> if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.
On the other hand, once shit hit the fan, you could argue that these people would be extra-careful about fucking it up again, as opposed to another company where everything seems silently OK.
It's a bit like the story of the engineer who did a 400.000 dollar mistake on his first job. Asking the manager if they were going to fire him, he was told that no way they were going to fire somebody that just cost them so much money to train!
> On the other hand, once shit hit the fan, you could argue that these people would be extra-careful about fucking it up again
In my experience with Facebook, Google, and a variety of smaller companies, this doesn't happen.
To people who think the way TripleByte apparently does, the fuck-up was getting caught, not violating trust in the first place. If they had no moral issues with betraying users, they won't have any in the future (unless executives and board are replaced).
Instead, they will pay more lip service to privacy concerns and be more secretive about violating user trust.
I also read a story on HN where a devops engineer made a $80k mistake and got fired. He got hired at a new startup and the founder thought "of course he won't make the same mistake twice". He did.
On the other hand, once shit hit the fan, you could argue that these people would be extra-careful about fucking it up again, as opposed to another company where everything seems silently OK.
It's a bit like the story of the engineer who did a 400.000 dollar mistake on his first job. Asking the manager if they were going to fire him, he was told that no way they were going to fire somebody that just cost them so much money to train!