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.”
“Loser talk” is something a fucking 4chan basement dweller would say. I hate how society is just the stupidest fucks at the forefront now.
Stupid fucks keep getting money from evil fucks because evil is controlling the stupid to do bad things without understanding what’s being asked until it’s too late.
Maybe I’m a particularly sensitive, spiteful snowflake, but if the boss of my company accused me of being a “loser” because I cared about the quality of the product, I’d be looking to deliberately sabotage the product. And for a new job, of course.
Many of us are in exactly that position with our employers, but finding another job in this climate is easier said than done.
Ah, yes, once again the old adage “When they show you they are, believe them” has proved it never fails.
A happy Proton paying customer, I bailed within a week when Andy made his pro GOP/trump comments some time back.
Folks said I over reacted. I handed them that adage. It was right.
Protons top “loser” engineers will find themselves welcomed elsewhere. What a disaster Proton has become under Yen.
Stop giving Proton money
WTF? Is he 12 years old?
Is this really true?The business culture is sick. This way of thinking is not limited to just a few people.
Andy Yen sounds like an asshole.
I still need to move away from Gmail, but it’s probably not going to be to Proton.
He sounds like my manager. For him AI is a silver bullet for every problem.
Ah shit balls! 3 months into a paid up email, calendar, drive and VPN suite. Have moved a lot of files over. Will start looking again, but definitely separating everything from now
I just got out of my 1 year membership with them and happily moved over to tutamail and selfhosting 😅
My membership end in march… Tome to find another mail hoster.
Everything is going this way, best to set up a list of things to do to help yourself move quickly each time, you’re going to be doing it a lot.
Great strategy and one I’ve adopted (now).
RIP Proton.
Privacy minded people tend to also want security.
Get rid of Andy Proton
I commented before from the summary. Read as much of the 404 story as I can now.
It’s bad. If I didn’t trust 404 Media, I might think this was a hit piece. But 404 does good work and I trust their journalists. I should really subscribe!
Social media is prone to instant lynch mobs, one of its worst aspects. I do not intend to rage quit. But I WILL re-evaluate in 3 months. Just marked my calendar. They need to very publicly reverse course, AND restore my trust. I believe in giving ppl and co’s a chance to learn from mistakes, or nobody ever gets wiser. But I need to see that happen, or me and my $ are out.
I also no longer trust Andy’s judgement. The Proton engineers are saying the right things. Again I trust 404’s homework, or I would be much more skeptical of all of this.
Vote on making him step down
Well…some people are linux distro hopping and me…email hopping…f*uck
guess its time to host my own email
I’m on a 2 year family plan in proton that has to be around 1 year in. Now, in the last few months I’ve been upping my game in self-hosting, even for our family business (moved from Zoho Workplace to a VPS with Nextcloud and MXroute for email, with mandatory PGP for internal emailing and all files in next loud encrypted, and it’s been great, but it does come with some extra work for me).
I spent the last 2 days deploying stalwart in the same VPS with a domain I wasn’t using to test it as a potential email server to self-host when Proton’s subscription ends. It seems to be working well, I even got it to e2ee between that and my Proton email (
can’t get Tuta to accept a single email from it though, still need to tinker a bit it seems). Using SMTP2Go for outbound emails (free gives me 1,000 emails sent every month, ans I know my 6 family users together don’t send even 500 emails in a month combined) to avoid the VPS IP address from being blacklisted if something goes wrong.I urge everyone to try it. It is not as easy to implement as they try to make it in YouTube videos, specially if you try to use as many security and privacy features as possible, but it is the easiest email server I have ever tried to implement, and I believe it is absolutely feasible for personal stuff (not too sure about business, so I’ll stick to MXroute for that for now).
If you have an unused domain (maybe a used one that you don’t rely on for emailing) and some space in your homelab or in a VPS, Stalwart + SMTP2Go is a fun and potentially productive project to give a shot.
Edit: I just went into my Tuta account and the emails are there. Seems it was an impatience issue more than it was technical 😁
Ugh.
I’ve heard Andy interviewed. Couple times. He came across as personable and likable. But that takes a backseat if he’s gonna steer his company off a cliff and I have to stop trusting their products. Even smart people can make dumb choices. Esp when no one is empowered to push back. It can get pathological, when the CEO starts to believe they walk on water.
Frankly I think the Proton Foundation needs to sit Andy down and have a heart to heart.
Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
Bro is all in on AI and even he doesn’t seem to consider “prompt engineers” actual engineers.
