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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.
The story about the backlash is the meta-April Fools about the Mic Drop feature.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I think anyone who uses gmail or Yahoo mail for their business is an idiot.
Yet you are here on April Fools day getting your news.
Falling victim to a bad user interface does not mean someone is dumb.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
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
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.
Er, gmail also has a paid version, which people use professionally. There's a difference between the free webmail (@gmail.com address) and gmail with a domain (@yourdomain.com). Seriously, what kind of unprofessional idiot doesn't know this already?
Not particularly politely put, but that's exactly the core issue. 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 (or hosting your own in-house). If you're using email for business, then don't use a provider whose business model involves scanning your email.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
I can't figure out what a 100 score actually represents
You don't belong here.