I know you people here don't like to hear this. Proton makes this process very open. Other companies are doing silent layoffs by calling employees back to office, granting generous buyout packages for leaving the company or offering retraining and removing them from their previous roles (while granting those few they want to keep every wish).
While the article is light on details and so at risk of getting ahead of things, what concerns me is the incentives this creates for said employees.
In addition to that, it possibly highlights a worry about where Proton's priorities are - as a paying customer of a secure email service, should I be concerned that that part of them business is increasingly paying second-fiddle?
That may make it slightly better, but that does not make it acceptable. I'm not going to jump to conclusions based only on this one article, but if Proton is indeed culling the workforce of those who are not sufficiently hyped about AI, I'm taking my business elsewhere. I don't want to give my money to a company that thinks it's ok to mistreat their employees just to chase a fad.
I don't think it's a mistreatment. I think it's fair that companies and employees have both expectations and if those no longer align they should part ways.
Companies can have expectations about productivity, coming to work on time, not acting rude to customers, that kind of thing.
This is firing people based on how much they use AI tools the company is paying for, or even worse what their attitude to the tools is. It's toxic micro management done to validate their own beliefs.
If it was about efficiency they could offer everyone an agentic coding course and then fire the least productive employees who couldn't make use of it. Same headcount reduction and you're more likely to keep the people you really need instead of the most willing to lie on an interview.
Depends on where you live, in switzerland it’s comparatively easier than in other European countries, so if they just wanted to lay off people they could
I really recommend owning your own domain, and getting zohomail.
It offers a free account with custom domains (which means your account won't get deactived just for non payment), and it otherwise doesn't get in the way. And if it does, you can just switch to another provider.
They kept their domain. This was reported in 13:39 and by 18:21 they recovered their domain, so this was a five hour outage. The issue was they used a registrar that had no enterprise-level support. They have since learned this lesson.
This didn't affect customers that opted for custom domains, either. You shouldn't have a @zoho.com email - register your own domain and have a @sixtram.com email instead (custom domains is offered in the free tier, something Gmail doesn't offer)
I had moved to Zoho for one domain and it was nice. Doesn’t do e2ee theatre and makes me install bridges and tunnels to flyovers just to use imap. Once my current plan ends with my provider I will probably reconsider them once more. What’s the plan cost for hosting 3 domains?
An open process with a clear rationale is better than a secret process, e.g. company wide surveys that are later used to determine whether you keep your job…
Whether this actually leads to improved productivity and better products is TBD, of course.
It’ll sort itself out. Whether they intend to or not, they’re “re-aligning” their customer base too with this decision.
The talented people that built their products will continue to build products for customers that no longer align with Proton’s c-suite philosophy/politics.
The C-suites are all nuts for LLMs. The craziest ones are trying to force their employees to adopt and be constantly sharing novel uses of Llms. What I have mostly seen as the usage by most coworkers usually involves using AI to take their notes and create a presentation or automate some tedious work. Essentially glue and pipe software program output together. One use case in particular had a coworker building find/replace macros by feeding slideshow slides to the agent describing how the macro should work. C-suite eats this shit up because they’re using “AI at work!”.
Im absolutely convinced the further you are way from the ground floor - the more delusional you are re. AI's capabilities and abilities w.r.t contribution.
it's always been like that. the more we know about the technology, the more sceptical we get. there are exceptions of course, on both sides. people who are critical and educate themselves, and on the other side those who make money off it, or believe they can make money off it.
fortunately recently i also have seen a bunch of articles arguing that AI hasn't helped any company yet save money.
At my company we explicitly tell candidates what parts they can do with and without AI.
It’s not hypocritical like you seem to be implying. It’s seeing you still have a brain and can do the job with or without the tools. Otherwise we would just prompt AI ourselves…
In addition to that, it possibly highlights a worry about where Proton's priorities are - as a paying customer of a secure email service, should I be concerned that that part of them business is increasingly paying second-fiddle?
This is firing people based on how much they use AI tools the company is paying for, or even worse what their attitude to the tools is. It's toxic micro management done to validate their own beliefs.
If it was about efficiency they could offer everyone an agentic coding course and then fire the least productive employees who couldn't make use of it. Same headcount reduction and you're more likely to keep the people you really need instead of the most willing to lie on an interview.
“do you love Microsoft Copilot and our internal company chat tool?”
even for users that aren’t lying, those would be the least AI proficient staff you have
I'm glad to learn about this before pulling the trigger.
It offers a free account with custom domains (which means your account won't get deactived just for non payment), and it otherwise doesn't get in the way. And if it does, you can just switch to another provider.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18059792
This didn't affect customers that opted for custom domains, either. You shouldn't have a @zoho.com email - register your own domain and have a @sixtram.com email instead (custom domains is offered in the free tier, something Gmail doesn't offer)
An open process with a clear rationale is better than a secret process, e.g. company wide surveys that are later used to determine whether you keep your job…
Whether this actually leads to improved productivity and better products is TBD, of course.
The talented people that built their products will continue to build products for customers that no longer align with Proton’s c-suite philosophy/politics.
It’s a free market!
fortunately recently i also have seen a bunch of articles arguing that AI hasn't helped any company yet save money.
It’s not hypocritical like you seem to be implying. It’s seeing you still have a brain and can do the job with or without the tools. Otherwise we would just prompt AI ourselves…
IMO if you’re going to run an interview that uses coding agents etc it belongs at the end of an interview pipeline.