now you're employed but didn't get it from
| triplebyte, one day you get called into the bosses office: "We've
| noticed youre listed on triplebyte as seeking another
| position..." This may be detrimental if in fact you want to stay.
| Eg raises, bonuses.
|
| Automatic listings to me are privacy violations.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Wouldn't it increase your odds of a raise/bonus, if you're
| valued by your current company?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Either could happen. Normally the choice to reveal this
| information is up to the employee, not some other company.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Not at many places. Your boss will generally try to hire
| someone in advance to cover for your departure. If you don't
| depart they may ask you to (fired). Fine if you were looking
| / interviewing, not great if you were not.
| cortesoft wrote:
| As a hiring manager, I find this hard to believe. It is so
| hard to find good talent, we would never push someone out
| over this.
|
| In fact, I always encourage everyone on my teams to keep an
| eye out for opportunities. You never know when you will
| need them.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _As a hiring manager, I find this hard to believe._
|
| One doesn't have to participate in organizational tactics
| that favor replacing employees over negotiating the
| conditions that makes notions of loyalty an inherent
| trait of the workforce to at least acknowledge that there
| are questionable actors in positions of power in the
| employer/employee dynamic who aren't willing to make the
| emotional and capital investment in their people.
|
| Brings to mind something I saw on someone's wall once
| "pay people well enough they'll never need to leave, and
| treat them well enough they'll never want to".
|
| Our experiences aren't universal. I'm also a hiring
| manager, and I don't find it hard to believe at all. Very
| early in my career I gave two weeks notice to a job I
| worked at for four years, offering to train up a junior
| on the team. I was walked out the same day.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The part I found hard to believe is the idea that "not
| many places" would work to keep a good employee that was
| looking for work elsewhere. I don't doubt that places
| exist that would immediately fire someone in this
| situation, I just find it hard to believe that is the
| majority of places.
| lumost wrote:
| This one has a ton of complex incentives. As a manager
| it's expensive to invest in growing an employee and
| promoting them. This requires setting them up in the
| right projects, helping them navigate situations they
| weren't prepared for and ultimately risk if they prove
| unable to handle it/your promotion case wasn't strong
| enough.
|
| It's only really worth the risk as a manager if people
| stay with the company for a significant period of time,
| at least long enough to make it through to promotion. If
| you see that someone may be looking, then you aren't
| going to invest in them and will focus on someone else in
| your team.
|
| All this is balanced on the turnover rate of our industry
| at ~18 months to 3 years median tenure.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Hiring managers I think are often out of touch then with
| supervisors.
|
| As a supervisor, you want to invest in folks who will be
| staying for the longer term - and doing what you can to
| reduce turnover (generally). There are also folks who
| like to job hop. If I'm supervising a team, and 9 of 10
| have given me the sense they are staying, and one is on
| his way out the door - I'm focused on the team that is
| staying, finding additional capacity to cover if the guy
| walks, and definitely not investing much in guy walking
| out the door.
|
| I think it is often a mistake to counter someone who is
| leaving. Stay on top of compensation, progression etc,
| and keep and reward the folks who stick it out with you.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Hi folks - I'm a PM at Triplebyte who recently inherited this
| part of our site.
|
| You're absolutely right that this is a dark pattern, but it's not
| a current one - it's the echo of the dark pattern we screwed up
| on last year. If you hid your profile at the time, prior to last
| year's thread and our response to it, the maximum duration was
| one year (and yes, this was a _really terrible idea_ among the
| other really-terrible-ideas that were called out at the time).
| But we changed that last year during our internal response.
| Hiding your profile indefinitely on our current site does in fact
| hide it indefinitely, and has ever since it was added as an
| option. (see https://imgur.com/n5e4CMB - and just to be clear
| this is my personal prod-testing account, not an actual person
| whose profile I screenshotted)
|
| What happened here is that if you had hidden your profile just
| _before_ we added the indefinite option, you were caught by the
| old dark pattern, which only let you hide it for up to a year.
| (And so, a year later, we 're correctly informing you that it is
| now visible again.) We fixed the site at the time so that no one
| would _newly_ be caught in this pattern, but what we failed to do
| was retroactively change the setting for people who 'd selected
| 'one year' prior to that point.
|
| This was a genuine oversight, and we'll fix it. I need to speak
| to our engineering team to make sure we can actually do so, but
| my immediate plan is to effectively just make the indefinite
| hiding retroactive by assuming anyone who set it to the max last
| year wanted that. In any case, it _will_ get fixed one way or
| another - I was as pissed as anyone here by last year 's events
| and have no intention of leaving y'all high and dry.
| mgsouth wrote:
| This has got to be one of the best mea culpas I've seen in a
| long, long time. If anyone internal gives you heat, you can
| tell them that, for this current non-client, it's actually
| moved Tripplebyte from "never in a million years" to "hmm,
| maybe I'll look into them." Being brutally honest makes the
| difference.
| akersten wrote:
| This actually definitely moved it to "not in a million years"
| for me. What kind of clown show engineering team makes this
| kind of oversight? They knew there were profiles that would
| be part of the old 12-month delay feature (and if they didn't
| know about this feature that also speaks volumes about their
| internal knowledge of their own product) and neglected to fix
| it or notify them about their new options. What else are they
| neglecting?
|
| This is not a weird edge case or a nobody-could-have-caught
| this. This should have been obvious and come up immediately
| in the "how are we thoroughly addressing this dark pattern"
| root-cause.
| javajosh wrote:
| The world is much worse if we don't let people correct
| their mistakes.
| akersten wrote:
| This now marks the 2nd time we are "letting" this company
| fix the same mistake, and it gets harder to assume good
| faith when the same issue crops up repeatedly.
|
| Calling out poor engineering is not prohibiting them from
| fixing it. It's calling the bluff on "oopsie woopsie a
| privacy issue again, silly us," for a company whose
| primary KPI is public profile engagement. The more things
| like this happen, the less they look like mistakes.
| hvdijk wrote:
| This is something that can happen even if everybody is
| aware of the problem. We don't know what their internal
| structure looks like, but in enough places I've worked, if
| something like this would happen, it would be clear that
| something needs to be done, but it would also be everybody
| thinking it's someone else's responsibility to do it, so
| the end result is that it doesn't get done until someone
| notices the problem again after it should have already been
| addressed. That's bad, but not "not in a million years"
| bad, in my opinion.
| kragen wrote:
| 'What kind of clown show engineering team makes this kind
| of oversight?'
|
| either you've never worked at a company or you've only
| worked at one or two places, and they had astoundingly high
| standards for successful collaboration. what were they,
| because now i want to apply to work there.
| akersten wrote:
| It's news to me that fully fixing a bug constitutes an
| "astoundingly high standard for successful
| collaboration." I consider that a baseline expectation,
| across my 14 years and 5 different companies of industry
| experience.
|
| I stand by my point that this is a symptom of amateur
| hour engineering.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| Seriously, can you list those 5 companies? Because where
| I am currently at, this level of ineptitude is something
| to aspire to.
| predaking wrote:
| Awesome. Would you mind answering the question posed
| above you? I'm definitely curious myself.
| Applejinx wrote:
| The question is more like 'clown show, or evil clown show?'
|
| If you think the former is uniquely horrible, you've not
| run into the latter :)
| ratherbefuddled wrote:
| This is a good response. Your CEO should read it and learn from
| it - as far as I recall his handling of the response to the
| incident last year was nothing short of abysmal.
| [deleted]
| miclill wrote:
| What is your plan to prevent things similar to this of
| happening in the future?
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| Well, in this case it mostly _didn 't_ happen in the future -
| most of it happened last May. Our failure to catch it
| recently was a mistake, but the root error was building it
| that way in the first place. Still, I take your point.
|
| After last year's snafu, we had a company-wide retro to
| discuss what had happened. It lasted a couple of hours,
| during which several people (including myself) were pretty
| blunt about what we thought. I don't want to get into a
| complete postmortem here, if only because it would make this
| post require ten paragraphs of niche internal culture
| context, but the biggest problem was that we had an internal
| communication breakdown. Many people who were uncomfortable
| with what we were doing, and who could have predicted the
| public response, did not feel empowered to speak up about it.
| Not in the sense that they'd face backlash for doing so, but
| in the sense that they felt they'd be ignored. This was less
| true than they thought - had they all spoken up at once, it
| probably _would_ have made a difference - but more true than
| it should have been.
|
| Since then, a number of people within Triplebyte (including
| Ammon, but also myself and various others) have made an
| effort to create space for those kinds of concerns.
|
| One of our defining traits as an organization is that we're
| very good at creating coherent internal narratives. Everyone
| knows what we're doing and why. But the flip side of that is
| that in the effort to create clarity, we sometimes run over
| inconvenient details like "wait isn't that a terrible idea".
| That means that to avoid problems like last year's, we need
| to be explicit and deliberate in actively seeking out dissent
| about what we're doing, especially from people who are not
| the very assertive strong personalities that tend to show up
| in leadership. That doesn't mean that dissent is always right
| - strategic decisions are difficult and complicated, people
| do sometimes lack the visibility to see why they're made, and
| in a room of fifty people there's always going to be some
| disagreement - but it costs us very little to listen to it
| and (as we learned last year) can cost us dearly when we
| don't.
|
| (Actually, as I was preparing to submit this post, one of our
| engineering leads pinged me on Slack to suggest ways we could
| avoid mistakes of the kind that spawned _this_ thread - TLDR,
| build less automated shit that we can forget about until it
| bites us.)
|
| I realize this reply is a little bit nonspecific ("make space
| for"? what does that even mean?), but that's the nature of
| solving a culture problem. You're necessarily wrestling with
| subtle cues and unspoken assumptions rather than with a thing
| where you can go "ah, yes, we just need to change step 2a of
| our product development process". But for what it's worth, I
| think we've gotten better about making sure we consider how
| people feel about what we're doing, and we've avoided some
| potential bad decisions in the year since then as a result.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Still waiting for TripleByte to allow people with hearing loss to
| be able to be the ones to make the call for an interview.
|
| Has to do with Federal Relay Services where we can shop for an
| interpreter that can actually talk the talk (computer lingos).
|
| Despite acing the lower (backend) system engineering question, I
| feel that this has been a standstill in getting to work for
| Google.
|
| Also default dark pattern impacted me as well.
| akomtu wrote:
| What's their business model? A pimp for software developers? Let
| me guess: their next move will be to nudge users with "Hey, a
| recruiter from X is really interested in your background! Based
| on our quick chat with them, they are willing to offer at least
| 500k. Please login to review their terms." and promptly demand
| state ID, bank statements and W2s to login. If the user is stupid
| enough to give that, they'll just say "sorry, the recruiter has
| moved on with another candidate, but here are other opportunities
| for you."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > What's their business model? A pimp for software developers?
|
| No, but I wish someone would fill that role.
|
| Though pimps are almost always just called "agents".
| [deleted]
| prepend wrote:
| Fortunately, about a year ago, I swapped all my profile info with
| random info a photos of some various randos who share my name.
|
| This company started doing jerk things from the start.
|
| They wouldn't let me delete my profile, but fortunately let me
| change all my details.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| I just followed your example. Even changed my email. Won't be
| able to log in again, but I can live with that loss.
| prepend wrote:
| Same here. Can't log in any more.
|
| I suppose it's only a matter of time though until companies
| wise up and go through historical info and not just present
| values.
|
| I'm assuming they still save previous values. But just hoping
| it's not frequent enough for companies to bother.
|
| In my case, I just didn't want business associates browsing
| the info.
| neilv wrote:
| Using photos of someone who shares one's name seems like it
| could turn out bad for that person.
|
| In some contexts of how info&photos are used, seems like it
| could constitute impersonating that person, and knowingly
| fabricating/asserting false information about them.
| inetsee wrote:
| You could just grab an image from
| https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
| prepend wrote:
| It's funny, I've thought about it since then, but didn't
| know about it at the time.
|
| I changed the email address to something random and can no
| longer to adjust.
|
| If I was trying to reset a profile in the future, I'd use
| this site.
| prepend wrote:
| Good point. I have a very common name and used multiple
| photos from different people, all with the same name. And the
| details on the account do not match the photos.
|
| Perhaps it could be fabricating false info about them, but
| I'm not aware of that being a crime or even being prosecuted.
| And I'm not sure a reasonable person would link it to a
| particular individual.
| mosselman wrote:
| I have used this strategy with websites that don't have a
| delete as well. Works great as far as I can tell.
| morfei wrote:
| Triplebyte has delete profile button, so easier to just do
| that. That email looks like old stale mail, because when I
| logged in it is very easy to change my profile's visibility
| or delete it.
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