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Gmail's Mic Drop April Fool Backfires Horribly Costing People Their Jobs (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report on The Telegraph: Google is facing a fierce backlash after introducing a new tool for April Fools' Day that has cost some people potential jobs. The new Gmail Mic Drop button, which sits next to the normal send button, ends an email thread forever by muting all future replies to the sender, and firing off a gif of a minion 'mic dropping' at the same time. After an immediate backlash the feature was taken down early on Friday morning. Some people using it had failed to see the funny side, saying that by accidentally pressing the button instead of simply sending the email, they have appeared rude or unprofessional, in some cases costing them jobs.
this is how we weed out the dumb people at the office.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The story about the backlash is the meta-April Fools about the Mic Drop feature.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Seriously, free webmail is unprofessional.
Google hates employees anyway and wants to replace them all with their own version of Skynet
Anyone actually see this happen? Think the story itself is a hoax.
I don't need Google's help; I never get a second interview in any case, because I ask the hard questions!
Are you interviewing applicants just to make yourself look important?
Are you seriously planning to hire anyone?
What exactly is it that you think you do here?
Surely the job applicant could have just sent another email with a different subject line...? Or am I not understanding how it worked?
They Took Er Jerbs!
If you use gmail for anything important, you're doing it wrong,
Especially for work?
I don't get it. I was thinking it might have been 20160401 in decimal, or it was something Bender said in Futurama.
Summation 2
Its 9am EST, so 13:00 GMT ... and you want to tell me someone has already been fired because they sent a gif in an email?
Let me go ahead and clear something up for you, that douche bag was going to be fired today ANYWAY, the email had nothing at all to do with it.
Can we please not make such retarded fucking statements in the summaries for articles? Can we use at least an ounce of thought before regurgitating some bullshit you heard someone else spew?
God I fucking hate slashdot on April 1st.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yet you are here on April Fools day getting your news.
No sense of humor here? I am looking for that day every year! That's a classic since I am a member (circa 2004) and probably before my time, and I love it. If you don't, well just come back tomorrow. BTW, even the most serious news outlet will have their April's fool story today.
Every year, I have to quit Slashdot for a day and get my tech news elsewhere.
Which day are you talking about since it's fairly apparent that you didn't do this today? You see, what matters to the owners of Slashdot aren't the feelings of the users, it's the page hits. It makes no difference to them if you come here to shake your fist or to be a positive member of their community.
And as a side note, there isn't much real tech news here anyway. If you're looking for real tech news there's a thousand pages that are better. The science, business and political news is even worse.
I'll go as far to say that if I couldn't troll here I wouldn't ever bother to visit Slashdot. Sorry for anyone who is butthurt of this but it is the truth.
You might argue that "oh noes, the button was too close to the send button, and I accidentally clicked it", however....
It didn't cost you the job because you mic-dropped the target, but it may have cost you the job because you demonstrated a disregard for/sloppiness with details. (In exactly the same way even trivial misspellings in resumes or cover letters can cost you a job: not because they don't think you can spell, but because you didn't care enough to double check something important thoroughly.)
It may seem trivial, but when I get 00's of resumes for a position, honestly the first cull is going to be the obvious misfits and barring really eye-grabbing qualifications, trivialities such as misspellings (or mic-drop emails) for that very reason.
So did the mic drop actually cost you the job, or reveal that they really probably shouldn't have hired you?
-Styopa
Dude,
Are you backed up and need to go number 2?
Do you need some "me time" to chill?
How about a beer?
Maybe a cat video?
Relax - it's just the internet...no need to go nuclear.
Then comes google and android. Menu items and user interface paradigms and rules are changed at the whim. One day it is the "gear", suddenly it is gone and there is a the three lines, suddenly it is nine dots in a matrix, then dot dot dot... Some thing that appears to be some decoration in the phone app is the "new" interface for a well known functionality used to be located somewhere else.
Ages ago I watched a young boy play Super Mario Brothers. He ran along some path, stopped at some seemingly random location, banged his head on the brick 8 times, a gold bar fell out. Pocketed the points and ran along. I asked him, "how did you know there is a gold bar on that brick?". He said, "Well, you keep banging your head on every brick in the wall to see if there is something?". "You banged your head on EVERY brick eight times on this tunnel?", He goes, "nah, I banged some 30 or 40 times, this brick needs only 8 hits".
I wonder if that boy grew up, got a job designing user interface for Android apps. They seem to think, after every release the user should try every gesture on every pixel to re-learn how to use this app.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yes, most new sites might have one or two jokes. That's fine. They're funny. Slashdot just basically gives up on news for the day.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Honestly, I like the binary. I think it should stay......or if it takes up too much room, just convert to hexidecimal and leave it at that.
Bring back the "News for Nerds" mantra.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Is this for real? If so: congratulations, Google, you won Internet Jackass Day.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It looks like the new Slashdot owners are posting real stories on April 1 instead of fake stories that weren't even remotely funny. Good job. That alone makes Slashdot better than under any previous ownership, including Malda.
They did do one cute Easter egg which I found cute. That's doing April Fools the right way.
Go fuck a pink pony.
You know what's unprofessional? Accidentally pressing the big yellow button.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dear /.
It's April the 2nd here.
Signed, The future.
it may have cost you the job because you demonstrated a disregard for/sloppiness with details
It probably did both sides a favour. The employer now knows not to call that individual for interview and the applicant won't have to travel to an interview they are (highly) likely to fail.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I think somebody needs a pony hug...
When I checked my email last night and saw the new feature I immediately tried to find a way to turn it off, because it seemed an utterly pointless feature, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I carelessly clicked it by mistake. Gad to see it's already gone.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...Will people ever grow out of this nonsense?
Perhaps, If you want to appear professional, and conduct business, maybe you shouldn't be using the gmail web interface for sending emails in the first place?
Google! Please take your job serious. This is no longer the '90's. WTF.
"Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
In other news, stupid people continue to blame others for their inability to perform simple tasks (like clicking a blue button that's been in the same place literally forever, instead of an orange, animated one) without fucking things up.
Sorry if I have no sympathy for webmail users.
Just use a fucking email program!
It's a long standing tradition. Some of us still have a sense of humour. So here's an on topic idea - why not make your post a "mic drop" post and say no more on the subject?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Using gmail is unprofessional anyways.
It displays a lack of privacy consideration for everyone else who interacts with that account thru email.
How rude.
Since when does humor come without someone's expense? Every single goddammed change in some publicly-used application is going to have someone complaining that something inadvertently bad happened because of it. In 1 billion people, you can find someone, somewhere who used it incorrectly. I for one am glad for many people to be amused for one day at the expense of a few people who didn't look carefully enough.
To the new Slashdot owners:
Please disregard the OP, the majority of us actually love the April Fools day jokes, so long as they are not repeated 3 times in one day as Slashdot tends to do with most stories. Also, please move the Polls back to the feed, they are too easy to miss when off to the side. Other than that, you are doing a great job!
https://www.dslreports.com/for...
If you can't take the 1 seconds it takes to confirm you are pressing the right button, how could I possibly trust you to conduct business correctly? You should be fired..
Everyone crying, get a life and find something important within yourself. Don't use google if you cant handle the lulz. Weirdly, you have that choice, right?
Have the Gmail designers forgotten that email is now the "old fogey" way to communicate, and that it's a lot more official than IMs or text messages?
I probably wouldn't have fired anyone over this, but responding to an email thread with a "mic drop" by King Bob is the ultimate childish way to end a conversation. I'm reminded of my wise-beyond-his-years 5 year old just turning his back on a conversation he doesn't want to have. There are some people I'd love to do this to because they drive me nuts, but surprise, some people do still act like adults. Something like this could be interpreted as very rude; there's a reason why Exchange/Outlook doesn't have this feature.
It's cute, but it belongs in an IM or one of those social coder tools like Slack, not in email. Email is the new paper mail.
I'm willing to bet it's the same people who always seem to hit Reply All instead of just Reply.
"I wonder if that boy grew up, got a job designing user interface for Android apps. They seem to think, after every release the user should try every gesture on every pixel to re-learn how to use this app."
All UIs are like this now for the most part. Things like the ellipsis, the gear, the hamburger menu, magic unmarked corners and gestures are common even in desktop software now. I'm mostly used to it now, but being more "experienced" it's a big shift from the ugly-but-usable stuff in the past. I do wish designers would surface more of the functionality rather than making you find it every time.
One thing I can't live with is bright white background, light grey text. Who thinks this is a good design and makes for readable content??? If I could wave a magic wand and fix one UI problem, that would be it.
For using gmail period.
Can I have the lotto numbers?
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
I used to think that webmail was a fundamentally stupid idea mainly because it's impossible for it to be done securely. (The IMAP client is some other computer with which you'd have to share your keys, so there's really no point in even trying to do things sanely.) It inhibits the practice of people signing and encrypting email, and thanks to network effects, an entire dimension of technology is effectively denied to nearly everyone. Spam, phishing, surveillance: they could be gone by now, but we still pay the price thanks to webmail. It's at least a candidate for the title of Neo-Luddism's Most Glorious Victory.
But that's just beating a dead horse. Here it is, early 2013 and nobody cares about security anymore. Nobody is reading our emails and nobody ever gets phished. No reason to update these two paragraphs for 2016 because I'm sure that nothing will happen to make people start thinking about this stuff again. ;-)
---
But it never occurred to be that there was a whole other dimension to webmail's stupidity: that the user interface might suddenly change in sneaky ways, without the user telling the computer to install an update. Thanks, Gmail, for being another legitimate reason that people think the software industry is controlled by user-hating morons.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Talk about brutal . . . I saw one screen capture of the "minion mic drop" GIF pasted into a funeral home director's email to the deceased's family. Not sure if that one was fake or not, but with 900M users, how could Google possibly think this was a good idea?
Particularly in the case where you tell a subordinate to do something and they insist on debating every detail. Just effing do it and shut the hell up.
American companies have with implementing actual changes to their products just to mess with people 1 day of the year.
It's bad enough newspapers publish bullshit stories.
Traditions can be stupid.
To be proper April Fools joke, it shouldn't have really muted replies or sent the mic drop image to anyone. It should have razzed the sender in some entertaining way for clicking the button, like popping up one of their well-known animations. For it to really do what it said it would do, it's a new feature, not a "fooled you" joke.
It worked wonderfully. They got people to believe this actually happened!
If anyone lost their job over something that simple, it is for the best for 1 of 2 reasons -
1 - They were already on the fence anyway, and the bosses were looking for an excuse to can them. Now they can move on.
2 - If their workplace is that fucking uptight, they shouldn't want to continue working there anyway. Now they can move on.
**Once again, a UX Genius at work. And once again, proving they are the dumbest people in high-tech.
**My lawyer, Mr. Douchesniff has informed me I need this disclaimer: My response is predicated on the assumption this is an April Fools article thing. If it isn't, it should be, if it was, it was meant to be, if it wasn't, then it's not, but and including the option that it might have been until its proven that it was. Or not. Caveat Emptor You Fool. And so on and some such. (It's the best $4,000 I've ever spent.)
I hate April Fools. I don't like the idea the Google did this, and I think there are things they could have done differently in implementing it.
But, it still was an unusual looking send button, in an unusual position. I get that people don't fully understand what the mic drop button is going to do - but still, that's as good a reason to just not use it. And it wasn't that hard to choose not to use it.
This is all rather symptomatic of a larger problem in society - that people just don't pay attention to what they are doing. Whether it's walking into you while they are chatting or texting on a mobile, or walking into and falling down a lift shaft without looking to see if the lift is there.
We all need to slow down a bit, take a breath, and pay attention to what we are doing.
"I just sent off an email with my resume to the first person who wanted to interview me in months," one user posted in a Google Help forum. " I clicked the wrong button and sent it with the mic drop. Well, I guess I'm not getting that job. Words cannot describe how pissed off I am right now. I'm actually shaking. One click, ONE CLICK and I lost the job. Goddamnit. Not funny, google. I'm going to go cry now."
You didn't lose a job. You never had it. You probably weren't going to get the job anyway.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Traditions can be stupid.
Just to point out "can be" isn't the same as "are."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If email is so important to you that you can lose your job if it does the wrong thing, then you should be using an email service with an SLA
I work at a university where we have an SLA agreement with Google (mainly to cover privacy issues) and are supposed, though not required, to use GMail for all official email. However it's also not the type of environment where you would ever get fired for something like this...although it might raise a few eyebrows!
Ask to see HR and/or the break room.
They have to post all H1B applications there, along with salary. Look for your job description in one of those (along with the salary).
Seriously, free webmail is unprofessional.
I am guessing that you are not aware that many universities use GMail for business under agreements where Google will actually manage the email for the university domain i.e. my university email address is essentially a GMail account that I can access through GMail on the web or via IMAP. We have an agreement with Google which means that they agree not to mine our email for advertizing and we don't get ads displayed on the Google pages. They also gave us unlimited Google Drive space as well although I suspect if I tried dumping petabytes of ATLAS LHC data there it might turn out to have a limit at some point.
when you don't realize you live in a bubble.
Entitled fools, April 1 or otherwise...
Traditions can't be stupid, only people can be stupid.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Summarizing the ACTUAL news as reported:
-One single person reported that they fired off a resume to a potential employer with the mic drop button.
-They then reported that they were mortified, and instantly assumed Google cost them the job.
-They didn't bother to resend their resume with an explanation of the Mic Drop feature.
-They assumed that they were going to GET the job, despite as they described, "It being the first person willing to look at my resume and interview me in months."
So news as actually happening:
-A few people are terrible at e-mails and shouldn't be using it.
-A pretentious unemployed person blames Google for their own poor decision making skills.
Sweet, I was worried I wouldn't see any minions today...
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
People that use mic drops are simply drama queens. If you need to use a mic drop to make a point, you don't have a point - all you can do is shut down the conversation and run away with your tail between your I egs
The 'mic drop' is people deliberately
damaging precious things they rely on,
things they would not wish to replace,
things they do not know how to fix,
and is the sign of a decaying society.
~Signed, sound technician
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>