Proton CEO Andy Yen: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers." | Hacker News Reader

Proton CEO Andy Yen: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers."

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Thanks for the heads up, Andy! I’ll find a new email and vpn provider. It was a good 7 years, admittedly.

Whereas I was thinking that I should start making the migration to Proton.

So, thanks to everyone for the advance warning!

So many thread replies are saying they are cancelling both their email and VPN accounts lol! Self-destructive tendencies all these hallucinated CEOs!

I think LLMs are showing you what was under the mask the whole time..

we've known CEOs are evil and deluded for decades

Instead of just reading a tweet that includes quote from an article, read the full article at https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-i...

Full archived / paywall free copy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20261029143048/https://www.404me...

Wow, their CEO seems like an absolute shithead. Made me lose any respect I had for the company.

Are there any good alternatives?

What are criteria to be a good alternative? I personally work for inbox.eu for the last 10 years

We are a small team and have experience with providing email services for almost 30 years.

Our management also is lately very pro AI and we are reevaluating how we will move forward with developing features

I concluded that the best alternative is to use a simple email host like iCloud with your own domain, which is free if you pay for their storage, and then move everything important to Signal.

fastmail, tutanola, couple other smaller providers

If they can vibe code the project without engineering then surely their users can too, right? I currently pay for Proton Pass but when mine renews next year I'd rather just give the money to Opus 6.5.

Serious answer:

- they provide a service, not software

- you'd also need a maintained /24 of IPs with good email reputation

- unless you want to only use an email client, you need to do lots of testing on the web editor part for how the formatting gets interpreted in other clients, how to render weird emails correctly, how to protect the privacy in external resources, and lots of other things

Even with an LLM that's both a multi-week implementation and an infra management project for life. Their users in general can't do that. (There's a handful that could)

Proton Pass, not their email service. Although I suspect things like the Cloudflare Email Service will expand by next year too.

> CEO Andy Yen wrote it to staff in Slack: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers." Starting next year, he said, Proton hires product managers to build things with AI.

That won't age well in the long term, especially and for a company that deals with security. Here's what Proton just did:

Rather than equipping more of your technical staff with AI to compete against the competition, they are dismissing them over it and not hiring anymore engineers on technical defense. Not only the competition has AI agents as well, the malicious attackers also do and will overwhelm Proton with swarms of them, non-stop with less staff.

This will be the beginning of the end of Proton as there will be no-one ready to defend the company when millions of abliterated frontier-level AI agents attack them at 25,000 tokens per second.

That isn't a secure future for Proton.

> “Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document...

Ummm, maybe I am crazy but I don't want the main metric for my privacy-first email provider to be ARR. How about security and privacy guarantees? How about bugs fixed? How about lowering the supply chain risk for the company? I care about a lot more than your ARR.

> That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure

> Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

I'm on the Proton "visionary" plan ($280/year) for my family. I'm more than happy to switch. Anyone have a suggestion as to where to re-home our email? I'm using custom domains for ~3 domains and control 3 people's email.

> Anyone have a suggestion as to where to re-home our email?

Fastmail Family should be a good fit for you.

This statement may end up true, but not for the reason he thinks.

I just helped a product manager friend host and run their app on a VPS.

It was a single file app.py flask app with over 10,000 lines of code. It had html and css defined as variables in that single file!

I am sure this is gonna end well.

Manager's of firm's will refuse to accept LLMs are a complement, and not a direct substitute for human capital - until things literally crash and burn and they lose significant market share.

    Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking...”

Ah, that explains the recent enshitification. Add some AI slop to this mess and you will soon be the centerpiece of haveibeenpwned

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692

Cutting costs to save a bit here and there is never a winning move because it doesnt create value.

Engineers at a tech company create value.

This will be the last year I have confidence in Proton as a product I should be using...

Guess I will be finding a new email provider...

Can anyone recommend good alternatives?

I’m been happy with Fastmail for years.

I’ve been with Mailbox.org for years and never had any problems

According to the article, Andy Yen was afraid of their competitor Tuta (https://tuta.com/). Maybe that's a good place to start.

Unfortunately that’s the reality we live in. How do you compete if your competition is willing to move fast and break things? I guess the only option is to move to a provider that doesn’t disclose it’s ai use. Am i too pessimistic?

You provide your customers with a service that gives them value. I've been a proton subscriber for 3 years because I value privacy and security. That's kind of (was) their whole thing. I didn't sign up hoping they would bolt on features and add a chatbot. I suspect that the majority of people using proton have a similar view, otherwise why bother with it?

Why can't they just provide the service people like them for and do it well? There's no reason to move at all, especially not if it means breaking things.

a company that does not move will die. cheaper/better competitors will emerge, people will migrate.

> a company that does not move will die.

Which is of course not true and just the usual SV/MBA bullshit.

Lots of businesses around the world are happy and successful where they are without chasing the latest fads or trying to be unicorns.

Maybe look outside the SV bubble sometime and learn about the real world.

An email service provider doesn’t need to move fast for any reason whatsoever, and should never, ever break things.

aye. email was solved years ago.

I don't need cutting edge features, I need a service that won't snoop on my shit and is otherwise reliable and trustworthy.

features like Proton Calendar and VPN make sense but again these aren't new concepts and don't require vibe coding or "move fast break things"

> How do you compete if your competition is willing to move fast and break things?

You focus on providing something that isn't broken. It's really that simple.

not so simple without using AI when attackers are. Proton being privacy oriented is a target of choice.

Shipping more feature doesn't make you more secure. Taking the time to evaluate and test what you are shipping does. The obvious conclusion is that if you want to go all-in on AI for some reason, you do so by using LLMs to do more testing in the same amount of time you would have used before. You supplement human expertise with LLMS.

You don't just yell at people to ship features faster, with less testing.

Fucking yikes. As someone that relies on Proton, I'm devastated to hear this. They have just completely destroyed their brand.

I’m also cutting cost with my proton subscription

What an utter moron lmao.

Sigh, I'd just started the migration to proton.

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