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> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction. Correct. I don't want apologies or
by geofft 6y ago
> Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction.
Correct. I don't want apologies or retractions from companies. I want postmortems.
This is really no different from a technical outage, e.g., "As a result of a bad deploy to prod on Friday, all Triplebyte profiles became public." Why was it not noticed in testing? What is the testing process? Is profile privacy part of the testing process or part of code reviews? What are the practices around making changes that affect user privacy - is there a culture of asking questions about it up front, etc.?
Most importantly, what changes are being made to prevent a similar outage from reoccurring in the future? I really couldn't care less about how bad the CEO feels about it - sure, the CEO probably should feel bad, but feeling bad is not a reliable mechanism. If the CEO said "Bwahaha, I wish to profit and I learned over the weekend that my profits were in danger, so I changed course" but then says that in order to maintain his profits in the future he added an external privacy council that reviewed all major new initiatives (or whatever), that would actually be a lot more useful than contrition.
Now, yes, it's true that basically no company does public postmortems of decisions that they needed to walk back (at best you get blameful postmortems that end with a key executive resigning, but most of the time that doesn't help anyway - either the executive wasn't the problem, or they were the problem and they already spread the bad culture to others). But I think it was pretty rare until a couple of years ago for tech companies to do detailed public postmortems of internal outages, and that expectation has slowly changed. I think we should push for the same change for non-technical incidents like this.
- eru 6y agoThat sounds like an excellent idea. And I absolutely agree that the feelings of the CEO matter less than putting in place some proper procedures. Profit ain't bad.
- philwelch 6y agoYou can’t install business processes to prevent unethical decisions. You can only hold the people making those decisions to high ethical standards, and replace them when they fall short of those standards. Now, I suppose it may be possible that the CEO in this situation dramatically misunderstood the situation. It may even be possible that he had good faith even as he militantly defended those misunderstandings in previous threads. But from the perspective of trust, I can’t get past the suspicion that he’s just sorry that he got caught.
- late2part 6y agoExactly. I went through their process to delete my account on Saturday or Sunday, and still received their apology letter. This suggests my account was not deleted?
- eru 6y agoThey could delete almost all the data in your account, but still hold onto your email address?
- executesorder66 6y agoWhy would they need to keep your email if you have deleted your account? To spam you? To sell your email to spammers?
- geoelectric 6y agoYou can install business processes that give chances for unethical decisions to be reviewed and identified, though. Committees are shit for innovation but relatively effective for squashing interestingly bad ideas along with any interestingly good ones. I read the apology letter as essentially saying he single-handedly drove the idea, in part because he was flailing due to COVID killing their bottom line, and was tunnel-visioned enough to not recognize it was unethical. Even at face value, that’s absolutely troubling for a CEO in TB’s domain. But smarter people have done dumber things under pressure, and sometimes dumb is at someone’s (or a lot of someones) expense by mistake. So I’d like to think this was an exceptional occurrence, and I appreciated his personal post-mortem of sorts. However, taking this as charitably as possible, a process-oriented RCA focused on how he’ll keep his runaway ideas from being a one-man show—or whatever the problem actually was that saw this conflagration actually see light of day—wouldn’t suck.
- philwelch 6y agoI still don’t like the idea of hamstringing the CEO’s ability to make executive decisions because the CEO can’t be trusted to make ethical executive decisions. Processes are fine for preventing operational mistakes, but when it comes to ethics and executive judgment, they’re a poor substitute for having trustworthy people making the decisions.
- phlakaton 6y agoIf there's one comment I think the CEO ought to take to heart, it's this. I'm sure the CEO has been taught that good leadership means fessing up when you've screwed up, and to an extent that's true. But it's also an act of ego to assume full responsibility. Ego got them into this mess, most likely, and it will not get them out of it. The CEO needs to realize there was a systemic failure. It's not just about him having an epiphany – it's about surrounding himself with people, processes, and values that can help keep a runaway product idea from breaking their customer base ever again.