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Comment by RandomBacon | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a different industry, but I read the HN thread about it a few days ago. In the CEO's comments, I saw a lot of 'I'm sorry you feel that way' type of apologies. I wrote that he should take responsibility for his own actions.

Perhaps he read that and took it to heart. Perhaps he read that and realized it would sound better if it seemed like he took it to heart. Perhaps after the monumental PR screw-up, they hired a PR professional that wrote the apology.

Who knows. Actions speak louder than words.

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My personal belief is that any educated, native English speaker who peddles in non-apologies like "I'm sorry that YOU feel that way" is to be avoided as much as possible (socially or professionally). In my experience, these are typically the same people who will do other weasel-y things like tell lies by omission and justify it to themselves (and others) by saying didn't technically lie so what's the big deal?

Indeed I've learned this the hard way.

Having said all that, the above apology goes even farther in accepting personal blame than I would have expected... so I'd be slightly torn on this one if the cynic in me didn't know he was likely coached heavily in crafting it.

Your comment was the first thing I thought of when reading today's email. I hav worked most of my life as a secondary math and science teacher, and one of the things we teach all students about communication is "I statements."

This email is full of sincere I statements. Whether it comes from reading your comment or just reflecting on the whole situation, this is about the best response I could have imagined a few days ago. It accepts responsibility, and shares the thinking and feeling behind getting so far from where they should be heading.

I don't have a TripleByte account at the moment, but if I did I'd be open to what they do next. A CEO who has made a major mistake and taken sincere responsibility for it in my eyes is more trustworthy than many who just haven't made their first major public mistake yet. I know we need to watch them carefully for a while, but this is about the best statement I could imagine Ammon and TripleByte putting out right now.

After digging in his heels repeatedly on Friday against a tidal wave of opposition, Ammon found a "how to apologize" book and banged out an apology, while still devoting paragraphs to defending his mistake and selling his origin myth. Even his well researched apologize reeks of narcissism not respect.

I guess he also needs some amount of reasoning to explain his mistakes. I do too, and it somehow infuriates people if an apology contains anything but ‘groveling’.

Doesn’t it show that I’ve properly reflected on how I could screw up like this so O can adjust my behavior in the future to avoid it?

> I guess he also needs some amount of reasoning to explain his mistakes.

An apology 100% does not need explanation or justification of why mistakes were made.

And if you're going to put those in, you 100% need them not to be "Our company is doing it really hard due to COVID, so we though we'd just {{monetise user data provided under strict expectations of total privacy}} "

People who beat their partners regularly say "look what you made me do!". Ammon just said "but I was going broke, I had to try this!"

They scrapped the feature so that's an action backing up his words.

Question is why was it there in the first place , so hideous, so late on Friday, one week time to update the profile. Why not more time when it concerns privacy.

The fact that it got to this point I think would be concerning:

a) No one thought this was a bad idea, or

b) people who thought it was a bad idea didn't want to say it was a bad idea (why?), or

c) people who did say it was a bad idea were not listened to (feedback was not acted on).

I wonder if searching LinkedIn/Crunchbase might reveal a small team of people with experience in the technical recruiting space who've very recently left Triplebyte?

That might be a good indicator that perhaps _they_ are the sort of people who might sensibly be trusted with job seeking personal information...

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