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. 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.”
In a follow-up message, 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.”
This sounds like the most insecure loser statement I’ve ever heard. Andy Yen and the rest of the Proton Execs seem to have fully bought into the man-o-sphere in the same way that every basement incel has.
I hate winner mentality. Competition is an artifact left over from our evolution and society has historically reinforced it because it resulted in better outcomes for the in group to the detriment of the whole. Eventually we’ve reached a point where people can compete against each other on unimportant things for no reason other than competing, which was also celebrated as a spectacle. Now we’re at the point where people are applying the same “competition for competition’s sake” attitude to things that do matter even to the detriment of the in group and themselves. And it is still celebrated because competition and winning has such a strong association with betterment in our culture. We will not improve as a society until we start viewing the desire to win as antisocial behavior.
I was out as soon as this dropped but anyone still in may want to reconsider.
Holy shit this CEO is fully unhinged, I feel so much for the employees at Proton. What the fuck. I like Proton products T.T
I have never bought into the Proton hate seen on Lemmy, as most if not all of it came from a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works. And if anything, this report confirms that the employees inside Proton really do seem to care about the product.
But ultimately, if the CEO is this hostile internally, those employees will leave and the product will just enshittify at an exponential rate. This is actually some very damning insight into the future of Proton.
Proton has a couple competitors that are viable to switch to, if not somewhat half baked next to Proton. But it’s important to understand for the people who have been berating Proton for handing over metadata to authorities and similar things, that Tutanota and other competitors will have all the same problems. Tuta is based in Germany which is a member of 14 eyes, and will if anything be more susceptible to the whims of the US government than Proton was.
You can help us by spreading this https://molecule.build/
we need collective worker power at proton
This was enough for me to jump ship, after some research fastmail seems to meet my needs. Sure its not a perfect replacement but im willing to miss out on some features to avoid funding this kind of behaviour. Voted with my wallet
The same CEO who, a while ago, praised the Republicans? How can a company under someone like that ever be “privacy first”? If I remember correctly, there were a lot of people acting as if this wouldn’t affect the products in of itself, but how could it not?
My thoughts exactly! I was banned on a Reddit sub for critiquing him. Seems he really has his fanboys.
I switched to Mullvad and Tuta yesterday. Still working on moving password managers. I’ve let some things slide in the past but Yen has turned into such a big asshole. Proton deserves a better CEO.
Holy shit, well that slipped through my research. Time to checkout IVPN, maybe?
Isnt the founder of mullvad just as much of an asshole funding far right politics etc ? Not meant as a criticism of you, I’m in the same boat trying to move my stuff and its so fucking frustrating that so many of these companies are either led by psychopaths or being enshittified in other ways. I guess I’m looking more and more at self hosting shit again, but that also scares me a bit for stuff like email and password managers and hardware prices are insane… But either way I’m definitely spreading everything out to different companies this time… Not looking forward to changing my login email on every single website again after just having moved it to proton about 2 years ago…
So far I’ve come up with:
Email: Tuta seems okay
PW-Manager: Found no good service yet, self hosting Vaultwarden seems like an option but I read some concerning things about changing company structures at Bitwarde wich it depends on that implies them possibly moving away from FOSS
VPN: Dont know honestly
Calendar: Im with murena from /e/os seems fine for now
Cloud Storage: Dont really need this, as i have everything on my server but i need a better backup strategy for that server and my god harddisk prices are crazy…
Yeah i completely missed that during my research and am back using Proton until my subscription expires. I had a custom domain which made switching to Tuta easier
Some choice quotes:
“The CEO is in full AI psychosis and has been for a while now,” one of the sources told 404 Media.
I think it’s important to use the term “AI psychosis” until it becomes mainstream. There’s power in simplifying, in two words, the mental illness that has spread to nearly every major-company CEO and C-suite MBA hump. And until it becomes a meme, until they know the general public sees them and knows they are blindly confident in something they don’t understand, that we know they are conning themselves and us, they won’t spare a moment of introspection to reconsider.
“Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”
Let’s unpack this. The programmers are concerned about Proton’s push for security, and they push back on objectively unmaintainable AI code - to say nothing of Yen’s bullying to push to live before it’s even tested - and this is Yen’s response. In essence: Security does not matter more than the perception of speed.
This is demonstrably idiotic, because security issues are the “truth” being undermined here, and when someone hacks or compromises key parts of your service, that will be far more damaging some CEO-naval-gazing version of “look how fast we are.”
In all, the many quotes from engineers really do the job convincing that this guy is not just a bad CEO, but a bad person. I’m sure to Board members or billionaires, this type of psychopathy and lack of empathy looks like a feature and not a bug. This probably won’t change that, but every moment spent holding up a mirror helps.
I guess I’ll say it here, but I have always had weird feelings about proton. They are always marked as the top of privacy alternatives to Google. I was never sold on it though and figured that the shit would hit the fan eventually
I wish I could just throw out email and calendars as a service and still live in the modern world. I really don’t like my only options for them being having to host it myself with all the pitfalls that can come with or using services controlled by data brokers like Google, shit heads like this guy apparently is, or our way or the highway gatekeepers like Apple.
I just want to give someone money to let me point my domain at it for email services and host my calendar without any drama or BS. Why does that concept have to be so complicated these days?
Crap, time to drop Proton and find an alternative.
What a sorry excuse of a human. Fuck that guy.
so much for this ‘protection’
The fortunes of mail and VPN provider Proton will be managed by a foundation in the future. In this way, the founders around Andy Yen want to ensure the independence and direction of their company for the future and remove it from the influence of profit-oriented shareholders.
(emphasis mine) from heise.de
and like half the shit in this blog post written by lord proton himself, andy yen, ceo, announcing that foundation.
if this (op link) is any indication of how he treats those who work for proton, this guy needs to go… founder or not… ceo or not.
he was already skating on the proverbial thin ice with his magat/trump support.
Time for them to jettison this asshole.
I wonder why revenue is flat. Could it be the CEO making dumb statements which alienate their user base?
I bet it’s that. I bet management of the niche company doesn’t understand their market and why they got popular in the first place.
Now I’ve got to figure out replacements for their services.
VPN -> Mozilla VPN? Mail Relay -> Firefox Relay? Mail -> Tuta? (Need ~5 custom domains and lots of email addresses) Calendar -> Tuta? Drive -> ??? Docs -> ??? Notes -> ???
This leadership mentality doesn’t look good for the future of Proton.
They want to appear that they are about security but seems they are more in boat with Microsoft, now and into the future, of AI does all the work.
Do they think this is gonna play well with their security minded base?
Cancelling isn’t that hard.
Going to be migrating some of my info and deleting my account later today. They’ve been making bad headlines a bit lately but this paints a very clear and bleak picture. This company is completely fucked unless it has a total change in both leadership and company policy.
We’ve all been down this road before with these AI-obsessed dickweed tech CEO’s. We know how this ends.
