Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Yet you are here on April Fools day getting your news.
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
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
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.
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.'"
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?
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.
I ...think...I saw.. a...a... 2!
rewriting history since 2109
It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as two.
There are serious important issues in the world that need our attention.
Worrying about people who enjoy pranks is not one of them.
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?
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.