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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.
Google hates employees anyway and wants to replace them all with their own version of Skynet
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?
They Took Er Jerbs!
Yes. It just seemed 'stupid', so I thought it was a 'fail fast, fail often' feature from the young genii in the Googleplex.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
So what do you recommend people use? gmail is the predominant email provider I see when I review resumes , followed by Hotmail and ISP email.
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
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
I woke up and saw this story on the Guardian's website and thought it was an April fool too, but no, apparently it's legit. Google played a prank, kinda messed up the UI for it, and people are very upset and Google had to pull it. If it is a giant meta April fool's, then there's a lot of independent, often rival, groups cooperating with one another to pull it off.
It's also past noon in the UK, and the Guardian has revealed a different April fool's article is "their" April fool, so they're sticking by the story.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Which for reference anyone in the EU cannot simply be sacked for clicking on that button. Well they can but the courts will then rule it an unfair dismissal so you would be dumb as an employer to sack someone for it.
Especially for work?
Uh, that "dumbass" you're referring to happens to be an entire generation that practically demands every online service be provided for free.
Let's just say they're enjoying their spoils today.
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?
Seriously, free webmail is unprofessional.
Good luck explaining that to an entire generation who thinks that running a business online consists of creating a Facebook page and signing up for Gmail.
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.
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.
and you want to tell me someone has already been fired because they sent a gif in an email?
Not quite. He was supposedly fired for not responding to the (presumably urgent) replies he was sent (because this "feature" doesn't deliver them).
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
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?
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.
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?
For less than $100/yr, one can get a domain, web site, and email services and be in control of their own destiny. For free, one can use any POP/IMAP client with gmail and not be subject to Google's constantly changing UI.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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"
"God I fucking hate slashdot on April 1st."
It ain't just Slashdot. The internet (and most people) suck much more than normal on April 1st...
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.
If it is a giant meta April fool's, then there's a lot of independent, often rival, groups cooperating with one another to pull it off.
Well, "cooperating" would be one explanation. "Falling for each other's prank" would be another...
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.
And then, a year or so later, once the employee has won the case for unfair dismissal, the employer has to pay a whole three months of the salary in compensation. And the employee who sued their former employer has to find a new job. Guess how easy that is.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
https://www.dslreports.com/for...
I knew it was possible but I just tried it recently and for the low price of nothing you can get Yandex to host all the email (with your own domain - just change your mx records) you might need to send as a regular user. It actually seems to work rather well - I've been poking at it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
...Will people ever grow out of this nonsense?
Probably not. It appears that most people enjoy it, as it's been going on all over the world for hundreds of years.
Seriously, what kind of unprofessional idiot doesn't know this already?
The type that practices unprofessionality professionally.
Seriously though using free Gmail for your internal business email is stupid - using the paid version is fine (we were on it ourselves until my boss got the brilliant idea to switch to Office 365 - he's gone now but we're stuck with it for the time being. Gmail was much better).
For a private individual though fee Gmail is fine to conduct business on. I've done my own personal domains and ran email servers (before we migrated to hosted email at work I admined our on-site server). Overall it's just way more frustrating than its worth for a regular user. Just pay attention to your username and pick something somewhat tasteful. You don't want to be applying for a job or a loan with sexynips87@gmail.com.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If it makes money, then it is a business.
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.
Erm... so paying for a domain and hosting for something I might use every 2 years is better.
Right.
Realistically GMail is fine. Any perspective employer is going to call you on your phone first, so a good phone manner is far more essential.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Yes.
Ahahhaahh April fools! Of course not. Any other questions?
There are serious important issues in the world that need our attention.
Worrying about people who enjoy pranks is not one of them.
Seriously, free webmail is unprofessional.
My gmail address helps me weed out pretentious assholes from the line of potential employers.
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.
Why would you use gmail to do your own business on? Pay for a domain, get the domain hosted for free, and get the mail hosted for free. It's what I do. The company that hosts my mail provides up to five mail accounts and after that (or more than 5GB of storage) you have to pay. I have an NAS running a mail server at home where I store all my archived mail but then I like to keep a lot of stuff.
Most web/email providers support DKIM. Additionally, false positives are a recipient issue, not a sender one.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you're sending emails on behalf of your business, false positives cost you many. They may not be caused by your severs, but they are your problem.
Well hookers and blow FTW then!!
If you're running a business with a gmail/hotmail/etc domain, you're doing it wrong and losing even more money. Really, having a personal/personal business domain hosted by a reputable provider doesn't produce false positives as a matter of course.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Sadly enough, this appears to be true. I told some of my 16-year old daughter's friends that Google goes through their e-mail (when they use a Google address), and they had a hard time believing it, and wanted to know why Google would do that. I pointed out that the service had to be paid for SOMEHOW, and that monetizing their e-mail traffic was how. They seemed genuinely puzzled that there was any bill to be paid...
I guess my generation assumed "free TV" was really free, and current generations assume "free information services" are really free. I think I better check and make sure that my kids really get how the bills are paid.
Even with a personal Gmail, you can import from a custom domain's POP account and send out via SMTP. Effectively, you can use Gmail as the front face of a domain-backed email for free.
Traditions can be stupid.
My employer uses its own domain for email, hosted by gmail. It costs more than zero, but at least we know the hosting company won't go out of business.
Have you read my blog lately?
It worked wonderfully. They got people to believe this actually happened!
**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.)
or
3 the muted replies made them miss an deadline.
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.
If you're looking at their resume, it's not their work email now is it? If you're looking for a job you're hopefully not going to put your current employer's email down there.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Paying for email services is miserable, expensive, error prone, and dangerous (spam, DOS, viruses, etc.).
That's bullshit, AC. Paying for email is how one gets *good* service.
I don't respond to AC's.
"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.
Yandex? As in Russian Google?
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!
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.
Eh, my place supports webmail or local clients for the same account. Local clients are faster, have better calendar and meeting integration, more responsive UIs, let you see your last-known mailbox offline when you don't have internet access, etc etc. They'll always be superior for my purposes.
Or, for $50/year you can get a GoogleApps account, plus $15 for the domain registration. You don't HAVE to use the Gmail web interface. You can bring your own POP/IMAP client. It's cheaper than rolling your own mail server, just in terms of the power savings if nothing else, and probably with better availability.
Yup. As in those same people. Putin's reading my WP confirmation emails!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Traditions can't be stupid, only people can be stupid.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Right. Because Google doesn't arbitrarily shutdown services. One might think gmail, and apps for biz would be safe, but I wouldn't take that bet. (remember, they killed postini.)
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!
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>
Google's april fools joke should've been discontinuing their search engine in order to refocus on exciting new cutting edge markets.
This space intentionally left blank
or
3 the muted replies made them miss an deadline.
Too soon unless the deadline was for the same day. In that case, see 1).
I think it's awesome. I wish they still had it. Wish Slashdot had that feature. Reply with a dropped mic. I guess I could put in a recipe that takes slashdot responses and sends them to /dev/null
Yes, goatse.cx is a perfectly respectable email-hosting domain these days. They're also reportedly intending to open up for yourdomain.goatse.cx registration too. It might not be suitable if your business is in selling personalised bibles, but it'll be wonderful if your business is ... well babyjesusbuttplug.goatse.cx would work pretty well, I think. Amongst people who are in on the joke.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"