I think that corporations already try to exert way too much control over their employees' lives. Forcing them to use a particular payment service or a particular brand of personal phone seems a bit too intrusive to me. Employees should be able to exercise autonomy over their private lives, even when they're at work.
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.
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
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?
- 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?
This was not about a payment provider. It was about their employer. If you can't promote your own product then Marcus was right - go find something else to do
As a developer, should I also quit if I don't want to vacuum the carpets or restock the supply cabinet? If you need your product promoted, maybe hire someone with a marketing degree.
This notion that it should be mandatory to love your company and its products is so fucking Orwellian.
All of this is to say: I'm sure the reason those employees weren't using PayPal was because it was a pain in the ass to use. Maybe if, instead of suggesting their employees find other jobs they had focused on making their product work better, we would have had a better digital payments processor before competitors like Square came along and ate their lunch.