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> A PayPal employee who buys snacks on campus wouldn't be likely to have the same kinds of experiences that a vendor using PayPal has, or even the same experien

> A PayPal employee who buys snacks on campus wouldn't be likely to have the same kinds of experiences that a vendor using PayPal has, or even the same experience as someone buying from an unknown vendor - it would always be a smooth and risk-free transaction. This might be true - or it might not, we have no way to know. Even if it were, how does it make sense (from a business perspective) to allow the people you've charged with building your product to avoid using it? That's a recipe for disaster. > Employees should be able to exercise autonomy over their private lives, even when they're at work. If I were running a marketing team, I probably wouldn't care what brand of phone my team members use. If I were running the iPhone division at Apple, I would very much care whether they were using iPhones for work. I wouldn't mind if you were using a Pixel as your personal phone, but if you're building an iPhone you better have some kind of empathy for the people who're going to buy it. We can also look at this through a different lens: if you (as an employee) can't be bothered to use the product you're building, why did you accept a job building that product? It's clearly not something that motivates you.

lovich 8y ago
It's a payment service. Who gets motivated about payment services? If you're doing something cutting edge and flashy like SpaceX then you can probably get 100% of your workforce to be motivated about the issue. For everyone else you're gonna have to deal with the fact that most of your employees are there for the paycheck. The company isn't their baby and they're also not the ones who are gonna turn into a billionaire if the startup makes it big. As for the affect on the business if the employees don't use their own product, why do you think the company should force their employees to use the product instead of using the opportunity to figure out how to improve the product so that the employees want to use it? For a website where the general consensus is that the government should stay out of the way and most regulation is authoritarian, there's quite a lot of people who don't have any concern when it's a corporation exerting the same sort of pressure on people
- culturestate 8y ago
  > why do you think the company should force their employees to use the product instead of using the opportunity to figure out how to improve the product so that the employees want to use it If nobody uses it, how are you supposed to figure out how to improve it so they will? > there's quite a lot of people who don't have any concern when it's a corporation exerting the same sort of pressure on people It's an employer telling employees to do something while they're at work, on company time and company premises! How is that relatable to federal regulation of private industry?
  - greenyoda 8y ago
    > If nobody uses it, how are you supposed to figure out how to improve it so they will? - They could survey their actual customers. (Businesses I deal with ask me for feedback all the time.) - They could conduct focus groups, where they pay customers to come in and give feedback directly to the product team. - They could do A/B testing. I think customers would be more likely to provide negative feedback about a product than employees. Employees might be wary of offending the decisions of powerful people in the company. And in any case, some employees will voluntarily use the company's product. Just don't force people to use it if they don't want to. > It's an employer telling employees to do something while they're at work, on company time and company premises! - It involves the employee consenting to hook up their personal financial account to the company-owned payment account, which is a rather personal and intrusive thing for an employer to ask. - It exposes all the employee's purchases to their employer, which is a privacy issue. What if I don't want my employer to know that I drink six cans of diet Coke every day? Just because the employee is on the clock doesn't mean the company owns them. Would you think it's OK for the employer to force the employee to eat certain foods or read non-work-related political literature just because they're on the clock?
chickenfries 8y ago
The email was to the entire company, not to a specific product design or marketing team that was working on PayPal Here.

lovich 8y ago

It's a payment service. Who gets motivated about payment services? If you're doing something cutting edge and flashy like SpaceX then you can probably get 100% of your workforce to be motivated about the issue. For everyone else you're gonna have to deal with the fact that most of your employees are there for the paycheck. The company isn't their baby and they're also not the ones who are gonna turn into a billionaire if the startup makes it big. As for the affect on the business if the employees don't use their own product, why do you think the company should force their employees to use the product instead of using the opportunity to figure out how to improve the product so that the employees want to use it? For a website where the general consensus is that the government should stay out of the way and most regulation is authoritarian, there's quite a lot of people who don't have any concern when it's a corporation exerting the same sort of pressure on people

culturestate 8y ago
> why do you think the company should force their employees to use the product instead of using the opportunity to figure out how to improve the product so that the employees want to use it If nobody uses it, how are you supposed to figure out how to improve it so they will? > there's quite a lot of people who don't have any concern when it's a corporation exerting the same sort of pressure on people It's an employer telling employees to do something while they're at work, on company time and company premises! How is that relatable to federal regulation of private industry?
- greenyoda 8y ago
  > If nobody uses it, how are you supposed to figure out how to improve it so they will? - They could survey their actual customers. (Businesses I deal with ask me for feedback all the time.) - They could conduct focus groups, where they pay customers to come in and give feedback directly to the product team. - They could do A/B testing. I think customers would be more likely to provide negative feedback about a product than employees. Employees might be wary of offending the decisions of powerful people in the company. And in any case, some employees will voluntarily use the company's product. Just don't force people to use it if they don't want to. > It's an employer telling employees to do something while they're at work, on company time and company premises! - It involves the employee consenting to hook up their personal financial account to the company-owned payment account, which is a rather personal and intrusive thing for an employer to ask. - It exposes all the employee's purchases to their employer, which is a privacy issue. What if I don't want my employer to know that I drink six cans of diet Coke every day? Just because the employee is on the clock doesn't mean the company owns them. Would you think it's OK for the employer to force the employee to eat certain foods or read non-work-related political literature just because they're on the clock?

chickenfries 8y ago

The email was to the entire company, not to a specific product design or marketing team that was working on PayPal Here.