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PayPal chief reams employees: Use our app or quit
- RTigger 13y ago"It’s a bit ironic considering that yesterday Marcus took to Twitter to say his credit card was hacked. So clearly not all hacking is acceptable in Marcus’ book — only hacking that supports the company’s business objectives." sigh.
- mynd 13y agoAgreed. Someone needs to create a PSA about the term "Hacking" in the 21st century.
- izzydata 13y agoI had the same reaction. Unfortunately the general public is ignorant about the different definition of hacking here. The author is likely ignorant about it too and not purposefully trying to deceive people.
- mgkimsal 13y agoI got the feeling that it was mostly PR to point out that his card was hacked. He was quoted as saying that had he used Paypal to pay instead of his physical card (which had extra security chip in it) he would have been secure.
- puppetmaster3 13y agoHow motivational: “It’s been brought to my attention
- hardwaresofton 13y agoI don't know how to feel about this. I feel like the sentiment is right (eat your own dog food -- if that's the saying)... But everything about the delivery seems to be wrong
- avenger123 13y agoI like the delivery. There is little "corporate speak" and a lot of frankness. He's not calling out a particular person but a whole office. I don't see this as a "reams employees" type of email. He's making his case for why everyone should be using PayPal's apps. His telling employees to go elsewhere if their heart isn't into it is also refreshing. This is exactly the type of email I would expect from someone at his level that isn't trying to play the "everyone please like me" game and is actually trying to move things forward.
- mason55 13y agoIdeally people are eating their own dog food because they're excited to do so not because the President is telling them. Even if you force people to use your product it's not going to have the same effect as organic dog fooding. You won't get the same level of passionate feedback because the employees just don't really care. The correct solution probably IS to tell people to go elsewhere if they don't care any more (or never cared). I'm sure there are plenty of people who would work at PayPal who would have passion for the product. And I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, everyone needs change. Maybe some fresh blood would be good.
- alimoeeny 13y ago"That’s unacceptable to me, and the rest of my team" :)
- chadwickthebold 13y agoI think it's really disappointing when company heads do this. If you work there, you should be treated as a professional, not some little kid who gets overly excited and tries to break open the coke machine because hey - PayPal. If you want your software devs to go the extra mile either make a product that they can organically care about, or pay them more and make it part of their job description to evangelize your product. Also, that PayPal 'it' thing seems pretty scummy. Do the engineers get some financial incentive for generating sales leads for the home office?
- ItendToDisagree 13y agoThe idea of getting vending machines to accept PayPal seems ridiculous. What are the fees on a 0.65 cent candy bar? Does that leave any profit at all for the operator/owner of the machine? Or am I missing something there? I'm interested to know more about that 'hacking' of a Coke machine he is referring to. Anyone have a link?
- meritt 13y agoAlternatively he could just hold their paychecks hostage like Paypal does with everyone else's money.
- rmc 13y agoThat really wouldn't last long in court.
- mgkimsal 13y agoPerhaps just like they're not really a "bank", they could try to argue they're not really an "employer", and are really "paying" their workers, so they're not subject to normal behaviors.
- rmc 13y agoSure, they can claim that all they want. A judge would look at it for about 5 seconds and say "You're an employer." and that would be that.
- FireBeyond 13y agoI don’t feel the parent ever intended his observation to be a sincere suggestion ...
- mgkimsal 13y agoNow you're on the trolley!
- mikeryan 13y agoThis is really one of those things that look, in principal, to be a simple fix. "Why are our employees not eating our own dog food". The part he's missing is the question, "Why aren't our employees so passionate about our product that they use it constantly in an effort to make it better?". He's missing a deeper morale issue, and compounding it with his attitude.
- outworlder 13y agoIt could be that, or they have seen the sausage being made and are steering clear of it.
- nobodysfool 13y agoWell, I give my boss the ability to deposit money into my account. I would not willingly give my boss the ability to withdraw money from my account. I think that would explain a lot of the trepidation.
- aresant 13y agoPayPal's mobile payment strategy is incredibly important to PayPal's future. Here's the quote specific to the "use our own app": "It’s been brought to my attention that when testing paying with mobile at Cafe 17 last week, some of you refused to install the PayPal app. . . everyone at PayPal should use our products. . . That’s the only way we can make them better, and better." He's asking employees to use the new app to help beta test on the PayPal campus. (1) So that he, and the team responsible, can improve the product to win. He gives a few illustrations of high-morale employees "hacking coke machines" etc. And then closes by saying "If you are one of the folks that refused . . . go find something that will connect with your heart and mind elsewhere" I get that the tone is passionate and angry. But I feel like there's a balance that needs to be struck vs. your comment. Sometimes "morale" issues can be improved by letting people who are too far checked out go their own way. (1) Cafe 17 is in the PayPal HQ (1) https://www.facebook.com/events/181056035410307/?ref=22 https://www.facebook.com/events/181056035410307/?ref=22
- 13y ago
- jobu 13y agoThe title of the article seems like linkbait. What Marcus said was: "In closing, if you are one of the folks who refused to install the PayPal app or if you can’t remember your PayPal password, do yourself a favor, go find something that will connect with your heart and mind elsewhere." Pretty similar message, but the title makes him sound like an asshole when the actual text seems more reasonable. If you're not willing to use the products you make, then how can you expect anyone else to use them.
- raganwald 13y agoI agree, let's flip this around and think like customers. We go out to choose a vendor for some important service. Vendors A and B have roughly equal parity on features and services, but vendor A's employees eat their own dogfood and vendor B's don't. Now in one sense, who cares? Eating your own dogfood is a means to an end, not the end itself, so it's like finding out that McDonalds employees don't eat McDonalds food. As long as they wash their hands, who cares what they eat themselves? But on the other hand, I'm a human being, and I'm personally a lot more comfortable doing business with a company that seems to care about its product from top to bottom, and isn't staffed with people who don't like their own product enough to use it.
- ItendToDisagree 13y agoWhat if they have no use for the product rather than 'don't like' said product? It is quite possible to just not need to use PayPal and still work for them.
- jrochkind1 13y agoYes, employees that use their own product generally a great and encouraging sign. But what if you find out that the employees at company A use their own product only because the CEO ordered them to do it or get fired, and they actually hate the product themselves too? No longer quite so encouraging. They are mistaking the indicator for the thing indicated. Dogfooding is an indicator of quality and commitment when it happens naturally; when you artificially compel the indicator, it's no longer a good indicator.
- mgkimsal 13y ago"And part of that is having every employee be the customer and utilize our services wherever you can, and if you see a problem, highlight it and tell people to get it fixed. And that’s something we do a lot." If it really worked, that'd be great. Instead of yelling at people who don't use the tools and programs, I'd suggest a review of those tools and processes, and a public rundown of the findings and improvements to those services. If people are spotting problems, reporting those to be fixed, and nothing gets done, or perhaps they're told to go pound sand, people will quit reporting problems. That very well may be the case (I've seen it happen at companies), and the CEO/President needs to get in to that part of the company and root out if in fact there is a problem in that part of operations. If there is a problem, fix that and promote it. If there is no problem, they need to do a better job of promoting the case studies of things that were reported/fixed/improved. This will send a bigger message than public berating for not using stuff that may be broken. Those workers still have jobs to do, and if using the PP tools doesn't get the job done, and they're now expected to do bug reports as well as use broken/poor tools, you've just made everyone's job a lot worse.
- outworlder 13y ago"Offices with under 100 employees beat us by an order of magnitude " Hmm. I sense a connection here. But I'm not a CEO, so what do I know.
- bronsoja 13y agoLovely to see venturebeat sowing more confusion around sensible usage of the word 'hacking'.
- vitd 13y ago“We’re getting back to our technology and innovation roots, and we really want to be driving the best customer experiences that are possible,” the spokesman told VentureBeat. Yeah, maybe if you took the customer experience seriously by, you know, responding to people's emails, having a human being customers can talk to, and not holding their money hostage, you'd be doing better? Just a thought.
- watwut 13y agoHow companies alienate their employees. Chapter: David Marcus, PayPal. Somehow, I doubt you can make people enthusiastic by threatening them or yelling at them (figuratively). Then again, I'm not a CEO.
- panarky 13y agoSo doing your job isn't enough for PayPal. Now you have to show loyalty. And enthusiasm. And hack on the product in your free time. And install your employer's app on your personal devices. An app that knows your personal financial details, tracks your fine-grained location, reads your personal contacts and SD storage, and can transmit all of this to your employer[0]. Will PayPal also go above and beyond the employment relationship for their employees? Will they show the same loyalty in return[1]? [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paypal.here&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paypal.her... [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-cutting-as-many-as-400-jobs.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-c...
- jrochkind1 13y agoYep, I understand why a company would want employees who do all those things. Employees who do all those things is a great signal that you are on the right track, and some of those things in and of themselves will produce benefits for your product, sure. But you can't get those things just by ordering your employees to do them. Even if you somehow get your employees to pretend to have loyalty and enthusiasm by ordering them to, that is -not- a signal that you're on the right path, and won't produce those benefits.
- nobodysfool 13y agoYea, I agree with Marcus's message: Dogfood our products! But I don't agree with his methodology for achieving it: chiding workers. What he should have done is require feedback from all workers on why they do or don't use the app (they can use third party anonymous surveys for that).
- bashcoder 13y agoWell said. It's like demanding that someone love you, instead of working to be more loveable.
- greenyoda 13y agoI agree with you 100% that a company is stepping way over the line when it tells employees what software they should install on their personal devices, how they should pay for their own purchases, etc. (And after treating his employees like he owns them, the CEO will whine about how hard it is to find good developers.) That said, people who create intrusive software to track the intimate details of their users are hypocrites if they'd object to being tracked by that same software themselves.
- nayefc 13y agoIsn't this a wake up call that PayPal juts sucks?
- vidoc 13y agoThat's pretty funny! Reminds me when I worked for Yahoo couple of years ago, I was not even working for the search team, but one day I got busted by a product manager of that team who saw me googling. That chick sermonized me and said that engineers were people with great technical influence and if I wanted yahoo search to be successful, people around me had to see me use it. I tried to make the point that the path to success for a product is to make it better in the first place, but that didn't fly for her. It was also pretty funny to see all those hypocrites use Yahoo Mail while on the campus only to switch back to Gmail in the company shuttle :) I love capitalism!
- mgkimsal 13y ago"engineers were people with great technical influence and if I wanted yahoo search to be successful, people around me had to see me use it." Insane. If anything your time might be more valuable than someone else's, and if you can get your job done faster with google or bing, get the job done as efficiently as possible. Using Yahoo on campus, then using google off campus is even worse, because it gives the impression that it's solving your needs when it's clearly not.
- sdegutis 13y agoNot everyone makes online payments, some people have no need for PayPal's services. Should they be denied their job just because of that?
- drakaal 13y agoHe's Captain Kirk's abandoned bastard son, he has some anger issues, you would too. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/David_Marcus http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/David_Marcus
- ItendToDisagree 13y agoWow. I hadn't seen him before and his picture screamed Gaius Baltar (Battlestar Galactica) / Julian Bashir (Deep Space 9) to me. The Sci-Fi is strong with this one.
- justin66 13y agoIf you can remember your password - for PayPal or whatever else - you are probably doing it wrong. Use a password manager, so you only have to remember one password, and can have distinct, strong passwords for everything. I have to admit that I wondered when I read that CEO tirade (and not knowing what the hell Cafe 17 is) if his employees couldn't remember their PayPal passwords in a testing situation for a fairly legitimate reason, being away from their computers and therefore their password managers.
- x0054 13y agoI have been using PayPal for 10 years or so. I use my iPhone all the time, in fact I am typing this on it right now. I shop on eBay all the time on my phone. I pay for a bunch of things online using PayPal. And I DO NOT have the Paypal app installed on my phone. Why? Because its unnecessary. PayPal, the service, works just fine without PayPal, the app. If PayPal truly wants to grow their business, they should improve significantly their merchant relations, not their app.
- mgkimsal 13y ago"some of you refused to install the PayPal app" They may have some legitimate concerns about what the software actually does, records about them, etc. I'm not saying it's necessarily right or wrong, but there may be more at play than just "I hate working here - this sucks". There are some things I probably can't install, as my primary device is still on ios5. Would I penalized for not upgrading my whole device just to show some company spirit? Also... if they're testing out "paying with mobile", they're never going to get 100% acceptance rate. Real world scenarios, not everyone will have your app or install it just for that transaction. Seems this is actually a good 'real world' test of what it's like on the front lines, and yelling at your potential customers for not using your app isn't the way to go.
- sophacles 13y agoOne of the "more at play" things I could imagine: I don't want my employer to know about how I choose to spend my money. It's not their business, and having my employer have such a detailed understanding of my personal life is not remotely desirable. It's like forcing employees to give social media access to you, but even more invasive.
- mgkimsal 13y agoExcellent point - should have been a top-level response. If I worked at a bank, I might choose to keep my money there, but I might choose to bank somewhere else for any myriad reasons, and should not be punished for it. If I worked for Fidelity, I might want to keep an IRA with Vanguard - again, should not be punished. For a CEO to not grasp the ramifications of having access to employees' financial records - or perhaps not caring - shows a disturbing side to this man. I would strongly suspect he doesn't use paypal for everything he purchases.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sneak 13y agoSquare, on the other hand, lets their own employees work in their own cafe using their own product in exactly the way their customers do: http://sprudge.com/secret-square-cafe.html http://sprudge.com/secret-square-cafe.html
- godgod 13y agoPuck FayPal. I refuse to use their garbage monopoly.
- joesmo 13y agoSeems like Paypal employees are all too aware of Paypal's draconian polices and don't want to lose their money. I don't blame them.
- carsongross 13y agoThe product stagnation will continue until morale improves!
- dcpdx 13y agoI closed my PayPal account a few months ago and will never use them again. I had transferred $300 from my bank account to my PayPal account to pay for a weekend outing I was attending, and once the money was in my PP balance I transferred it to my buddy along with the $10 fee. So far, so good. A few weeks later, I started getting emails and calls almost daily about past due payments for my PayPal balance, which I was confused about since I used my own funds and thought that was the end of it. Turns out, PayPal charged that $300 to my credit account with them instead of taking it out of my balance, so now I owed an extra $300 and had to pay interest and late payment fees. When I called in to customer service to ask what was going on, it took me almost an hour to finally reach someone and they told me there was nothing they could do. After that, I paid my remaining balance, closed my account and never looked back. I've since used Venmo, Square, bank transfers, and good ol cash to accept payments from friends, but I will NEVER use PayPal again in my life. Fuck them.
- runamok 13y agoIf they didn't use dark patterns (http://darkpatterns.org/ http://darkpatterns.org/) such as always defaulting to your bank account instead of your credit card (which inconveniences me but makes them more money) maybe more of their people would use paypal. This regards the web payment flow experience and not necessarily the app.
- dman 13y agoReminds me of the "Wear 15 pieces of flair" scene from Office Space.