The expectation of privacy came from the fact that this is a recruiting platform; even mediocre recruiters know that discretion and privacy are critical since leaks about job searches can get people fired.
You’re right. Supposedly the hints have been in the privacy policy since December 2019.
Identifiers, third parties.
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Companies that use our services to be matched with job candidates. Candidate profiles created by our users are accessible to the public.
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Others would have similar expectations, from other online services. We expect them to use our data in very limited ways that they've specified, and not suddenly start disseminating it in unexpected ways (if that is indeed what's happening with Triplebyte.)
"it only takes an instant to destroy your company’s reputation, and it’s incredibly difficult to win back that confidence."
Not really. Given that nobody on here has identified the underlying problem, and are happy to blame everything on Triplebyte ... it just goes to show how nothing is going to change anytime soon.
Confidence in using this, and other services, will only grow.
I have used Triplebyte before (for the tests! wasn't available in my location yet) and before I was very excited about their eventual launch in my location. I will never use them again now.
At least in the discussions area, there is a distinct lack of "hacker culture" opinion expressed on any topic, given the name of the forum. At least from where I am standing, this reflects very poorly on ycombinator, and the "Tech Culture" that they are putting investors in touch with.
For a certain portion of the readership, Microsoft can do no wrong ... and when they do wrong, it's never their fault.
Perhaps the site should be renamed to "Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals with Rose Coloured Glasses and No Clue, Living in an Artificially Inflated 1st World Bubble News" would be a more accurate title.
This acquisition makes perfect sense for anyone who thinks that "the real economy" is in great shape, and middle management jobs are likely to experience unheard of growth over the next few years. Layoff numbers are just made up propaganda, and everyone around the world loves the US Dollar.
When this level of backslapping groupthink starts to predominate, its a pretty sure sign that things are rotten in Denmark, and should be a clear warning sign for smart investors in this market. But .... each to their own, its their money they are gambling with I suppose. (or conversely, other people's retirement hopes that they are gambling with)
*
Anyway, I find it interesting that Linkedin's infrastructure is written in a mashup of Java, Scala, Ruby, and God knows what else.
You can almost guarantee that somewhere in the corridors of power, some pointy haired boss types are putting together a PowerPoint® presentation on how they are going to port all of Linkedin's codebase to .NET in 3 easy steps, for great profit. What could possibly go wrong ?
Big congrats to anyone that manages to cash in their Linkedin stock in the near future. If so, you have just managed to sell premium seats on the deck of the Titanic for top dollar !!
I don't have that many people around me that are worth influencing directly, so here is the way that I do it :
1) I divide up the TODO list and customer requirements into the 'Little Things' and the 'Big Things'.
2) Customers / Managers / Users seem to love the 'Little Things', and feel like they are getting great value for their dollar when so many of the 'Little Things' can be delivered in a relatively short time, it looks like great progress to them.
3) I always do the 'Little Things' at the Customer's site, in the Customer's presence. I always do them during the day, and I get the managers involved as much as possible. Be a good corporate citizen, and get paid on time.
4) Doing lots of little things on an hourly rate is a good way to generate cash quickly, and get paid on time. Its useless in the grand scheme of things in terms of software development, but it is needed to keep everyone happy and ensure that you can pay the bills on time. As you can see, this is all about cash, fast cash, and smiles and happy customers all around. It can be borderline degrading at times, but there you go. Milestones and Invoices and Smiles, and more Smiles and Cash.
5) I don't even bother trying to explain the 'Big Things' to these same Customers / Managers / Users, because it just plain scares them. They will never believe that software can ever be that complicated or difficult. It really scares them in fact. They want their world to be manageable, understandable, easy to estimate, easy to achieve ... that want to feel like they are 100% on top of things and in control. So I just don't talk about the 'Big Things' at all. Peering into the void that is the Big Things is the quickest way to make a Happy Customer (who pays on time at a good rate), into a very upset individual.
6) Bank the money and take time off. Turn off the phone, close the email app, stock up the fridge, tell people you will be out of town for a while. Get comfortable .... and code. Code the big things. Do it in the comfort of your own setup, away from everyone, and take your time. No deadlines, no clocks, no timesheets .... just you, an editor, a github account, some emergent ideas that may or may not be well defined, and some code.
Working on the 'Big Things' is simply not negotiable.
I never charge for doing the 'Big Things', and I never discuss this with customers, or try and use it as leverage in future billing arrangements.
Working on the 'Big Things' is simply not negotiable.
Working on the 'Big Things' is why I program and why I ever started to get into this in the first place. Being able to properly immerse myself in the Big Things, on my own terms, on my own time, out of my own pocket ... is compensation enough, and worth far more to me than any paycheck ever will be.
Working on the 'Big Things' is simply not negotiable.
Having a set of 'Big Things' in my toolbox then enables me to re-enter polite society for a while, in order to crank out some more 'Little Things' easily and cleanly, and get the bills covered. You need happy customers for that. Happy customers with Milestones and Ticks in Boxes and Smiles and Invoices and Cash on Time.
But working on the 'Big Things' is simply not negotiable.
Note also that some "laws" may remain as "laws", even in the face of experimental evidence which directly contradicts the predicted results of that law.
Which gives rise to "The Law of Research Funding", in which the amount of funding that can be attracted to support a given law is proportional to the amount of real world experimental evidence which contradicts that law. :)
For any given reasonable estimate for an item of software, add 2^N days to that estimate, where N = the number of date/datetime fields involved on that form or database table.
eg - You have a complex data entry screen to add to a webpage, and you KNOW for certain that you can complete it thoroughly in 2-3 days tops, testing every possible edge case. Good stuff.
However, if that screen has 2 date fields involved, then its going to take 2^2 or 4 extra days over and above the reasonable estimate to get it done properly, and handle NULL dates, timezone differences, comparison of dates for equality, parsing date inputs, converting internal representations between front end / backend / storage ... and every other unexpected abomination.
Great article with a lot of good points. Enjoyed the read.
Having said that though, the first paragraph or so made be choke. In the "hypothetical" case of Mike, who after being layed off from Microsoft finds himself a little shocked that his "skills and experience" are not valued in the real world ... well, its really hard to have any sympathy for him.
Hiring on merit is one thing, but there also has to be some weight added for a candidate's integrity (or total lack thereof, as in this case.) These Microsoft folk will never understand how much damage they have done, and how deep the resentment against them runs. Its not even worth trying to explain to them.
For another example, lets consider the hypothetical case of "Gavin". Gavin is someone with brilliant skills in say - early childhood learning, adminstration, media relations and marketting skills. He applies for a job as a senior admin at a childcare centre. The application is rejected !!! Gavin is appalled at this blatantly unfair treatment, so decides to investigate further and marches into the office to demand an explanation.
Anyway, as it turns out, Gavin proudly made full disclosure on his CV about a number of recent highlights in his career, including filming and marketting child pornography, collecting healhly organs from child donars for resale in the Middle East, and also the collection and hiring out of particularly talented children to both the Catholic Church, and the Freemasons.
"Gavin" sees these activities as mere expressions of his brilliance in the fields required. He is at a complete loss as to why all the staff / parents in the childcare centre are "discriminating" against him, and some are even casting unfair daggers in their eyes. He cant understand why ???? Perhaps they are just inferior to him.
I dont see this as being any different at all to the hypothetical "Mike" situation. Seriously - Fuck Mike !
To anyone recently layed off from a job at MS, who thinks they can jump bandwagons onto the next "trendy" thing in software, I think the most humane thing to do would be to tell them the rotten truth right up front .... "Just Fuck Off, and get as far away from software dev as you can. Get a job pluckng chickens, or collecting broken glass, or whatever pays the bills ... but whatever you do, keep the fuck away from our computers. You are NOT wanted here, and we all have excellent reasons to hate your guts with a passion and intensity that you are too selfish and narrow minded to ever comprehend."
.... but they would still think this was unfair ! Ridiculous.
I have been (forced against my better judgement) to attend a total of 4 conferences in my whole career ... and been politely asked to leave during 3 of them
In all cases, my questions were perfectly valid and reasonable, but this was at a time when "linux" was considered some sort of nutjob conspiracy theory that would go away if ignored.
I think that the total amount of unemployment I have had over all those years adds up to about 2 weeks total ... plus the additional inconvenience of spending about 4 months total in court. (which I managed to successfully bill for, so I suppose that doesnt count.)
The various CIOs, CEOs and other "Eye Tee" experts that I met at these conferences - Hopefully - are no longer involved in the tech industry.
Thought about that too, but then, as the girl in the article suggests, its not the excessive bandwidth use that is the problem ... teh real prob is that parents just dont understand, its all about living in the moment.
Im sure that silly old Daddy, once he got his head around that simple concept, could just appreciate it for what it is, and stop stressing out over some stupid bill. He is just missing the whole point.
How does anyone know for sure that all of that traffic (or at least the meta data related to the traffic) is not prepped for data mining on a per-user basis ?
There would be obvious commercial advantage in doing this, just for starters.
Data mining services like facebook gives you a solid picture of the interests and connections that the target person broadcasts publicaly. This is useful information, and it is exploited by any number of parties ... and people are (hopefully) aware of that.
Data mining snapchat gives a deeper picture of a person's interests and connections, as they are broadcast whilst that person believes that this information is entirely private.
Aggregating data from both sources (which would be almost trivial), would provide a very detailed view of the target. Much more than the sum of each dataset alone.
And it matters not whether the owners of Snapchat are completely and utterly above-board with everything .... there is the question of who owns and operates the network that all this info travels over.
Bottom line is that all of that "ephemeral" data that is going through snapchat is no more private than facebook, or youtube, or HAM radio, or telephone calls, or email, or SMS, or pretty much anything electronic.
There is no real privacy with this, but its easy to provide the illusion of privacy.
People get upset because Twitter and Facebook "mess with" their timelines, as if they were some fundamental natural component of the universe. The average person, even a young "digital native" has no concept of how their gadgets work, so while you might think "Oh, this pretty much has to be sitting on their server in a recoverable format" the average person thinks the picture lives only on their phone. They can't even get to the point of making an informed decision of whether or not the data they give up is worth the service received because they lack the models to understand what happens.
It's like wondering why someone who still thinks good and bad humors mediate health isn't worried about their cholesterol, there's literally not the machinery available to make that a concern. This is one of the biggest reasons that we should teach coding in schools. Even if you never write a line of code in anger, knowing vaguely what's going on at least gives you a chance to be a consenting participant in technologically mediated arrangements.
"How does anyone know for sure that all of that traffic (or at least the meta data related to the traffic) is not prepped for data mining on a per-user basis ?"
You can't, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's not permanent in a form that other users can access. Sure, maybe Snapchat stores every picture I ever sent. That sucks and should stop. But at least Grandma can't go back and look at some 2 year old picture I took with some buddies.
I know that because I know Evan, and he is obsessive about privacy. Of course it could all just be an act, but Occam's razor.
Truthfully, I don't really care if my Snapchat data is being mined. I'm not looking for absolute privacy. I'm not sending sensitive or private information. The ephemeral nature of the medium keeps me from worrying if a picture is unflattering or could be construed as in bad taste out of context.
Q: where did these expectations of privacy come from ?