Just three weeks ago, LowEndTalk user @meowwcc commented:
Proton products are honestly a bunch of bullshit relative to their marketing. their whole thing seems to be about taking jabs at big tech without offering competitive products.
I guess @meowwcc had a crystal ball because there’s a new article on 404 (and a followup) about the inside of Proton and it’s downright awful. Some highlights:
- Their COO declaring that engineering is a dead profession and the people writing code are now just product managers, managing teams of AI agents.
- Their CEO stating on their internal slack that employees are “stupid”, “losers”, and other motivating terms.
- CEO Andy Yen berating employees for not doing more with AI and launching a series of re-interviews where staff will be interrogated about why they’re not using AI more.
Ugh.
Proton’s market niche is providing privacy-focused tools. You sign up for Proton if you don’t like Google or Microsoft’s privacy policies and you’re focused on security and privacy. Finding out that the CEO is sacrificing what you want on the altar of go-faster AI and the engineers you’re depending on to keep your stuff safe aren’t actually writing any code…
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.”
…wow.
The Reaction Has Been Brutal
The /r/degoogle subreddit has lots of threads with titles like:
- Fire Andy Yen (Proton CEO)
- My favorite Proton replacements
- Alternatives to Proton
Etc. And Proton’s own forums have been lit up with these topics:
- Andy Yen step aside
- Dump Your CEO
- Temper your expectations with AI. Remove your CEO and top management if you have to.
- CEO and CTO needs to terminated, immediately.
- Stop the re-interviewing of staff about AI usage please
- Andy Yen needs to go
…and I stopped scrolling at that point.
raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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