Hacker News

Proton CEO Andy Yen: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers."(twitter.com)

38 points by 101008 12 hours ago | 31 comments

Thanks for the heads up, Andy! I’ll find a new email and vpn provider. It was a good 7 years, admittedly.

Whereas I was thinking that I should start making the migration to Proton.

So, thanks to everyone for the advance warning!

So many thread replies are saying they are cancelling both their email and VPN accounts lol! Self-destructive tendencies all these hallucinated CEOs!

[–] ee3aa 11 hours ago

I think LLMs are showing you what was under the mask the whole time..

[–] CqtGLRGcukpy 12 hours ago

Instead of just reading a tweet that includes quote from an article, read the full article at https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-i...

Full archived / paywall free copy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20261029143048/https://www.404me...

[–] vrganj 11 hours ago

Wow, their CEO seems like an absolute shithead. Made me lose any respect I had for the company.

Are there any good alternatives?

[–] malinens 11 hours ago

What are criteria to be a good alternative? I personally work for inbox.eu for the last 10 years

We are a small team and have experience with providing email services for almost 30 years.

Our management also is lately very pro AI and we are reevaluating how we will move forward with developing features

[–] killingtime74 10 hours ago

I concluded that the best alternative is to use a simple email host like iCloud with your own domain, which is free if you pay for their storage, and then move everything important to Signal.

[–] bitbasher 11 hours ago

> “Due to insufficient velocity,” Proton is not on track to achieve its annual recurring revenue target by the end of the year, one internal document...

Ummm, maybe I am crazy but I don't want the main metric for my privacy-first email provider to be ARR. How about security and privacy guarantees? How about bugs fixed? How about lowering the supply chain risk for the company? I care about a lot more than your ARR.

> That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure

> 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.”

I'm on the Proton "visionary" plan ($280/year) for my family. I'm more than happy to switch. Anyone have a suggestion as to where to re-home our email? I'm using custom domains for ~3 domains and control 3 people's email.

[–] drewbitt 11 hours ago

> Anyone have a suggestion as to where to re-home our email?

Fastmail Family should be a good fit for you.

[–] __m 6 hours ago

Unfortunately that’s the reality we live in. How do you compete if your competition is willing to move fast and break things? I guess the only option is to move to a provider that doesn’t disclose it’s ai use. Am i too pessimistic?

[–] nnmg 6 hours ago

You provide your customers with a service that gives them value. I've been a proton subscriber for 3 years because I value privacy and security. That's kind of (was) their whole thing. I didn't sign up hoping they would bolt on features and add a chatbot. I suspect that the majority of people using proton have a similar view, otherwise why bother with it?

[–] vrganj 5 hours ago

Why can't they just provide the service people like them for and do it well? There's no reason to move at all, especially not if it means breaking things.

[–] scottydelta 11 hours ago

I just helped a product manager friend host and run their app on a VPS.

It was a single file app.py flask app with over 10,000 lines of code. It had html and css defined as variables in that single file!

I am sure this is gonna end well.

[–] ee3aa 11 hours ago

Manager's of firm's will refuse to accept LLMs are a complement, and not a direct substitute for human capital - until things literally crash and burn and they lose significant market share.

[–] drewbitt 11 hours ago

If they can vibe code the project without engineering then surely their users can too, right? I currently pay for Proton Pass but when mine renews next year I'd rather just give the money to Opus 6.5.

[–] viraptor 11 hours ago

Serious answer:

- they provide a service, not software

- you'd also need a maintained /24 of IPs with good email reputation

- unless you want to only use an email client, you need to do lots of testing on the web editor part for how the formatting gets interpreted in other clients, how to render weird emails correctly, how to protect the privacy in external resources, and lots of other things

Even with an LLM that's both a multi-week implementation and an infra management project for life. Their users in general can't do that. (There's a handful that could)

[–] drewbitt 11 hours ago

Proton Pass, not their email service. Although I suspect things like the Cloudflare Email Service will expand by next year too.

[–] MrMorden 6 hours ago

This statement may end up true, but not for the reason he thinks.

[–] throwa356262 12 hours ago

    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...”

Ah, that explains the recent enshitification. Add some AI slop to this mess and you will soon be the centerpiece of haveibeenpwned

[–] MiroslavPokorny 11 hours ago

Cutting costs to save a bit here and there is never a winning move because it doesnt create value.

Engineers at a tech company create value.

[–] npc99 11 hours ago

Guess I will be finding a new email provider...

Can anyone recommend good alternatives?

[–] bitbasher 11 hours ago

According to the article, Andy Yen was afraid of their competitor Tuta (https://tuta.com/). Maybe that's a good place to start.

[–] mindracer 11 hours ago

I’ve been with Mailbox.org for years and never had any problems

[–] jdlshore 11 hours ago

I’m been happy with Fastmail for years.

[–] latentsea 6 hours ago

Fucking yikes. As someone that relies on Proton, I'm devastated to hear this. They have just completely destroyed their brand.

[–] sligor 11 hours ago

I’m also cutting cost with my proton subscription

[–] rvz 11 hours ago

> CEO Andy Yen wrote it to staff in Slack: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers." Starting next year, he said, Proton hires product managers to build things with AI.

That won't age well in the long term, especially and for a company that deals with security. Here's what Proton just did:

Rather than equipping more of your technical staff with AI to compete against the competition, they are dismissing them over it and not hiring anymore engineers on technical defense. Not only the competition has AI agents as well, the malicious attackers also do and will overwhelm Proton with swarms of them, non-stop with less staff.

This will be the beginning of the end of Proton as there will be no-one ready to defend the company when millions of abliterated frontier-level AI agents attack them at 25,000 tokens per second.

That isn't a secure future for Proton.

[–] ChrisArchitect 11 hours ago

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50289692

[–] verdverm 11 hours ago

This will be the last year I have confidence in Proton as a product I should be using...

[–] ee3aa 11 hours ago

What an utter moron lmao.

[–] bitfilped 12 hours ago

Sigh, I'd just started the migration to proton.