<< “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”
Note how he says that he wants to 'acknowledge' things. Not apologize. Not that he is wrong about the re-interviews. He says he didn't use nice enough language to soften the blow. Basically, in simple terms, he didn't Lisa it up as temporary refund adjustment.
edit: and the passive voice is a cherry on top
edit2: I gotta say -- all those CEOs are getting a little uppity for people who likely use copilot for summarizing emails.
Proton engineering culture always got a bad rep pre-AI era as well(per their glassdoor reviews[1]) . Poor engineering directly or indirectly makes them susceptible to data breach because good talent stays away. One reason why I hesitated moved to proton back when a lot of people did. My understanding is that the only reason they are in the game are because send email services are extremely difficult to run.
This is very disappointing, I've been on Proton for a long time and just assumed a "high trust non-Google" email provider implicitly had integrity. Knowing that they're scummy almost defeats the purpose of using it for me.
which is exactly why the AI push and brand harm from the CEO is so baffling, it is in essence an email service based on privacy and trust, what is the point of pushing AI so hard. Wonder if the CEO has some sort of AI psychosis
I think de-googling is itself has its costs. I've been waiting for a better solution to email. On a related note fundamentally I think the incentives to keep email infra alive is linked to the same incentive rooted in the core belief held by companies/services that ads work.
If there was an inflection point to break that perception — like covid gave a pause for thought for location based ad targeting — and hence the incentive, perhaps we can kick email as one of the ideas whose time has come.
Thank you for including other reports. However, everything seems to link back to 404. Convo.casa is just quoting 404I'm suspicious that 404 has a grudge against Proton, but I am open minded.
The articles seem damning. However, CEOs jumping on board the AI bandwagon is not particularly rare. I don't see a CEO pushing AI as reason to change my email provider. If it manifests to be a problem, then sure I will switch. So far I haven't seen any repercussions.
When a CEO calls people "losers" for caring about security, and when the CEO considers it a failure that they don't have hockey stick growth, to me that's absolutely a reason to consider changing for most people using Proton. If someone doesn't care about employees raising security concerns, or a company chasing profits at all cost, then why are they using Proton in the first place?
If all that is true it is a concern. I'm not going to make any changes until I see some validation. Validation from other media, or seeing a decline in quality of product.
Damn. My proton plan just renewed a couple weeks ago.
I have not failed to notice that they’ve slowed focus on security oriented features and are now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of the cultural problem there.
Without the security aspect, Proton is ridiculously overpriced. If they want to compete with GSuite or Zoho, they gotta come down.
I’m willing to pay premium for a niche security focused offering. I’m not willing to pay a premium for AI generated crapware.
I became a Proton visionary after I interacted with them here on HN. They took PGP really seriously and addressed my very specific concerns.
I don't care about the AI use bur I'm very sad to learn they won't be "lovingly" crafting their products anymore. Less craftsmanship and attention to detail can't be good.
Thankfully, owning a domain makes switching providers easy.
Yeah, I'll be looking for an alternative. I've already drifted off of everything but the email service. The opportunity to potentially not due business with orgs run by insufferable assholes is all the push I really need to take another look around.
> now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about
Yeah, I'm a paying customer and have been asking for a desktop app for Proton Drive for years. Instead, they've focused their efforts on a crypto wallet and a chatbot. (Sure, we recently got a CLI app which _is_ better than nothing but come on.)
Kind of amazing how completely Yen misunderstands Protons customer base. It’s pretty much entirely security conscious people who want to divest from big tech right?
They had a safe stable business with a loyal user base in a market niche they completely owned, could have basically just sat on their asses and de facto collected taxes from paranoid nerds and journalists for decades.
I just don't understand why they'd want to trade all that away for a chasing the same nebulous "something something AI" business plan as literally every other company in the tech industry right now. The odds they'll be competitive in such an endeavor and see a fraction of the success they had again is minuscule.
I already cancelled my subscription. They've demonstrated far too reckless behavior for me to trust something this critical to them, especially as they present themselves as the private and secure alternative.
Same here. Been a paying customer for probably about 3 years now. Off to either Fastmail or Tuta most likely. I'd like to self-host, but corporations have thoroughly ruined what should have been an open and decentralized system.
If an employee is getting their work done, with or without AI, why does it matter? Is it just the idea that if an employee is keeping up, without using AI, how much work could they get done if they were?
According to the manifesto, it seems to be that hopping aboard the AI train has inexplicably not materialized exponential revenue growth, and since it can impossibly be that AI has been oversold, the only conclusion must be that employees are dragging their feet and must be forced to go full send with vibecoding for the destined profits to arrive.
If you're a start up especially in silicon valley, it doesn't matter how well something is built if you can't get to market, which creates a toxic culture of build fast at all cost, that small detail will be a "good problem to have", and AI has thrown jet fuel on the dumpster fire.
I feel like this is an internal bias I’ve actually built up over time. If I see another company providing a service come out after something I already am using, I subconsciously gravitate toward it.
If they’re coming to market when there’s already a dominant player, they must have improved something, right? Not saying it’s logical.
It doesn't matter but CEOs are dumb fucks. Ask this guy how HE uses AI and you'll see he most likely doesn't. They don't understand how anything their company develops works.
Usually that would be fine if reporting lines were healthy, but in the AI age with top-down mandates they're not.
Aw schucks. I moved to Proton half a year ago in an effort to de-Google (and de-US) myself. Now this. Time to write a message to customer service explaining my concerns.
I really like the idea of using Fastmail over Tuta since they support normal protocols and thus third party clients. My main concern is that if they're able to serve those protocols, they have to be able to access my emails in plaintext in some form or fashion, which also means if their systems do (and most likely inevitably will these days) get hacked at some point, all my emails are now exposed and leaked.
Yes email is inherently insecure, don't forget your emails also sit on lots of other systems too usually unencrypted unless everyone else has opsec matching yours. Don't put important secrets in email I guess.
Frustrating that it was designed so badly and I don't think there's a way to fix it without fixing protocols really and doing E2E encryption and signing with keys only on devices, even then you depend on all the code handling that to be secure, and nobody on the other side to store plain text of your encrypted emails (which they must be able to see/get after all).
Ah sorry, I've been toying with moving to Proton for their password manager because I despise what 1Password has become so I think I just assumed everyone was recommending Fastmail because they have a comparable suite of apps. I maybe got over excited that there might be a decent alternative.
FastMail is great, I'm not sure there's the same expectations around privacy though. I've been using it for years and love my masked emails, but I don't have any expectations that my data is locked down or encrypted, and one legal request would expose my info.
This is already true for Proton. While they don't keep logs for ProtonVPN (as tested in court), they do for ProtonMail. Someone went to prison for trusting ProtonMail with their illegal activity.
I have already begun using my proton-domain email address with real people. They have just started learning it (or have finally updated my contact info). That’s one hurdle.
Another hurdle is I see no other good alternative. I used Fastmail for a while, but it was a bit laggy due to network requests across the Atlantic Ocean. Also it is under US jurisdiction. That company is no longer relevant to me.
I still think it is a valuable use of my time to make my voice heard to the company.
Weird. FastMail is many times faster than Proton ever was for me. FastMail is also headquartered in Australia, not the US. Fastmail also now has European servers.
Data regions like these offer no protection, it’s just a feel-good marketing term with no legal basis. Source: I work in this business with multinationals with a similar footprint and we have paid actual lawyers to look at it.
The only thing that unfortunately matters here is that Fastmail has a US incorporation.
Fastmail even writes as such:
> If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
If you haven't already, it's a good time to pay for a domain. That way, no matter what host you may choose to use in the future, people will still be able to email you with the address they already know. It does add some additional cost, but imo it's well worth it.
This to me doesn't solve the actual problem. I don't care if engineers at Proton use AI, and I don't care if management makes it a requirement to work there. What I care about is using it as a way to instill fear. Combined with the CEO constantly blowing up on Slack insulting employees, it cultivates a culture of "yes-men" which is not good for a security and privacy minded product.
I've seen a fair number of seemingly together people crumple as leaders when things behind the scenes were crashing. Is this what's happening at Proton, an unseen disaster that's turned leadership into burnt toast?
People in control of themselves don't publicly write such things, regardless of whether they think it.
I'm looking at alternative email provider options, and I'm struggling to find options that have banned GenAI, and have the features and reliability I need. I will gladly pay a premium for a provider that's not going to let AI creep in gradually, and take a bigger role over data and security
I've been happy with fastmail. Their product and UX looks a little dated even - in a good way I realize. It's not trying to be anything its not.
Also iCloud paid accounts allow custom domains for email. The Apple mail product is way worse but it was amazingly simple to set up and I am happy I have my own domain.
Apple is extensively and heavily using GenAI internally, and I've not got confidence in their product quality going forward (macOS is still declining in overall quality, from my experience)
Fastmail is excellent. They haven’t banned AI but their approach (set up MCP so AI power users can pull in their email data) is a lot more thoughtful and entirely nonintrusive so far.
> To be clear about what this isn’t: we have not integrated AI into Fastmail. There’s no chatbot bolted onto the inbox, and your mail isn’t being piped through a model in the background. The MCP server is simply another API endpoint for you to use, if you want to, with the AI client of your choice.
> That distinction matters to us. Our long-term values include “Your data belongs to you” and “We are good stewards of your data”. The pattern we try to follow is: rather than continuously reworking our UI to follow every new trend, we give you the interfaces to use your data however it suits you. MCP continues that pattern. It’s there if you want it, and nothing changes if you don’t.
Using AI for support is such a dick move to your customers. I can't understand how companies don't see how disrespectful it is. I ran into that at work with Sonicwall recently, and had to contact our account rep to get my case to a human, not a clanker. It really made me feel like they don't care about solving my issues, and as a result I doubt very much if I would ever choose the company if I were given the power over that decision.
But gmail have basically spotless security record? If you care about security, gmail is the option that basically had no security incidents in last 10 years (aside from "someone's mail password leaked from somewhere else" which is not gmail fault).
Only problem (and a big one) is just fact it is US company
I know there must be a better phrase for it, but i'll just say that we're in the Age of Extreme Capitalism. I know folks tend to reply "Because capitalism" for many ills and awful behavior (I've done it my self!)...But i think its more than that. Its like an extreme, excessive, bonkers form of capitalism (and all things under and adjacent to capitalism)...Again, maybe there's a better label for it. But nowadays (and as others have cited that its felt like its been going on for what like a decade or so)...lots of folks in leadership positions seem like they're out only for themselves, and damned be everyone, and sell your grandma for that sweet money from her data...It feels so much worse than that Gordon Gecko character as portrayed in the old 80s WallStreet movie - like, so much worse, everywhere.
> In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August.
There was a moment a while back when 1Password made some decision (I think abandoning delphi?) that made me take a step back and ask if they were a security company or not. In moments like this, I wonder if Proton's pitch is security or not. Even if this is a true take, I think someone saying that they need to be cautious and pentest something before launch is a valid concern, for a security company. Not all companies are security companies, but Proton specifically advertises itself as being security and privacy conscious. It is a bad look for a security company to do something that indicates a lack of security prowess.
I think the writing on the wall for manually writing every line of code is obvious, but that does not obviate the need to secure things. However, pushing for speed at the expense of security, AI or not, is a bad look for a security company.
I feel like I got lucky in choosing fastmail. They are always compared. Fastmail gave me a better impression. Maybe there's something to that instinct.
I'm also a happy Fastmail customer, but they are not really comparable: Fastmail is an Australian company with American servers, they are not a privacy-conscious option at all.
It’s email. There isn’t much privacy in email other than TLS. Proton encrypting your inbox is basically useless since they could read your email in between TLS termination and encryption. I don’t care how private their fancy Swiss servers are and the NSA doesn’t either.
The sender and the receiver both have a copy of the email. The receiver's MTA pretty much has to have a copy of the email for sane antispam to work. Email itself intrinsically leaks the sender, recipient, and time as part of the SMTP message, which means anyone with access to email server logs can recover this information no matter how much security and encryption you try to put on top of it, and that means that whatever three-letter agency you care about probably has access to all the information they want anyways.
The only meaningful difference in security is going to be whether or not the outgoing MTA is going to try to use (or even require) TLS on the MTA-MTA connection, and what level of encryption is applied to the at-rest email.
Personally, I'm not too fussed about a mail system administrator being able to read my email because of the BOFH principle... it's not worth the sysadmin's time to read my email, because it's just not interesting.
I switched recently. I think the safe bet now is to just use my personal domain and whatever provider I move to next I can just update MX records. Really annoying but it is what it is.
I've had their top level personal account for years (visionary or something equally wanky). What are others using instead? I'm not sure I want to continue funding someone that is behaving like this (if it is confirmed).
Yeah, it's pretty weak from the CEO, bowing down to the morons. I will not move away because I've never used them, just like you, but let me tell you, I'm angry. And I want you people to know it: look at how angry I am. Such a good boy.
One could easily argue that the CEO's comments about employees being "losers" are quite abusive. He's not acting as a responsible leader. Sounds like a terrible place to work. Glad I never moved any services to Proton.
> “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
This is the leader behind Proton? I think I need to be more on social media and pay attention to this. This single sentence, if true, has now made me decide to never pay Proton again. That's it. Done. I had email services, VPN, and was considering storage too. Nope.
I am so sick an tired of AIBrained CEO's. All this does is validate how much these people do not need to exist. They just don't. Their thinking is useless. Their in-grouping and in-breeding of mentality is psychosis at large. And now that feel, once again, they can take their masks off, it's time to start looking them in the face and saying, "No."
I expect Proton's existing employees may be a particularly bad audience for a "let the AI worry about security" message from the top, given that they are more likely to be a) security experts and b) people who care enough about security to actively seek out a job at Proton.
Looking at the comments I seem to be the minority, but I appreciated the honesty to say, look we want to use AI and if you don't then this company is not a good fit anymore. Now they will let go these people anyway, but in a less transparent way.
The employee seems to have a better grasp of their demographic than the CEO. Hope he enjoys losing a good employee and their revenue continuing to fall through the floor. I'm not the only paying customer leaving ASAP.
As a customer of a company whose motto was privacy and security i'm extremely concern about this push at the expense of security. In what world is doing a security audit "loser thinking"?? Its not honesty, it's a techbro in ai psychosis running a company completely against it's core values.. Start of enshittification as they call it?
“That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
I mean, I also appreciate the honesty of the CEO to say that security is not important anymore and if it is to you, this company is not a good fit anymore.
Letting people go for invented reasons isn't something that happens in civilized countries, by the way.
All of this has made me really appreciate that the people I work for, and with, aren't childish assholes. People need to realize this is not normal behavior from an executive or anyone in any sort of management position.
"Not the best at communication" is an entirely generous way of putting it. This is not a one-off mentality or an "oopsie". This is someone who believes themselves over-sovereign, singularly capable, and further that they alone have a true vision.
These are people you do not give time, attention, or money.
Just makes me think how we have encouraged a generation of tech leaders to be complete assholes with no consequences. That “loser thinking” line should never be accepted in any company discourse, even from leadership. If this person wasn’t an exec, they’d be shown the door for that language.
Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
I was recently 'mentored' with some leadership advice. Be optimistic. Nobody wants to put a pessimist in a leadership role. Who would you hire for a C level position? An optimist or a pessimist?
The problem is that being optimistic creates massive cognitive disconnects in engineering teams who are trained to think in terms of systemic failure modes. There isn't the same practice of systemic success modes (perhaps that's the role of product managers?)
Anyway, this type of CEO is pushing his brand of 'optimism' down the org chart and making anyone who feels different an outcast, hence his choice of words.
Yen's behavior, per the OP, is nothing like optimism. Optimists not only see a brighter future, they are positive and inspire that in others. Steve Jobs was an optimist (at least publicly), to pick a random person.
Yen says there is an existential crisis, Proton employees must adjust to survive, and those who don't agree or raise concerns are losers. Yen's behavior also strongly implies a future of abuse.
I interpreted it as meaning that optimism is an assumption that problems will go away so there’s no need to painfully face them, whereas pessimism is an assumption that things will get worse unless you actively search out problems and fix them.
ah yeah, I mean if that's the case, I think that's orthogonal, right?
In my interpretation of the words, I tend to think of optimism as being the brave thing because having hope is more difficult, and IME, you can only muster energy to solve a problem if hope exists. Conversely, pessimism to me feels cheap and easy, and if you say "everything's fucked, what's the point" then nothing gets solved
So, it's probably more of a quadrant/compass along the axes of optimism/pessimism and proactive/passive
This is a wider problem than just the tech industry. The kind of rhetoric, words used in political rallies, debates, on TV etc just sets the tone for society as a whole to become a bit more meaner, nastier...one step at a time. Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
> Even religious talks, sermons etc aren't immune to this
They aren't just not immune - often enough, particularly when it comes to anti-LGBT hate, religious speeches of all kinds are fueling the fire. And that's before we get into the serious Evangelical backing of the Trump administration, Hegseth being almost a crusader [1] or the worst of the worst who believe that there needs to be a holy war in Israel to incite Armageddon [2].
> Oh trust me. We knew all along but we always viewed 'other employees' as lower caste deserving of the disdain they get.
Projecting much? There has certainly been disdain towards other fields, but it mostly seems to be the management class that gets ripped by programmers the most. HR too sometimes.
The thing with tech products is they could just leave and start another company. No need to go through union-busting behavior.
Every discussion of Proton leadership shortcomings shows a market of users looking for a better run company.
And if it’s all AI developed moving forward, why not? There’s investors out there that would support Proton’s original engineers to fulfill Proton’s original mission, without the AI psychosis abandoning security as a top priority.
> The thing with tech products is they could just leave and start another company.
This is such a cop out response. They still need funding, and infrastructure, and to build up an entire customer base who presumably they would need to bribe with free service at a loss in order to attract anyone new. Who’s gonna fund that when there’s a known market ceiling for the service that’s already been captured? We’re not in ZIRP anymore
nerd-sniped me on this one. mainstream cool isn’t a thing. i think you mean successful. mainstream values success because it’s the vanilla proxy for a vanilla form of “value”.
so cool has always been about the “iykyk” kinda value. once too many people know there’s nothing to know anymore.
> Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
Pretty much, I found some very helpful words and perspectives on this from Michael Sandel - Tyranny of Merit. The winners begin to think there success is their own doing, forgetting the luck, good fortune, and many people who helped them along the way. They grow arrogant and full of hubris, looking down on and belittling others.
The question is then, how do we get out of this mess? Sandel offers some interesting foundations, along with Acemoglu.
I think it also has to be that the more powerful you are, the more likely you are to attract and retain sycophants who do nothing but compliment you and tell you how great your ideas are. It's a tale as old as time since the days of kings and emperors.
Some of the best moments of growth that I've experienced have happened during adversity, when something I said or did was laid bare for me from another perspective, with all of the problems with my approach pointed out. Those moments are intensely uncomfortable in that moment but so valuable for long-run growth (provided you have enough of a check on your own ego and developed enough insight to learn from such experiences).
My guess is that this trend to sycophancy will happen in every hierarchical organization where individuals at the top are able to reshape their social environment to avoid uncomfortable moments that they don't wish to have. I think it takes someone truly exceptional to avoid creating that kind of reality for themselves, and why it's oh-so-common to see hyperinflated egos from the most powerful individuals.
That said, I would read the hell out of a non-fictional expose covering specifically just the sycophants around some of our most notoriously unhinged powerful people, ones that showed exactly who are applauding these Emperors Nero who play their citharas while their world burns.
I've noticed a marked increase in overall shitty, childish, selfish behavior in and out of the work place since around 2016. Being an asshole has absolutely been normalized.
I'm personally un-normalizing this. I've left meetings for this shit and will continue to do so. I don't give two shits which service is broken or what bug made it to prod, if you can't talk to me about it without sounding like a tweenage boy, you can fucking fix it yourself.
I don't think CEO personality types have changed all that much. I work IT in manufacturing, and have consistently seen this "macho masculinity alpha" type before. He was quickly let go by the board, thankfully.
We live in a world where CEOs typically have gotten their position through nepotism, or fucking over many people to get to the top. It's just who they are.
I guess people go where the incentives are. For at least the last decade that sort of behavior hasn't been punished or has even been rewarded (see: the entire Trump administration).
Meanwhile, being a decent person carries very little benefit anymore. So it's probably not surprising that people no longer take the effort.
Sure, but that only works if corporations are willing to value being a decent person in their hiring and performance reviews. In my experience, that is not the case at all.
As in any job or interview - especially if you offer something different than all the carbon-copy candidates - you need to compel them to see your value.
If you believe in what you do - and 'decency' (depending on definition) isn't hard to believe in, having a long track record and obvious advantages - it's relatively easy to be compelling.
Finally, don't work for the corp. Work someplace else. Start your own!
In more ways than the obvious, "great leaders are jerks, like Steve Jobs".
There has been a shift from "We" to "I". It rubbed me wrong when Apple launched the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In that moment, the world became more self-centered, instead of group-centered. Social media is the same, it's all about the individual: MY profile, MY followers, MY status.
It's anti-social by nature, and society is worse because of the shift.
Steve made really good products. Maybe not to your individual taste but it's clear he had a vision and worked tirelessly to follow it - no half measures - and a lot of people liked his vision. Everyone else is forgetting to copy that part.
Less "forgetting" and more "not as brilliantly insane as Jobs" ... but Jobs was NEVER someone that ANYONE should ever emulate.
Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.
One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.
Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."
He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.
Most of the Steve Jobs cult forget that Steve grew up. He was an ahole, but if you look at the historical examples they are almost exclusively from his first tenure at Apple. After his ouster and time with Pixar and Next it appears he mostly calmed down and learned to respect colleagues and employees significantly more.
IDK about the "being an asshole to your face" part (my story on that, above, did come from early Apple).
But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.
That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.
"Do whatever you can get away with, with prioritization on local optimization with eager evaluation"
So basically, be an asshole/sociopath. The tennets of objectivism.
"morality" is basically memoized reinforcement learning over many human generations. So, it seems that the cache has been wiped out, and they need to learn again why they shouldn't be focusing on local optimization exclusively.
"Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?"
It's a team not a family.
The idea that demanding performance from your employees is "losing your humanity" is insane.
Teams are made of people. People skills make you more effective at dealing with people.
Obviously you can be a total prick and demand performance and maybe get some people onboard but nobody thrives in those environments and unless you want to deal with turnover and mediocrity you foster good working environments with your teammates
Plenty of people thrive in environments where high performance is demanded. This idea that you produce the best outputs by coddling your employees is pure cope.
Demanding high performance also doesn't necessarily mean forcing everyone to work 996 or yelling at people, but it can mean enforcing standards that everyone might not like or agree with.
You treat your team well because your highest performers are the ones with most options and the ones that will leave first when you don't. If productivity is bad before you pull something like this, you won't like what happens when all you have left is a team full of demoralized underachievers.
Even still, there are gradations of using AI. Yen seems to have been on a crusade to get everyone to vibe code the entire thing. Not a lot of high performing software engineers signing off on such practices either.
You can be demanding without using terms like “loser thinking.”
But performance isn’t a single thing. If you prioritize features over pen testing, you’re optimizing one kind of performance and neglecting security, which is an another kind.
For a company whose whole selling point is security, it’s a bad trade-off.
As I think about it, I am starting to suspect that it a layoff in disguise. Even the likely backlash part is. Still, it seems.. bold primarily because, if anything, we are in a transition period of sorts. No one figured everything out yet. You want people who can do it, but those are the ones who will jump ship, because those are the ones with options.
> company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership
This is evil in ways most people probably don't understand. To explain, here is the real message behind this, stripped of neutral journalism language. I'm not going to be shocked if this is the actual hidden thought process.
"Hello. You have now worked at our company for 7 years, contributing thousands of hours of work towards making our products better. We regret to inform you that you are worthless. Your so-called 'contributions' don't deserve to be printed on toilet paper our CEO wipes with. Frankly, you are a waste of space sucking up the air inside our offices, and we are itching to get rid of degenerates like you at the first opportunity. Your only chance to temporarily offset our perception of your uselessness is our upcoming 20-minute degradation ritual where you'll dance to our whims and plead by showing how much you love using whatever our CEO says you'll use. Building good solutions, knowing our tech stack, working with other people, being creative? All worthless, just like you. What really matters is if you can make me feel good. Fuck you and get ready to crawl on your knees."
As a privacy and security focused company, this would seem like reputational suicide. Which in the privacy and security space you would figure is basically corporate suicide.
Honestly losing the will over here; I Degoogled and moved to Proton a couple of years ago because they seemed to be a cool company aligned with my values. Is this coming from a “the business is failing and we need to ship faster to stay competitive” angle or is he just a massive ball bag? I mean either way he’s probably a massive ball bag but if he’s trying to save a sinking ship it’s at least somewhat understandable. Otoh if he’s just a massive greedy ball bag then I don’t even know where I go next.
> “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
It's insane that rational thought, even in engineering orgs, is out the window in favor of AI hype.
AI changes the Quality/Time tradeoff. As anyone with a even a little engineering background knows, that means you can,
* Cut time to get the same shitty software quality
with unlimited bugs that we're accustomed to
* In the same time, increase quality and make
actually secure software.
How much time does it now take, using AI, to make 'High Assurance' software? Provably correct components? Other quality measures that were once out of reach? etc.
And the capability of AI-resourced attackers makes higher-quality software necessary.
I'll be angling hard towards abandoning Proton (and no longer recommending it to others) so long as Yen remains CEO. Hopefully, the larger company realizes the threat someone like him poses to their image AND quality of service.
Like I said earlier this week, this re-alignment of the people that built and maintained their products is also resulting in a re-alignment of their customer base.
Hopefully we’ll see those talented engineers leaving to build an alternative to Proton products now that we know corporate leadership at Proton can’t be trusted.
The board should really oust the “loser thinking” CEO and CTO if they want to minimize the damage to their brand.
The company not providing even a written statement in response to 404 reporting speaks volumes. They don’t see themselves accountable to their customers.
As one of the first customers of ProtonMail, this makes me really disappointed. Yen has clearly gone off the rails. This is a complete betrayal of the core principles he founded Proton on.
Note how he says that he wants to 'acknowledge' things. Not apologize. Not that he is wrong about the re-interviews. He says he didn't use nice enough language to soften the blow. Basically, in simple terms, he didn't Lisa it up as temporary refund adjustment.
edit: and the passive voice is a cherry on top
edit2: I gotta say -- all those CEOs are getting a little uppity for people who likely use copilot for summarizing emails.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PROTON-Reviews-E13574.htm
I guess they didn't like my reply of "many"
If there was an inflection point to break that perception — like covid gave a pause for thought for location based ad targeting — and hence the incentive, perhaps we can kick email as one of the ideas whose time has come.
I am rooting for ATproto to be the replacement.
"Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692 67 comments
"Proton goes all in on using AI" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296602 110 comments
"Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50251062 48 comments
The articles seem damning. However, CEOs jumping on board the AI bandwagon is not particularly rare. I don't see a CEO pushing AI as reason to change my email provider. If it manifests to be a problem, then sure I will switch. So far I haven't seen any repercussions.
I have not failed to notice that they’ve slowed focus on security oriented features and are now focused on a lot of things I don’t care about, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of the cultural problem there.
Without the security aspect, Proton is ridiculously overpriced. If they want to compete with GSuite or Zoho, they gotta come down.
I’m willing to pay premium for a niche security focused offering. I’m not willing to pay a premium for AI generated crapware.
you either pay out of pocket or you pay with data but there is no free lunch.
as a current Proton customer I'm going to start looking for alternatives.
I don't care about the AI use bur I'm very sad to learn they won't be "lovingly" crafting their products anymore. Less craftsmanship and attention to detail can't be good.
Thankfully, owning a domain makes switching providers easy.
Yeah, I'm a paying customer and have been asking for a desktop app for Proton Drive for years. Instead, they've focused their efforts on a crypto wallet and a chatbot. (Sure, we recently got a CLI app which _is_ better than nothing but come on.)
AI times are weird. Validates that truism I heard: money (and power and influence and now AI) is an amplifier. It amplifies what you always were.
Was this sentence authored under the influence of one or both?
I counted 4 things you could be under the influence of, not two.
Why would he throw all that away?
I just don't understand why they'd want to trade all that away for a chasing the same nebulous "something something AI" business plan as literally every other company in the tech industry right now. The odds they'll be competitive in such an endeavor and see a fraction of the success they had again is minuscule.
If they’re coming to market when there’s already a dominant player, they must have improved something, right? Not saying it’s logical.
Usually that would be fine if reporting lines were healthy, but in the AI age with top-down mandates they're not.
Frustrating that it was designed so badly and I don't think there's a way to fix it without fixing protocols really and doing E2E encryption and signing with keys only on devices, even then you depend on all the code handling that to be secure, and nobody on the other side to store plain text of your encrypted emails (which they must be able to see/get after all).
Now it's been made for me and I can plan my migration to FastMail :-).
This is already true for Proton. While they don't keep logs for ProtonVPN (as tested in court), they do for ProtonMail. Someone went to prison for trusting ProtonMail with their illegal activity.
Another hurdle is I see no other good alternative. I used Fastmail for a while, but it was a bit laggy due to network requests across the Atlantic Ocean. Also it is under US jurisdiction. That company is no longer relevant to me.
I still think it is a valuable use of my time to make my voice heard to the company.
What good alternative can you recommend for me?
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region...
EDIT: Re-reading your comment, maybe you meant the fact that the servers were exclusively in the US (until very recently).
The only thing that unfortunately matters here is that Fastmail has a US incorporation.
Fastmail even writes as such:
> If what you need is a guarantee that your data remains only in the EU, we don’t have that, and we’d rather tell you directly than let you assume otherwise.
Also iCloud paid accounts allow custom domains for email. The Apple mail product is way worse but it was amazingly simple to set up and I am happy I have my own domain.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/16278789555215-A...
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/an-mcp-server-for-fastmail/
> That distinction matters to us. Our long-term values include “Your data belongs to you” and “We are good stewards of your data”. The pattern we try to follow is: rather than continuously reworking our UI to follow every new trend, we give you the interfaces to use your data however it suits you. MCP continues that pattern. It’s there if you want it, and nothing changes if you don’t.
An MCP Server for Fastmail – National Email Day - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47870988 - April 2026 (14 comments)
I have had no problem getting a human for customer support in a timely manner.
(fastmail customer)
Only problem (and a big one) is just fact it is US company
There was a moment a while back when 1Password made some decision (I think abandoning delphi?) that made me take a step back and ask if they were a security company or not. In moments like this, I wonder if Proton's pitch is security or not. Even if this is a true take, I think someone saying that they need to be cautious and pentest something before launch is a valid concern, for a security company. Not all companies are security companies, but Proton specifically advertises itself as being security and privacy conscious. It is a bad look for a security company to do something that indicates a lack of security prowess.
I think the writing on the wall for manually writing every line of code is obvious, but that does not obviate the need to secure things. However, pushing for speed at the expense of security, AI or not, is a bad look for a security company.
The sender and the receiver both have a copy of the email. The receiver's MTA pretty much has to have a copy of the email for sane antispam to work. Email itself intrinsically leaks the sender, recipient, and time as part of the SMTP message, which means anyone with access to email server logs can recover this information no matter how much security and encryption you try to put on top of it, and that means that whatever three-letter agency you care about probably has access to all the information they want anyways.
The only meaningful difference in security is going to be whether or not the outgoing MTA is going to try to use (or even require) TLS on the MTA-MTA connection, and what level of encryption is applied to the at-rest email.
Personally, I'm not too fussed about a mail system administrator being able to read my email because of the BOFH principle... it's not worth the sysadmin's time to read my email, because it's just not interesting.
"can technically read your emails but is motivated to protect your data"
and
"is an advertising company that mines your emails to sell ads targeting you, specifically".
> “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
This is the leader behind Proton? I think I need to be more on social media and pay attention to this. This single sentence, if true, has now made me decide to never pay Proton again. That's it. Done. I had email services, VPN, and was considering storage too. Nope.
I am so sick an tired of AIBrained CEO's. All this does is validate how much these people do not need to exist. They just don't. Their thinking is useless. Their in-grouping and in-breeding of mentality is psychosis at large. And now that feel, once again, they can take their masks off, it's time to start looking them in the face and saying, "No."
I gather that the current CEO holds a majority of the shares. Is he susceptible at all to wiser counsel?
I mean, I also appreciate the honesty of the CEO to say that security is not important anymore and if it is to you, this company is not a good fit anymore.
Letting people go for invented reasons isn't something that happens in civilized countries, by the way.
Keywords: bypass paywall
that comment about "loser thinking" sounds like he's not the best at communication
These are people you do not give time, attention, or money.
Have people completely lost their humanity? Is winning at whatever you’re doing that important we can’t be equally obligated to show each other decency?
The problem is that being optimistic creates massive cognitive disconnects in engineering teams who are trained to think in terms of systemic failure modes. There isn't the same practice of systemic success modes (perhaps that's the role of product managers?)
Anyway, this type of CEO is pushing his brand of 'optimism' down the org chart and making anyone who feels different an outcast, hence his choice of words.
Yen says there is an existential crisis, Proton employees must adjust to survive, and those who don't agree or raise concerns are losers. Yen's behavior also strongly implies a future of abuse.
Happy days are ahead!
In my interpretation of the words, I tend to think of optimism as being the brave thing because having hope is more difficult, and IME, you can only muster energy to solve a problem if hope exists. Conversely, pessimism to me feels cheap and easy, and if you say "everything's fucked, what's the point" then nothing gets solved
So, it's probably more of a quadrant/compass along the axes of optimism/pessimism and proactive/passive
Knowing you can solve it doesn't mean you assume it'll get solved without effort.
It just means you're confident the problems will get solved. Pessimism stems from a perceived lack of control in my experience.
They aren't just not immune - often enough, particularly when it comes to anti-LGBT hate, religious speeches of all kinds are fueling the fire. And that's before we get into the serious Evangelical backing of the Trump administration, Hegseth being almost a crusader [1] or the worst of the worst who believe that there needs to be a holy war in Israel to incite Armageddon [2].
This kind of shit gets a lot of people killed.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/06/pete-hegse...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/us-evangelical...
Maybe they'll start unionising more, back in the days as long as they had a coffee and a chair they never complained...
Oh trust me. We knew all along but we always viewed 'other employees' as lower caste deserving of the disdain they get.
One positive outcome of ai coding is that now they have been bought back down to earth with fear of god put in them.
Projecting much? There has certainly been disdain towards other fields, but it mostly seems to be the management class that gets ripped by programmers the most. HR too sometimes.
Every discussion of Proton leadership shortcomings shows a market of users looking for a better run company.
And if it’s all AI developed moving forward, why not? There’s investors out there that would support Proton’s original engineers to fulfill Proton’s original mission, without the AI psychosis abandoning security as a top priority.
This is such a cop out response. They still need funding, and infrastructure, and to build up an entire customer base who presumably they would need to bribe with free service at a loss in order to attract anyone new. Who’s gonna fund that when there’s a known market ceiling for the service that’s already been captured? We’re not in ZIRP anymore
Compromising on pentesting and security reviews is not in line with their original mission. Their customer base (including employees) knows this.
so cool has always been about the “iykyk” kinda value. once too many people know there’s nothing to know anymore.
Pretty much, I found some very helpful words and perspectives on this from Michael Sandel - Tyranny of Merit. The winners begin to think there success is their own doing, forgetting the luck, good fortune, and many people who helped them along the way. They grow arrogant and full of hubris, looking down on and belittling others.
The question is then, how do we get out of this mess? Sandel offers some interesting foundations, along with Acemoglu.
Links to brain food:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50278616
Some of the best moments of growth that I've experienced have happened during adversity, when something I said or did was laid bare for me from another perspective, with all of the problems with my approach pointed out. Those moments are intensely uncomfortable in that moment but so valuable for long-run growth (provided you have enough of a check on your own ego and developed enough insight to learn from such experiences).
My guess is that this trend to sycophancy will happen in every hierarchical organization where individuals at the top are able to reshape their social environment to avoid uncomfortable moments that they don't wish to have. I think it takes someone truly exceptional to avoid creating that kind of reality for themselves, and why it's oh-so-common to see hyperinflated egos from the most powerful individuals.
That said, I would read the hell out of a non-fictional expose covering specifically just the sycophants around some of our most notoriously unhinged powerful people, ones that showed exactly who are applauding these Emperors Nero who play their citharas while their world burns.
I'm not making the connection, or can see several interpretations
can you expand?
Tech leaders have lost touch with people. And the top leaders — take your pick — have normalized shitty behavior.
I used to think Proton was good.
Not so, anymore.
I’m not supporting their products anymore. Cancelling my subscription
Grow the fuck up, all of you.
We live in a world where CEOs typically have gotten their position through nepotism, or fucking over many people to get to the top. It's just who they are.
Meanwhile, being a decent person carries very little benefit anymore. So it's probably not surprising that people no longer take the effort.
You're caught up in the toxic rhetoric and justification. Imagine how appealing decent management is now, as a competitive advantage.
And generally, being a decent person is more important than ever.
If you believe in what you do - and 'decency' (depending on definition) isn't hard to believe in, having a long track record and obvious advantages - it's relatively easy to be compelling.
Finally, don't work for the corp. Work someplace else. Start your own!
There has been a shift from "We" to "I". It rubbed me wrong when Apple launched the iPod, the iPhone, etc. In that moment, the world became more self-centered, instead of group-centered. Social media is the same, it's all about the individual: MY profile, MY followers, MY status.
It's anti-social by nature, and society is worse because of the shift.
Fun real life story: I worked with an engineer once who had some sort of disability that required him to walk around with crutches attached to his arms. Before he worked with me, he worked at Apple, and was high up.
One day he had a meeting with Jobs, and he was late, because a non-handicapped car had parked in the handicapped spot, and as a disabled person it took him a long time to get from a normal parking spot. He said as much when he arrived in the meeting.
Now here's the "Jobs is burning in hell right now" part. Jobs looks the disabled guy directly in the eye and, without any shame whatsoever, says "oh, I parked there ... I believe the US government overreacted after WW2 and built too many disabled parking spaces, so I park in them."
He says this ... to the sweaty disabled guy who just had to "race" across the parking lot to get to the meeting! Fuck Jobs and fuck emulating him.
The same nut case responsible for pushing industries forward is the same nutcase that blows up.
Society can decide not to reward such people but it doesn’t.
But he was still famous for working his teams an insane amount of hours throughout his career. It was an open "joke" that any new project he released would be completely unsupportable for the first week ... because he drove the entire team that built it so hard, the entire team crashed for a week after.
That is not how any healthy/reasonable adult runs any team, tech or otherwise.
"Do whatever you can get away with, with prioritization on local optimization with eager evaluation"
So basically, be an asshole/sociopath. The tennets of objectivism.
"morality" is basically memoized reinforcement learning over many human generations. So, it seems that the cache has been wiped out, and they need to learn again why they shouldn't be focusing on local optimization exclusively.
It's a team not a family.
The idea that demanding performance from your employees is "losing your humanity" is insane.
Obviously you can be a total prick and demand performance and maybe get some people onboard but nobody thrives in those environments and unless you want to deal with turnover and mediocrity you foster good working environments with your teammates
Demanding high performance also doesn't necessarily mean forcing everyone to work 996 or yelling at people, but it can mean enforcing standards that everyone might not like or agree with.
Even still, there are gradations of using AI. Yen seems to have been on a crusade to get everyone to vibe code the entire thing. Not a lot of high performing software engineers signing off on such practices either.
But performance isn’t a single thing. If you prioritize features over pen testing, you’re optimizing one kind of performance and neglecting security, which is an another kind.
For a company whose whole selling point is security, it’s a bad trade-off.
Yeah, calling people losers is a famously effective way to get performance out of your team.
Ah yes, as the old saying goes "team starts with 'my ' and there are no losers on my team"
Performance can be an expectation but don't try to shove shit down their throat unless you're willing to get it shoved down yours.
Fortunately the employer controls the relationship and can just fire employees with this kind of toxic attitude.
This is evil in ways most people probably don't understand. To explain, here is the real message behind this, stripped of neutral journalism language. I'm not going to be shocked if this is the actual hidden thought process.
"Hello. You have now worked at our company for 7 years, contributing thousands of hours of work towards making our products better. We regret to inform you that you are worthless. Your so-called 'contributions' don't deserve to be printed on toilet paper our CEO wipes with. Frankly, you are a waste of space sucking up the air inside our offices, and we are itching to get rid of degenerates like you at the first opportunity. Your only chance to temporarily offset our perception of your uselessness is our upcoming 20-minute degradation ritual where you'll dance to our whims and plead by showing how much you love using whatever our CEO says you'll use. Building good solutions, knowing our tech stack, working with other people, being creative? All worthless, just like you. What really matters is if you can make me feel good. Fuck you and get ready to crawl on your knees."
Same one as almost every other modern tech company. AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI
Shocking...
Any suggestions of a good email provider?
Also, a VPN that plays nicely with port forwarding for torrents?
It's insane that rational thought, even in engineering orgs, is out the window in favor of AI hype.
AI changes the Quality/Time tradeoff. As anyone with a even a little engineering background knows, that means you can,
How much time does it now take, using AI, to make 'High Assurance' software? Provably correct components? Other quality measures that were once out of reach? etc.And the capability of AI-resourced attackers makes higher-quality software necessary.
I don’t care you are hosted in Zwitserland, your CEO makes me distrust the company dearly.
Hopefully we’ll see those talented engineers leaving to build an alternative to Proton products now that we know corporate leadership at Proton can’t be trusted.
The board should really oust the “loser thinking” CEO and CTO if they want to minimize the damage to their brand.
The company not providing even a written statement in response to 404 reporting speaks volumes. They don’t see themselves accountable to their customers.
It is an entirely different ballgame of idiocy to write something like
> that’s looser thinking
In response to one of his employees in a company wide slack chat. How stupid and unaware of yourself and your surroundings do you have to be?
Put aside that this may even be a legal case in itself, what does this say about his leadership in general?