Proton's CEO Cancels AI 'Re-Interviews'
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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.
There was a point a few decades ago with architecture where people moved off blueprints to CAD files, and everyone had to learn CAD or be pushed out, which lead to terrible churn and people I know got kicked out of architecture for good. This is a similar situation; they're not kicking out engineers for being 5% less productive, they're re-interviewing to find engineers who are 1/10th or 1/100th as productive as their peers. It sucks, and I feel bad for people who have to fear for their job, but it's a necessary action
I can honestly say no. I might question your premise a little. Lets hypothetically say you got Karpathy level senior; clearly a star and beam of sunshine in an otherwise dreary world. Is he now less of a star just because he won't use AI?
It is a real question, because if he is then the question becomes why.
Did he simply stop working as much? Or is he working the same amount, but it looks like he is doing less? If it merely looks like it, we may well have office situation on our hands, where rank and file may end up turning to management and asking themselves and the management one simple question:
What exactly it is you are doing here?
I know for a fact good management can enable some things, but I am starting to question the blind fervor I seem to see more of lately. If you can't motivate Karpathy or worse, you now are suddenly are unable to see his value, then maybe it is not Karpathy's fault.
<< This is a similar situation; they're not kicking out engineers for being 5% less productive, they're re-interviewing to find engineers who are 1/10th or 1/100th as productive as their peers
And this may be the big part: productivity. The problem is that productivity along the lines of silly metrics like: lines of code, agents commits per engineer are.. uhh.. not useless exactly, but, how do I phrase it a sensible way so that it reaches at least one stray manager that watches this conversation,
*really fucking dumb metric to treat as a measure stick.*
But who am I to judge.
<< but it's a necessary action
None of it is necessary. By definition it is all elective. That said, the nature of that relationship goes both ways and, I will be super subtle here, right now it is not the engineers, who can't do it all.
Quite the opposite, management could find itself in a pickle now, because it has neither skill to drive the development, practical knowledge that you only get from getting to close to the abyss, 'taste', theoretical foundation, curiosity or even basic exposure that would it let develop either of the previous facets.
Make no mistake, a lot of us choose to do deal with some of the idiocy for a stability gain. But, if there is none, why do I need you? I might as well try to strike out on my own and watch the AI coded towers fall ( being mildly dramatic for visual purposes; amusingly, I don't think I am that far off ) .
I don't even know where to start. Let me just say it that by using LLMs you voluntarily decide to let the atrophy happen to your skills, knowledge and experience. You do things without understanding them, or with vague understanding only. Your thinking process becomes completely dependent on something that you find more and more difficult to verify (if you even care). Why would anyone do such a thing to oneself?
Sure, they may churn out a lot more code, but what is the quality of that code? What is the security of that code?
Can you prove that the code they are generating is actually having a material impact on the bottom line?
If the AI tools suddenly became too expensive to use, could those engineers go back to doing things the way they once did?
If you want to vibe code, feel free to do that on your own personal projects. For everything else, you need to be able to demonstrate that what you’re doing is not just fluffing your lines-of-code metrics, or your tokenmaxxing metrics, and actually demonstrate real-world positive impact on your bottom line.
Maybe in a few years, we will get to a point where no one will need those skills anymore, and all that stuff will be done locally, so we don’t need any more massive datacenter projects that suck down all the power and all the cooling and create more problems than they solve.
But we are not there today. And the way that the AI bubble is already crumbling, I’m not convinced that we will get there any time soon.
It’s useful, but it really doesn’t matter that much.
I see AI's main value-add right now as a ready-made excuse/bludgeon to finally let CEOs explore exactly how dogshit they can make everything while still having users.
"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.
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/PROTON-Reviews-E13574.htm
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.
It can, but it depends on how "googled" you allowed yourself to become in the first place. For me, that's not much at all. But if you've been all-in (or near it) for years, with tons of docs, your photo archive, etc. all tied to google, then yeah, moving away is gonna be difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
I guess they didn't like my reply of "many"
https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Proton-privacy...
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 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.)
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.
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.
He seems to no longer understand that, and he might run a decent business to the ground with his delusions.
I’ll definitely not be renewing my subscription to their service, I can tell you that much.
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.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region...
> 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.
Vouched, no idea why this comment was dead.
For all the shit they get, every controversy they've ever had has boiled down to a comms issue. They've been consistent for decades and I trust them, even if they often make weird business decisions.
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.
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.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/16278789555215-A...
> 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)
at least when i contacted fastmail support early this year, i had no problem getting in touch with a real person and asking follow up inquiries back and forth in a timely manner.
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.
Only problem (and a big one) is just fact it is US company
I get better support from AWS as a $30 per month customer than I did with GCP and Google Workplace spending $300k per month at work.
We're deliberately keeping things simple. No AI, no scanning your emails for other purposes, and no selling your data. That's not something we're planning to change.
The focus is on doing email well: deliverability, reliability, and keeping our outbound reputation clean through strict anti-spam policies.
We support SMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and custom domains. It's fairly bare-bones, and we expect customers to know their way around email config.
It's also just $5/year.
> “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."
"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".
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.
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.
And the capability of AI-resourced attackers makes higher-quality software necessary.
I gather that the current CEO holds a majority of the shares. Is he susceptible at all to wiser counsel?
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.
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.
Any suggestions of a good email provider?
Also, a VPN that plays nicely with port forwarding for torrents?
I don’t care you are hosted in Zwitserland, your CEO makes me distrust the company dearly.
Keywords: bypass paywall
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?
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?
Maybe they'll start unionising more, back in the days as long as they had a coffee and a chair they never complained...
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.
I’d wager that most of their current customers have left something else to sign up for Proton in the first place, because of the privacy and security offering.
When Proton leadership abandons those values in favor of “move fast, break things, lay off engineers”, their customers are more likely to follow the people that take privacy and security seriously.
The CEO and CTO have made it clear that they want vibe-coded product updates without pentesting before exposing their customers to whatever may happen.
If you bought into Proton for privacy and security, that’s a red flag and a sign to find an alternative.
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.
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:
I'm not making the connection, or can see several interpretations
can you expand?
This line from the poster. Its been my experience over 30 years.
Or forever, if you want to generalize to human nature
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.
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.
It takes exactly 0 talent to sit in a room and tell someone their worldclass effort is "not good enough". Just as it takes 0 ingenuity to say "I want a manned return mission to mars by 2030"... Just because the executive says it doesn't mean they're contributing anything of worth to the outcome.
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.
Society has nothing to do with this, as pretty every member of society would agree the above is atrocious behavior. What you're saying is that the entire human system is bad about rewarding people at the top appropriately ... which is absolutely true, but its not about people wanting it that way; EVERYONE (except the 0.0001% at the top) wants it another way ... we just can't figure out how to get there.
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.
> The "i" in iPhone originally stood for internet. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the lowercase "i" prefix with the iMac in 1998 to highlight the computer's fast, out-of-the-box web connectivity. During the launch, Jobs also revealed that the letter represented four other concepts: • Individual: For personal use and computing. • Instruct: For education and learning. • Inform: For accessing information. • Inspire: For creativity and future innovations.
In a more generous light, the focus on the individual is a reaction to an Authoritarian groupthink, eg 1984. Perhaps it’s just the Cobra Effect.
so cool has always been about the “iykyk” kinda value. once too many people know there’s nothing to know anymore.
yeah, thats not the case anymore, it stopped being cool sometime in the last 2 years, unfortunately. Just fyi if someone hasnt realized yet.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
It takes a special kind of pomposity to come out and defend the cultivation of a power structure in which people are dehumanized and berated for practising their discipline with diligence.
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.
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.
Yeah, calling people losers is a famously effective way to get performance out of your team.
But when one side can do it and the other side can’t, it’s just a demonstration of power edging into abuse.
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!
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...
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.
Shocking...
Same one as almost every other modern tech company. AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI
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."
Cult like activity like this is never good for anyone, in business or politics.
It's like the AI bros have handed out a cocktail of cocaine, benzos and fent to tech CEOs. They're hooked and going mad