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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
"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.