This 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".<p>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?".<p>He's missing a deeper morale issue, and compounding it with his attitude.
So doing your job isn't enough for PayPal.<p>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.<p>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].<p>Will PayPal also go above and beyond the employment relationship for their employees? Will they show the same loyalty in return[1]?<p>[0] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paypal.here&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paypal.her...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-cutting-as-many-as-400-jobs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-12/paypal-said-to-be-c...</a>
I 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.<p>Also, that PayPal 'it' thing seems pretty scummy. Do the engineers get some financial incentive for generating sales leads for the home office?
"some of you refused to install the PayPal app"<p>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".<p>There are some things I probably <i>can't</i> install, as my primary device is still on ios5. Would I penalized for not upgrading my whole device just to show some company spirit?<p>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.
The title of the article seems like linkbait. What Marcus said was: <i>"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."</i><p>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.
I 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.<p>If PayPal truly wants to grow their business, they should improve significantly their merchant relations, not their app.
I 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
“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.<p>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.
How companies alienate their employees. Chapter: David Marcus, PayPal.<p>Somehow, I doubt you can make people enthusiastic by threatening them or yelling at them (figuratively). Then again, I'm not a CEO.
"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."<p>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 <i>nothing gets done</i>, 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.<p>If there is a problem, fix <i>that</i> 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.
If 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.<p>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.
"Offices with under 100 employees beat us by an order of magnitude "<p>Hmm. I sense a connection here. But I'm not a CEO, so what do I know.
"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."<p><i>sigh</i>.
He's Captain Kirk's abandoned bastard son, he has some anger issues, you would too.<p><a href="http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/David_Marcus" rel="nofollow">http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/David_Marcus</a>
I 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.<p>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.<p>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.
If they didn't use dark patterns (<a href="http://darkpatterns.org/" rel="nofollow">http://darkpatterns.org/</a>) 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.<p>This regards the web payment flow experience and not necessarily the app.
That's pretty funny!<p>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 <i>had</i> 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.<p>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 :)<p>I love capitalism!
Square, on the other hand, lets their own employees work in their own cafe using their own product in exactly the way their customers do:<p><a href="http://sprudge.com/secret-square-cafe.html" rel="nofollow">http://sprudge.com/secret-square-cafe.html</a>