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.
83 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadTell 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"?)
Ultimately they are optimizing for profit, not (profit*ethics), and all of their actions will be guided by that optimization.
So far I haven't seen an html-only solution that works on mobile.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are also scenarios of automated, mass use of data from surveillance capitalism, where effectively adding incorrect information to these other people's various fusion profiles might affect them adversely.
Pre-Web, one of the concerns about databases of people was that individuals could harmed by incorrect information in databases. That was even before we knew that the computer industry would switch to widely doing things that we used to think were unethical.
(Regarding legality, I don't know whether the legal system has caught up with intentionally linking other people's identities to incorrect information, but I've heard there are concepts like "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation". But I think we're all concerned here with doing what's right.)
I appreciate the fighting back against a company abusing privacy, but our own industry situation is such a mess around this right now, that we have to be careful to avoid non-obvious collateral damage when we fight back.
(I'm just mentioning this for the benefit of HN discussion; I'm not criticizing an individual. These are tricky times, and we can figure this out together.)
And this was when triplebyte first planned to make public in just a few days.
The whole point is that I don’t trust triplebyte to respect my visibility choices.
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.
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.
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.
No, but I wish someone would fill that role.
Though pimps are almost always just called "agents".
It'd be named Upgrayedd.
When their business model fails they could pivot to making lattes.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Upgrayedd
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.
In fact, I always encourage everyone on my teams to keep an eye out for opportunities. You never know when you will need them.
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.
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.
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.
If the other employees start looking for a job because of the low raise, you will have more positions to fill and more headaches trying to transition projects between people, reprioritizing, taking on additional work to fill in the gaps, training the new employees, etc.
hopefully that sends a clear message
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.
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.
If you think the former is uniquely horrible, you've not run into the latter :)
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.
That's a fallacy and being kind to humans is hard.
As pointed out earlier, we do need to let people make mistakes, and often their paths will appear to be non-linear. I struggle with this too, but a world that doesn't understand that is much worse.
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.
I stand by my point that this is a symptom of amateur hour engineering.
I note that you seem to have ignored my question entirely, in what I can only characterize as mean-spirited discourtesy.
(Nothing against this PM, btw. But what a bunch of incompetence from the CEO)
He's since walked that back a bit (see other comments in his profile) , but personally I tend not to give someone the benefit of the doubt after they get shit on for such a terrible response.
(As a somewhat related note, people I know who have tried sourcing through Triplebyte were unimpressed with their candidates. No personal experience myself. I'm also told their cringey reddit ads had really good conversion, which feeds a narrative I'd be happy to believe.)
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.
IMO this is why it's vital to have Core Principles at a company (in this case, "user trust" might be a reasonable wording), both at a product level and a meta level, about how the world needs to see the company and the company needs to see itself. And when any employee, no matter where, feels something might breach Core Principles, it should be a five alarm fire that the C suite should know about and react to (or delegate said reaction), and if it turns out to be a misunderstanding, that employee should not feel they expended any political capital in escalating their concerns - at worst they might just require more context about why something is either a non-issue or necessary (which in this specific case doesn't apply), and leadership should be excited to see them growing by asking those questions. Ideally, it's as easy and low-risk as submitting an internal bug report.
Of course, I can imagine this stops scaling at some point. FAANG need very different approaches to this problem, and that's probably an entire business school class to answer. But I feel any smaller organization with a focused product can move in this direction!
If that’s not the case, can you share the percentage of profiles that will be turned public as of now?
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.
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.
Why would you expect someone who has demonstrated a complete lack of empathy to suddenly do so?
Which is why most people should probably leave toxic bosses, workplaces, as not be a user of the services they provide.
Someone should compile a list.
Also, on karat.io, the T&C are pretty much against you. Here is what their site reads.
Karat may (a) record you and your Interview in any format, including video or audio; (b) disclose the Interview and a recording and/or a transcript thereof to Company; and (c) use all Interview content and data, including your name, likeness, and voice, for its own internal purposes.
*Karat owns* all rights, title, and interest in the Interview and any works derived therefrom, including all copyright, and you hereby assign, transfer, and convey to Karat any and all rights you may have in the Interview.
*You waive and release Karat from any and all claims or other liability for any loss, harm, damages, or expenses * arising out of your participation in and any use of the Interview authorized under this Agreement, including without limitation any such claims alleging or arising as the result of Karat's negligence or Company's use of the Interview.
No sane person should be using these platforms.