Does Gabriel know about this? If not could you please clue him in and get some guidance because you are absolutely getting roasted here and are wrecking DDG's carefully built up reputation. I can easily see how this might seem to be a good idea to you and other DDG engineers but it goes 180 degrees against DDG's stated mission. In other words: you may be well outside your paygrade on this.
Not as worse as publicly denouncing an honest engineer while referencing his paygrade. I hope there is no affiliation you have with DDG to be honest, because this is much, much worse.
What do you mean? This response is fine. It’s honest feedback, and it isn’t a personal swipe to say it’s above someone’s pay grade to be responding to a PR crisis as an honest engineer.
I was once an honest engineer too, publicly. Being honest in private is enough for me now. It’s a lesson worth learning.
That said, it’s not like a single HN comment will make or break a company, so if they’re really just a rank-and-file engineer, I hope the company won’t come down on them too hard. A simple “don’t do that” would suffice.
Yes, but chastising an employee is not in the interest of good PR, even if we sadly see that quite often in the days of social media. That is especially true if the employee just honestly laid out the facts, I wouldn't even call that a mistake.
I use DDG and the possibility of getting a statement directly from an engineer conveys much more trust than a carefully crafted PR statement ever could. I would think again about using it if the company does indeed come down on employees that live the values the company writes on its flags to have honest and transparent business practices.
That said, I am careful too when I state things about my company, even if I believe there is nothing to hide. Still, people that think it isn't the place for others with knowledge to comment are often not too impressive and would have difficulties in convincing me that privacy and transparency are real goals instead of just looking decent enough.
Furthermore the naming of management of DDG creates a stark contrast to the suggestion for more professional distance. I don't like PR very much as you might have guessed, but like a good design it needs some congruence.
If people find out that you just shut up for your company, it might give people the wrong impression about their business.
It’s your duty as an employee to shut up for your company. I didn’t learn this until later in my career. Fortunately it didn’t have lasting impact.
By commenting on an ongoing PR crisis without consulting management, you are both undermining their ability to respond in an effective way — imagine how strange it would look to see a “Hey, X from <company> here” after an existing one was already posted — and you’re acting on your own rather than in a team. You’re a part of a team; how could you think it’s a good idea to act alone?
Of course, I am talking to my former self with this comment, since that’s exactly what I did at S2 when working on HoN. It was a mistake, and I gave the community the wrong impression about the company’s priorities.
You have to understand, when you’re given money to do a job, you’re not given authority to become that job. Just because your job is getting beat up on social media doesn’t mean you should just jump in and go “Hey, that’s not true!” It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. Here, let me pretend to be DDG:
“Hi, Shawn from DDG here. You’re right; this was an oversight on our part. Obviously we dropped the ball on this. To clarify, we were unintentionally gathering the data as a side effect of our favicon service. <some technical details here>. We’ll be acting immediately to reverse this, and we’ll be enacting policy changes to ensure that user privacy — our core mission — is maintained going forward.”
But that’s not what they said. And if you’re gonna tell the community the opposite of what they want to hear, you’d better be in charge of the company’s Telling The Community Things division.
Thank you for explaining this all far more eloquently than I ever could. DDG is precious and worth preserving, it wouldn't take much for the press to have a field day with a couple of careless comments. And no, I don't have a stake in DDG other than as a user.
I don't think it's fair to say this comment is 'wrecking DDG's carefully built up reputation'. If what he describes is damaging their reputation to you, that's on the business, not on the commenter. If anything, the commenter seems to have been honest and straightforward with what's going on.
Sounds like you'd prefer him to have run a message past management/public relations first?
If you speak in a public form in response to something that seems damaging to the reputation of the company in a way that is probably even more damaging to the reputation of that company you are either an official spokesperson or way out of your depth. Pointing that out is a service, not a sleight. And yes, if this is not in an official capacity he should either keep quiet or run it by the PR dept. People have lost their jobs for far less. Anyway, I've pinged @yegg, hopefully he can shine some light on this.
No, it is the response of someone who was once upon a time CEO of a startup that fortunately did not operate in the present day news cycle where reputations can be destroyed in a couple of hours. DDG is precious, saying things that are very much against what I know to be the founding principles of the company is something that should only be done by those that have been given the proper authority. The response here is candid but ultimately not the one that DDG would and should give. Gabriels' contribution upthread pretty much confirms that. My comment was simply to ensure things would not get worse than they already were until someone in a position of authority at DDG could step in.
All you have to do is to read this comment thread to see the kind of damage that a single statement by someone affiliated with the company can do.
For me it does the opposite. Hearing engineers speaking off-message inspires trust, while pr-evasion and weasel speak makes me think they have something to hide.
That's nice. But in this particular case the engineer says things that I know for a fact are not in line with DDG's mission statement so even if he speaks off-message he's actually destroying that trust. There is nothing about @yegg's response that strikes me as weasel speak, it is the content that is different and exactly where it matters: privacy first.
