Work · Opinion
Proton's AI re-interviews were a layoff programme and cancelling them changes little
Making staff re-earn their jobs by proving AI use is a headcount cut by attrition. Buyers should expect the vendor's senior engineers and support staff to walk.
Proton planned to put almost its entire workforce through re-interviews between 4 and 11 November, in which staff would explain how they use AI. An internal email described the sessions as consequential. According to six current employees who spoke to 404 Media, everyone understood what that meant: use AI enough in leadership's eyes or start updating your CV. I read that as a layoff programme designed so nobody has to call it one. Anyone who buys software from a company running something similar should start counting the engineers they know by name.
On Friday Andy Yen cancelled the re-interviews during a roughly two-hour all-hands, a day after 404 Media published its investigation into how he was pushing AI across the company. He told staff the sessions had already served their purpose, unintentionally, and promised there would be no loss of jobs from AI. I expected a climbdown of that size to come with some change to the plan underneath it. What surprised me is how little moved.
Look at what survived the cancellation. One employee told 404 Media that leadership said, in the same breath, that whatever the re-interviews would have measured will now feed into performance reviews. A reorganisation arrives next month, described by Yen as redistributing talent across teams. CTO Bart Butler, according to The Next Web's account of 404's reporting, said AI wrote 90% of Proton's code in October. And Yen wrote in an engineering Slack channel: "This will be the last year that we hire engineers." Put those together and you have a hiring freeze, a review score tied to AI usage and a reorg. That is the standard kit for shrinking an engineering department, running on the annual review cycle instead of a single week in November.
The promise of no job losses from AI is the best defence Proton has, and I think it is narrower than it sounds. It covers one stated cause. Nobody will lose their job from AI when a performance review flags them as underperforming on a metric that happens to be AI adoption. Nobody loses their job from AI when they resign. The cheapest redundancy a company can run is the one where people leave on their own, with no severance and no headlines about cuts. The investigation describes a culture in which Yen mocks staff in front of colleagues. When an employee in the security channel asked for a few days to pentest new code before it went live, Yen called that loser thinking and told people to stop lovingly handcrafting the code. If you are a senior engineer with offers in your inbox and you are told the company will never hire another one of you, I would expect you to take one of those offers.
Those departing engineers are what a customer is actually paying for. Proton sells itself on careful privacy protection. The people who make that true are the ones who slow a release down to test it, and they are the people this regime is built to push out. Paying users have noticed. Many said on social media that they were cancelling their plans, and Yen's response on Reddit was downvoted more than 1,200 times. The Next Web also reports that Yen told staff perception is more important than truth, which, if accurate, is an unusual thing for the boss of a security company to say out loud.
The governance offers buyers little comfort. One employee said Yen holds the majority of Proton's shares, and the Proton Foundation board, which includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is, in Yen's words, closely monitoring the situation. Another employee pointed out that the re-interviews were not cancelled until the story went public, despite concerns raised internally by many staff. On that account the only check that worked was a newspaper investigation followed by paying customers heading for the exit. Butler has since conceded on the call that leadership messed up and that Yen has committed to communicating better, while the policy direction stays the same.
Proton is the case that leaked, and I doubt it is the only vendor whose leadership is scoring staff on AI usage this year. Before your next renewal with any supplier that has announced an engineering hiring freeze or AI targets in performance reviews, ask in writing for the names of the support and security engineers assigned to your account, ask again at every review meeting, and write a clause into the contract that lets you leave without penalty if that list starts shrinking after a reorganisation.
Prompted by Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’, 404 Media.