cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology@piefed.social/p/2533091/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job
So if I’m reading this right, Proton is re-interviewing their entire staff, focusing on how they’ve integrated AI into their workflow, and if they aren’t using AI as much as management wants they’re likely to lose their jobs?
That is extremely disappointing.
Posteo is suddenly looking very shiny.
Tuta is good. Waiting on their drive.
Tuta cancelled my free account because their automated system detected fraud. This occurred after 24 hours of updating my contacts within Tuta and signing up for some services. I appealed and they only apologized for the inconvenience but kept the account closed.
Other people have posted similar stories but after a YEAR of use their email randomly because inaccessible. So Tuta isn’t a viable alternative for me as a Proton user.
Damn, second negative response. I guess I am leaving them but I just do t want proton - they give me the ick of wannabe big tech.
I just want a drive, calendar and email that is private.
Posteo seems like the only good option there… Sadly they don’t allow custom domains because of some hand-wavy “privacy” crap that boils down mostly to vendor lock-in like tuta.
There is a new belgian co-op company Nubo trying to break into the market, but they are tiny and running a nextcloud instance on-prem for storage. Performance is likely to not be great.
vendor lock-in like tuta.
Higher tiers allow custom-domains.
No IMAP, doesn’t support open standards, proprietary encryption, no compatability with 3rd party apps/mail clients. You get forced to use their app and have none of your mails locally. Also, since their encryption is proprietary, they only support password less encryption between tuta users, so 99% of users will only ever have encrypted mail with the tuta advertisements/announcement (though they market the “encrypted” angle extremely hard.
Not to mention all of their apps are exclusively web and electron and perform badly with a very very barebones user interface and options. Also the search is pretty bad. All things that would be fixed if they support open standards. I really dislike using their apps and interface with my account.
I’ve been using Startmail for a while now. I’m not sure if it has a drive function because I never looked for that, but it does let you create an unlimited number of semipermanent and temporary ‘alias’ email addresses, and you can use a custom domain, if you set one up
Apparently Tuta sucks, which really sucks as I was halfway through migrating my email to them. Now I have to start over with Posteo and wait for them to do something stupid
TIL about tuta, aside from my shitty experience with their mobile app now.
Give it 5 years and that shiny will ware off. That’s the damn problem. Nothing last forever and everything goes to shit eventually.
At some point you just gotta settle for the devil you know.
If you still have the energy to most posteo is fantastic from what I have heard tho.
I’m just tired man, I just want to stop having to think about politics in my fucking email.
Does posteo support custom domains yet?
No and they don’t plan on it, as far as I know.
Ok yeah, and I understand why that is. I just need a custom domain or I’d be right there.
If all you need is solid email hosting, I can vouch for Migadu. I’ve been using them for years with my own domains. Been perfectly reliable at reasonable costs.
+1 They’re great and their customer support is the best I’ve ever used, since it just connects you to their engineers.
To save people from diving into the Reddit swamp. Here is Proton’s response from a similar post over there:
Just to clarify, Proton is not doing layoffs and using AI as an excuse. We actually have a big shortage of talent and are actively hiring across the org: https://proton.me/careers#jobslist
AI is changing the tech industry and we, like everyone else, need to evolve our ways of working to remain effective in our industry, and to deliver features faster to users.
Proton exists to protect privacy and give people control over their digital lives. That commitment guides how we evaluate and use AI, including the tools we use internally. We see opportunities to build better products and work more effectively, but using AI requires judgment about privacy, security, accuracy, and where it adds actual value.
We are assessing how colleagues are adapting to these tools, what support they need, and who can help lead this work. We’re looking for concrete improvements in their work and thoughtful decisions about when to use AI - and when not to.
To do this, we’re in the process of figuring out who among our existing colleagues are the best future leaders, assessing whether everyone has the skills they need to take a step forward in a post-AI world, and making sure we are offering the support that is necessary, to those who need it, to succeed.
In the interest of transparency, the full email that was sent to some of our staff can be found below:
Dear,
AI is fundamentally changing how we build products and how we work. The capabilities Proton needs are evolving, and we must accelerate our transformation to remain competitive and deliver on our mission.
Getting this right is critical to Proton’s future. We need people who can translate AI’s capabilities into better products, stronger execution, and new ways of working—and who approach this change with curiosity, judgment, and urgency.
Last week, Andy interviewed more than 40 senior leaders across Engineering and Product to begin this process. We are now extending re-interviews more broadly to assess how people are adapting to AI and whether they have the capabilities and approach needed for Proton’s next phase.
This is also an opportunity to identify people who can lead the transformation. Those who demonstrate the ability to rethink their work, put AI into practice, and help others adapt may have opportunities to take on greater responsibility, accelerate their development as leaders, and shape Proton’s future.
What does this mean for you?
• Not everyone may be invited to a re-interview.
Given the scale and timeframe, interviews will be prioritized based on the organization’s assessment needs. Whether you receive an invitation should not, on its own, be interpreted as an individual outcome. Any decisions affecting your employment will be communicated separately.
• For those that get invited, re-interviews will take place November 4–11.
Further details about scheduling, format, and preparation will be shared centrally.
• Your interviewer will be outside your team and reporting line.
Interviewers will be selected from a pool of leaders who demonstrate strong AI capability and have aligned on the assessment criteria.
• Expect a discussion about how you think and work.
We want to understand how you apply AI to real problems, how it has changed your approach, where you see opportunities to improve, and how you expect your role to evolve.
• Come prepared with concrete examples.
Be ready to discuss what you have changed in your work, the results, what you have learned, what has not worked, and what you would do differently. A list of tools alone will not demonstrate this.
• Your ability to adapt matters alongside your current capabilities.
We will explore how you learn, challenge established ways of working, exercise judgment, and act on the opportunities AI creates.What are the consequences?
These re-interviews are consequential. Interviewers will document their assessments, which will inform the broader review of our organization and talent. That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment. Individual outcomes will be communicated directly once decisions are finalized.
The process will also help us identify people ready to take on broader scope and leadership responsibilities as Proton evolves.We recognize that this process creates uncertainty. We will be clear about what has been decided and what remains open, and communicate individual outcomes as soon as we can.
Please take the re-interview seriously and come prepared to discuss your actual work, your experience with AI, and how you can contribute to Proton’s next phase.Today at 4pm CET, there will be a call for recipients of this email to answer a few more logistical questions.
The meeting will be taking place on this Proton Meet Link
Best,
LOL.
This is sleazy AI drafted corporate speak confirming everyone’s supposition: we’re pivoting to AI and if you’re not on board you’re fired.
I guaran-fucking-tee the interview will be fed to a model for analysis and scoring.
Yeah - people in here commenting it “doesn’t sound that bad” etc - this is boilerplate for a restructuring/layoffs period, they’re going to fire a ton of people.
Yes.
And I guess they’re going to need to fire people now, because their entire consumer base is privacy minded folks, which tend to be anti-AI.
What the actual fuck. Wow.
I do love this era where C-level execs have somehow become too stupid for PR training though. It’s easy to say that they can do what they want, but in this case, the crap theyve spewed is going to cause serious damage to their brand, ya love to see it.
Did they even read what they wrote? They say they’re not doing layoffs, but the internal email states that interview performance could impact “continued employment”. Anyone getting that absolutely should be worried about their job.
This is a performance review tied to AI.
The primary use of performance reviews is to manufacture a reason to fire someone.
If you’ve worked somewhere with no or only very perfunctory reviews you can tell that there are some advantages to having some kind of system in place
This though is a major turnoff from Proton.
The problem is at this rate if we keep dropping things because companies are stupid.
We will have literally nothing left.
I don’t know about you but building the infrastructure and services proton has is not something i can do. Like some of it I can self host and I do. But like that’s only a fraction it cost more to do it myself then I would spend in years letting them handle it. And it would be less reliable and strain my already tight food budget.
'm just running out of companies that aren’t actively kicking puppies.
So either I become a luddite and stop using technology or I’m stuck accepting reality isn’t a magical wonderland where fucked up assholes are in charge of basically everything.
All good points. I’m now leaning proton skeptical but jot ready to pack up and leave. Might try to scale back and diversify - Kagi is apparently coming out with a mail service and I’ve been fairly happy with them overall.
I think what we are seeing here is both potentially just shitty corporate culture on the one hand, and AI triple down on the other.
Honestly thats the healthiest outlook. We should all be skeptical any time we use a service. Diversification and not throwing all in is a soild middle ground.
Honestly my read on this tho at this point having looked and thought on it more, is that it could be anything from proton struggling to find talent and accepting the fact AI is just a fact of reality. And checking who in the company is willing to work with ai and who isn’t before they make a big company wide shift in how they operate is frankly a good idea.
It reads as a possible lay off or a smart move from up high to get a feel for the workers opinions. Or any combo inbetween. Its hard to say with what we have here.
So i am not holding my breath its just the overlords from up high being smart. But its not impossible.
I don’t know about you but building the infrastructure and services proton has is not something i can do.
I can. I don’t want to. But I guess we’re getting there.
And I have few illusions that they won’t just illegally under-price their services to put me out of business if I expand enough to take on costs beyond my own.
This is all some bullshit. Sorry.
I guess thats a better way to put it. I could do it. But i can’t afford to, and don’t have the time or will to do it in a manner that would create more work for myself. Not to mention the risk of some uptight corpo lobbying to ruin everything if enough of us do it.
This definitely sounds better than the headline indicated:
Just to clarify, Proton is not doing layoffs and using AI as an excuse. We actually have a big shortage of talent and are actively hiring across the org: https://proton.me/careers#jobslist […] we’re in the process of figuring out who among our existing colleagues are the best future leaders, assessing whether everyone has the skills they need to take a step forward in a post-AI world, and making sure we are offering the support that is necessary, to those who need it, to succeed.
However the actual letter to employees seems to undermine it (emphasis added):
That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment. Individual outcomes will be communicated directly once decisions are finalized.
Hey managers, don’t do this shit. If they had just stopped at “may lead to changes in roles and responsibilities” this would probably be fine, people understand that team structures sometimes need to change or modernize. But don’t lie to your employees and tell them it’s not about layoffs when that is in fact a possible outcome. If you need to do some layoffs, it should be entirely separate and part of the normal performance eval process, not done via some BS re-interview under a team who probably doesn’t even understand the work.
Yeah, it seems to obvious to me that you should never say something like “this could affect your continued employment,” even if it’s true! That means that all of the staff are worried about their jobs, even ones you have no plans to lay off at all. Such a shitty thing to say, causing unnecessary stress to everyone. It totally feels like a threat. I’ve been through a similar (but honestly worse) mismanagement scenario at work, and I still 100% trust the company less, even though I’m still here 2 years later.
I expect this entire situation is a way to get people to quit voluntarily and gain leverage over people who remain via increased workload/threat of further layoffs.
Yeah, it’s undeniably hostile and will not make for the best working environment.
We actually have a big shortage of talent
That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment. Individual outcomes will be communicated directly once decisions are finalized.
Knowing how the hiring/onboarding process works in IT — i.e. how fucking hard it is to find, hire, onboard, train and build up a working relationship with an adequate employee — I strongly doubt they have a “shortage of talent” if they’re willing to fire (or even just threaten to fire) people over what amounts to tooling use.
Oh, also, if I got an email threatening my “continued employment” over shit like this I’d be looking for a new job ASAP. And I have been using LLMs for my work for a couple of years now.
Thanks for providing this information to think more critically about the post headline, unfortunately the headline is described accurately. 💀
Thanks for this.
That review may lead to changes in roles, responsibilities, and continued employment.
Here come the Bobs.
deleted by creator
You are missing the part of the statement where they stated that they copied Protons official response from reddit to save people from the reddit swamp
You’re right, … I even read that. Then my high ass forgot. I’m so sorry for my stupidity.
Clearly you just aren’t high enough to have looped back around into highly functional
Man that whole thing just reeks of corpo bullshit lingo. The email even seems LLM generated. Imagine getting fired because you don’t want an LLM to do your job for you.
God dammit, I just moved emails over to Proton like 3 years ago. Now I gotta move everything out again. Why does every company have to become garbage? Can I just have ONE company I have a service with that doesn’t become garbage eventually? Ugh.
I don’t want your ai, make your email and calendar better
Executives: “But how do we do that without the incredible investment of AI?!”
Developer, sitting in the corner, arms crossed and covered in cobwebs: “Harumph”
As a developer, our executives and stakeholders have really losed focus. It seems like 10-20 years ago we were being asked to solve tightly scoped problems. Now we get massive sprawling edicts, tons of how I want it, and the result is a very unpolished product. No one seems to care about basics or details anymore. This predates our current AI mess and the AI boom has only made things worse.
Decades ago we had engineers and devs rise up through the ranks to become a part of steering committees.
Now they’re all MBA/BPM/PMBOK people with either zero or superficial tech/dev knowledge.
You cannot “tightly scope” that which you cannot understand.
That gave me a good chuckle
I already stopped giving a shit about Proton after the CEO praised Trump, members of Trump’s cabinet, and the Republican party. Then claimed to still be “politically neutral”
Did he actually praise trump directly? If I recall correctly it was his admin pick that was praised
He did praise Trump directly on the admin pick.
Well the admin pick is even worse lol
It was worse, he thought Trump was going to regulate big IT business. Basically he believed Trump would fuck over Google so Proton could get more market share. Yes, a total piece of shit corporate tool who had no clue about US politics talking out his ass hoping it might benefit him.
The AI stuff is so frustrating. I’m terrified to really talk about how I feel about it, because my opinions are too nuanced to be shared in a bullet point in a performance review. Everywhere I’ve been lately, it’s been about how much you use something, not about your output.
What is the computer equivalent of “walk fast and always carrying something”
This looks too l33t. I fear if I had this going, typing like a maniac, everyone in the office would gather around and start reading the code.
“Everyone look busy”
I’m sorry, WHAT??? I use Proton!!! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DESTROY THEM, NOT JOIN THEM!
I truly hope we’re being overly dramatic here because Proton has been a good service for me. I do not feel like moving everything to another service. At least I have my own domains, though.
I believe they stopped being the good guys a while ago.
Yeah, Tuta are the good guys now.
For you know 5 or so years then also go to shit.
Like why can’t a company just decide to stay the good guys for like any real amount of time ;-;
Proton have been cunts for a long time my friend…
I’ve had my Proton for not even one year, & turns out they’re evil, same with Bluesky, I’ll move away, sometime, whenever I get the morale, it’s annoying, having to delete more old accounts, finding more even obscurer alternatives, the moving process as a whole is daunting, but I’ll keep going, because if I stop, how will I expect tomorrow to be different from today if I can’t bother to make change myself?
Keep fighting the good fight, my friend.
I host my own email on my own domain, and I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble.
Alas, when a company gets big it gets evil.
I’m prepared this time around, I use Protonmail with a custom domain, I’m ready to easily switch.
For the other stuff (Drive, Docs, Sheets, …) , I’m selfhosting.
Let me know how this goes…
I am also using my own custom domain, but I’m handling the aliases via simple login which I believe is also a product of proton.
Not sure how one migrates that layer as well…
Only manually.
I didn’t use that feature mainly to avoid this problem.
I used an email for each service (xyz-amazon@mydomain, xyz-ebay@mydomain,… Etc) and set up catch-all email for them. I was using the xyz+Amazon trick before, but some services don’t allow it, so I switched do dashes.
Just gotta migrate it manually, I suppose.
addy.io ftw
There it is. The last straw. My Tuta migration is complete.
The bubble can’t pop fast enough
AI policies are so dumb. You don’t evaluate people’s perfs on how much they use a tool. So what’s the damn end goal of such evaluation??
"Hey! I did nothing useful this year, but all with AI! -You’re promoted!!
I fixed hundreds of bugs and developed 3 new features all cheered by users! -With AI? -Err… not much -You’re fired!!"
The policy my company has implemented is the opposite. AI use is allowed, but no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service. Logic is that if we don’t have an actual NDA with OpenAI (or whoever), their privacy policy is not robust enough for us to take on that liability.
Interested in your thoughts on that!
Edit: we’re not a software company. We design medical devices, so nearly all data we have is confidential.
no confidential client information is to be sent to any cloud AI service
If the code has been crafted correctly, none should be.
Client info should be 100% data, and remain 100% in production. If you have any dev-side data to test and debug with, it should be 100% procedurally-generated pseudo-data that only imitates client data in terms of gross patterns, and not specific points of data.
Like customer names. Those names should be broadly representative of what is found in the regions the software operates in, in order to demonstrate acceptable data input validation and effective storage compatibility with those names. For example, you don’t want to be storing European names in a DB field that is not UTF-8 compliant, or validating those names by restricting characters to US-ASCII. But any one generated name that just so happens to match an IRL name should be a statistical occurance, and any extended data attached to that entry should (generally) not match any other IRL data for any IRL occurance of that name…
Absolutely, sorry for misleading - we’re not a software company. We do engineer for medical devices so confidential information in this case covers most everything we deal with. It might be actual IP, which is less of a concern, but it might also be trade secrets which as much more sensitive!
Multiple companies have that approach, I’m not denying there ARE companies doing things right (or at least better).
I work in a company using multiple agents. One of them is supposed to be off Internet, and even with that one we’re not to share sensitive IP.
But Proton is not an isolated case. I bet some execs have invested and promised so much they need to report some good numbers on usage, and you can’t make up productivity improvement if there are people left getting as much done without AI.
For the LLMs killer feature, software development, you don’t really need confidential information 99% of the time.
It continues to annoy me how both haters and glazers will over-simplify the topic by calling everything AI. There’s a giant difference in usefulness, ethics, and quality between LLMs that produce code guided by an experienced developer, and “art” slopped out for greed by some random schmo.
For the LLMs killer feature, software development,
Oof.
They’ve been replying on Reddit and it hasn’t made them look better. They say they aren’t firing people and are just looking for people who can accelerate their work with LLMs. Like, sure buddy.
Really? Is nothing safe these days? I just switched my email to Proton recently from Gmail. It’s been a long time coming, and I still can’t ditch it completely bcz I have had it for over 10 years and some stuff still uses it.
istg these imbeciles are going to get me to self host my own email server.
white hairs here i fucking come.
Damn, this mofo still has hair
I’m looking to migrate to Tuta.
Tuta
I just did. My only slight annoyance is their desktop app doesn’t import old mail the way I’d like it to. The rest of the switch- domain DNS on my own domain name, etc- less than 15 minutes. Completely painless.
I’ve done that and learned a lot. Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) won’t accept your email without paying them, or forwarding through someone who does (proton?).
i’m surprisingly ok with microslop not accepting my email actually
As am I. i don’t forward through anyone. All working well, but the learning process did, as you alluded to, give me white hairs.
noted, thank you.
while we’re here, any other tips i should keep in mind? what’s your stack (if you don’t mind sharing)?
Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL (MariaDB), postgrey, spamassasin.
Tips:
- once you get it running, keep close control and be prepared to shut down when the spam hounds find you.
- Do set up dmarc, dkim, and spf
- Put your server on spamhaus.org
- Don’t start if you’re feeling lazy, this will take a lot of mental attention.
I did mine before LLM’s, so I can’t comment how useful this will be, but I worry one might not understand the decisions made.
Thanks for making me realize that I literally don’t even need to be able to deliver to MS and I can just use my mailserver 😭
Microsoft (Outlook, Hotmail) won’t accept your email without paying them, or forwarding through someone who does
That’s absolutely not true. They sometimes bork some messages and signatures internally, but aside from that, delivery to MS stuff (and that includes a lot of business behind their “outlook protection” service) has been fine for years.
And, contrary to old beliefs, it has been mostly fine all around. Just properly setup DKIM, your DMARC and SPF records, and don’t actually send spam. The worst that could happen is if you’re trying to send through some residential IP, as large blocks can occasionally get blocked. But a cheap hosting anywhere (even in a spamfarm-ridden provider) is very likely to work fine.
Lol no
Maybe if you’ve got a 10 year old domain that’s been actively sending legit email everyday or something, but my email from my server goes straight to spam on outlook. Literally everywhere else is fine.
// yes my dmarc, dkim and spf are fine. No I’m not on any blocklists. No my IP is not a residential IP lol. The domain and server just turned 1 year old last week :]
Well, I must have imagined all the traffic being fine going out from an OVH server all this time then /shrug
Listen, I’m happy for you that your setup works, truly. I’m absolutely not trying to imply that it isn’t. It’s simply just not “fine all around”. It’s fine for you.
Both work servers, my private server, and a handful of colleagues running the same setups, on various hosts…
Yes, I agree it is anecdotal evidences. But seriously, people going around saying “it’s impossible, you have to pay them for delivery to work” is not only disingenuous, it’s factually wrong.
Are you all on OVH, then? Maybe my IP is the just the problem. Or do you all perhaps have older domains? Did you do any IP warming? I’d love to know. The openness of email is important.
(And fwiw, I’m not the same person as who implied you’d have to pay. In fact, I’ve never heard of that before)
I just looked and they’ve blocked the whole IP range from the VPS provider (digital ocean in this case). I assume many vps’ have the same issue.
Sent a few messages to them so here’s hoping.
I’m sending through a vps and have properly set up all the things (dmarc, dkim, spf, et al).
It was years ago when I set up, but I spent some time trying to get the mail to go through (wife uses Hotmail). The rabbit hole led me to a service I could purchase that would allow the mail to go through. Many fora articles paralleled my own experiences.
I don’t send spam, and my “reputation” is good. I’ll look into it again.
Oh c’mon. Enshittification this fast.
I don’t wanna move all that shit.
That’s not enshittification; enshittification is (to simplify) making a product worse to increase profitability.
In this case the CEO is conducting loyalty tests. It’s more of an HR issue. Groupthink.
Cramping AI into everything, including your “privacy” product, is enshittification.
It’s just not really in the same form as capturing market share and then paywalling your captive market to achieve rent seeking.
In this case you aren’t capturing rent you are capturing profiles, which in turn you will rent out to marketers.
Proton will betray everyone. I’m glad I stayed away.
Cramping AI into everything, including your “privacy” product, is enshittification.
That isn’t necessarily true. AI in and of itself isn’t shit. It’s the training data and the ethics of how that data was acquired that determines whether or not it is shit, and there are a ton of creators who’ve made local models trained only on their own data in order to make their work more efficient.
Most AI users aren’t ethical in that way, but I’d trust Proton before I’d trust a frontier AI developer, if for no other reason than the laws they’re forced to operate under favor privacy. The Swiss are great like that.
AI in and of itself isn’t shit.
Sure. But AI is shit for Privacy.
Gambling randomizers have no place in a toolchain being sold as a privacy tool.
Proton’s leadership have lost their minds, or taken a bribe to intentionally destroy the company.
I guess I don’t see a good reason to trust either, and setting up a scenario where those are being compared like I must is a false dichotomy.
That’s okay.
You’re welcome to your opinion. Have a great day. :)
You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like you.
AI in and of itself isn’t shit. It’s the training data and the ethics of how that data was acquired that determines whether or not it is shit,
And adittionally you know, the massive amounts of energy, destruction of local computing accessibility, the mass surveillance built into every chatbot, directly supporting and enabling of fascist regimes, the water stealing and toxifying, destruction of local communities, and not last or least, the Observed decline in brain function (also not limited to AI, but many digital tools, sadly).
The only models that skip this are locally trained and run models on solar power.
Of which it is maybe what? 0.01% of the AI use of the world? Less, if we are being completely honest?
Proton itself uses Mistral, OpenHands, OPMO, and Qwen under the hood. Again, not ethical or avoiding any of the above problems at all.
If you read the Proton response to this article, it actually does seem like trying to figure out what’s going on with business process in a big picture way. Senior managers are interviewing, too. Not all staff are interviewing.
Personally, I think it’s just as much about seeing who can’t QC the slop out off their code as anything else. Maybe. Or maybe I’m wrong, I dunno.
If you’ve got to prep for a job interview either way, then you might as well do a few more.
